Sad Little Squash... Sad Little Me...

Ugh.

I hate it when I am excited about a recipe and I put a lot of effort into it and it turns out like crap. I had this soup recipe from Whole Food's blog about a butternut squash puree soup and it sounded amazing! But when I cooked it all up and dished it out, it was plainer than plain could be. Nothing I did could give it flavor. I added red pepper flakes. Nothing. I added more red pepper flakes. Nothing. I added some random cheese (I bought the wrong kind), and that only made it worse. I tried adding a few olives to my bowl, yuck.

Neither of us could stomach it, although we both tried.

I really don't understand why it was such a failure. The only thing I'm really left with, I think, is using this bland puree soup in a quick-bread or something. I found a recipe for it, but I don't think the puree in the recipe also had things like onions, peppers, and carrots blended in.

That's the part that I really don't understand. I added all these tasty, flavorful veggies, and after pureeing it, all I tasted was a very faintly buttery carrot taste (not in a good way as in, yum, buttery carrots, more as in, ewww, flavorless carrots smeared with flavorless butter). The poblano pepper I added (including seeds)? Not a hint. I can still taste the heat even now on my fingers from chopping it hours earlier, but in the soup you couldn't even tell it was there.

I think next time I make this recipe, I will puree the squash, and leave the veggies intact. Maybe having a different texture to break things up would help. It might also protect the different flavors from getting swallowed up by the squash so much.

Anyway, whenever I have a cooking flop, it always makes me sad. I had grand plans for the chores I was going to get done tonight after dinner and now I just don't know if I feel up to them. I know it's silly, but I hate when a recipe goes awry.

I think I am going to turn this failure into quick-bread tomorrow, but if that also fails I don't know what I'll do. Maybe I'll order chinese food to make up for it. Or make brownies. That's always a safe cooking exploit to boost my confidence (and caffeination) after a failure.

In the mean time, I'm going to go try and find something productive to do (pointedly avoids looking at sink full of dirty dishes)... anything except that.