As a foodie I enjoy trying something new, sometimes veering away from a recipe or sometimes veering away from all reality to try something different and new. This often results in magical oral delights, but sometimes it fails, and when it fails, it fails BIG. There are also situations where you make every effort to have the meal be perfect, but the whole experience does not go to plan for reasons out of your control.

For example there was the time I cooked for Claire (my wife), it was our first date meal. Talk about pressure, I wanted to obviously impress her and make her something special. At the time she was training for the Ironman triathlon, so I went with a nice healthy salad. Mixed leaf lettuce, toasted pine nuts and to add a special element I went to Sanata Barbara Market on Commercial Drive and purchased some great prosciutto – which was rolled up and served with the salad. Growing up in Leeds in England we didn’t eat much salad (probably because it doesn’t taste great when deep fried) but when we did we always had rolled meat to accompany the salad.

Now this is where it all went pear shaped as my wife grew up with different cultural and culinary experiences (they grew their own food and butchered bunnies, my parents went to a supermarket). I am going to hand over to Claire at this point in the post and have her write her side of the ‘tale of the rolled meat’.

There I am in my boyfriend’s (now my husband) dining room awaiting this promised delicious meal. I had just finished a tough training session with some of my Ironman buddies and I was absolutely famished. I was really looking forward to having a big meal with lots of carbs to pick up my energy. In comes Matt with a beautifully decorated plate of salad. To my horror, however, there were these raw looking pieces of meat on top of my salad. Having never been served anything like that before I was clear that I was not going to eat the meat but I had no idea of the best/polite way of telling him this information. I was also trying to avoid my face showing absolute shock and disgust but unfortunately I was far too expressive for my own good.

Ahhh, my darling wife. After the initial disappointment of ‘that’ meal we have gone onto being happily married for many years (and I have vowed to never serve her meat on her salad again).

Please share your story of a meal that you screwed up or that didn’t go as you had origianlly planned.

Originally posted on Foodists.ca

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