Cooking. Failure.

There will be no Sunday's Adventure in Cooking posted this week.  I made meatballs and spaghetti from a Smitten Kitchen recipe.  She raved about it--as she does most recipes that make it through her stringent selection, careful kitchen trial, and eater's approval before they can be be posted on her blog.  So...

Apparently I didn't read it through.  Or else I trusted her to make magic gold coins from scrap shards of lead.  The ingredients were onions and garlic, of course, red wine,  tomato puree and diced tomatoes.  For the spices, pepper, salt, and parsley.  Yeah--you read right.

So guess what?  It was as sour as cheap dill pickles and as bland as unsalted tomato sauce.  After adding basil, oregano, a teaspoon of extra salt (maybe more) and four tablespoons of sugar, I came up with something I could swallow without running to the sink for a glass of water.

What was she thinking?  Is her variety of tomato puree really different from mine?  Does she not believe in the magical powers of tomatoes+basil?  Was she really, really hungry?

The meatballs were okay.