Pride Comes Before the Fall

I pride myself on being a pretty good cook.  I just recently conquered homemade granola, and my lasagna makes mouths water.  So of course, being the wonderful wife that I am, I decided to exercise my cooking muscles and make a delicious Sunday lunch for us to enjoy.


The menu?  A nice creamy succotash with honey cornbread.  I had made a Rachael Ray healthy version of succotash before that was delish, so I figured using the full-fat recipe would be just that much better.


So off we go.  I put my wonderful husband with the task of chopping onions because my eyes can never handle it.  Apparently neither can his.  We both had to take turns chopping because the fumes were so strong we were both crying and getting sick to our stomachs!  Finally that was over and the succotash could begin.  I was very excited, but my excitement soon wore off when it appeared that my heavy cream was not going to thicken and evaporate, but instead turn the dish into some kind of milky-vegetable surprise.  I thickened it with flour and some seasonings, but it wound up tasting kind of like a milky soup with a lot of strong onion in it.  Fail.  


Then onto the cornbread.  I'm a big fan of batter (unhealthy, I know) and it tasted wonderful before going into the brand new cast iron skillet.  Unlike a mistake in the past, I seasoned my pan a few weeks ago and it was ready for baking!  I poured in the batter and thirty minutes later pulled out the most beautiful pan of cornbread I had ever seen!  My mother would be so proud!


We let it cool a few minutes and then went to flip it out onto a cooling rack.  Alas, nothing would come out.  Stuart spent a good 5 minutes shaking the pan and running a knife around the edges.  All of a sudden, cornbread goes flying out in about 48 pieces!  I screamed and Stuart just started dying laughing and apologizing.  Turns out I forgot that little bit of oil twice around the pan that makes your cornbread slide out beautifully.


Well, when life hands you lemons ... you decide to use your broken up cornbread to put in your milky soup succotash, and it actually turns out quite delicious!


{I took really amazing pictures of the cornbread catastrophe but blundered again by not having a memory card in my camera.  Oh well}