Just plain not good

I'm pretty handy in the kitchen. I can whip up a Thanksgiving feast. I can make a mean mac 'n' cheese with fried chicken. I can even take on an Indian guy at a curry cook-off. But sometimes I wonder about my culinary skills. Tonight’s dinner was the first dinner in my recent recollection when I didn’t want to eat it.

I wasn’t making anything out of the ordinary. I pan-fried two small pork chops seasoned with salt, pepper, and a touch of garlic. I sautéed some spears of asparagus with minced garlic. And I made some wild rice in the rice cooker.

In the process of cooking of the pork chops, I set of the smoke detector. The rice managed to stick to the non-stick pot of the rice cooker. These weren’t good signs.

And, when I plated up my food and sat down to eat, I didn’t want to. The pork chop was too tough and too dry. It scraped as it went down my throat. The asparagus just tasted funky, and for someone who quite enjoys asparagus as a vegetable I couldn’t finish the several spears that were on my plate. The rice, however, even for having stuck slightly to the pot, was fine. It wasn’t too mushy but still had some bite to it, and it tasted nutty.

I finished the rice and the bits of dry pork, merely for the fact that I was hungry and didn’t want to waste food. I put the asparagus in a Tupperware container, thinking that I might want to eat it later but knowing that I wouldn’t.