Number one, of course, is that I'm in nursing school full-time and I work part-time. It's a huge commitment of my life that will eventually be more than just a labor of love.
But while I was making dinner tonight, I thought about all the reasons why I don't blog about my food more often. There are blogs I've been meaning to do, like about how I make iced coffee at home (and if you're not doing it, you should) and these really yummy ginger-berry popsicles I made a while back. Sometimes it's because my kitchen is not ready for prime time and is too dirty for me to take pictures in it.
I'm also someone who's really bad at making recipes because I enjoy cooking as an organic process. I have great recipe concepts - like my legendary fried catfish or shrimp grits - but I almost never make things the same way twice because I can always think of something else to do to change it up and potentially make it better.
And sometimes, my food is downright ugly.
I suck at visual presentation as a whole (I guess it's good that I married a graphic designer) in pretty much every aspect of my life. I hate dressing up and doing my hair. I have zero interest in decorating. The day you catch me buying curtains is the day I caught someone looking at me in the window earlier that morning. So when I put up a picture of my food, I've usually come up with something that - for me - is an attractive dish. But for every attractive dish I put up a picture of, I've made five to ten things that were way more delicious and far less attractive.
Say I were to tell you that when I came home from work tonight, my dinner was a Mediterranean Tuna Salad Wrap with fresh cucumber and cream cheese. Sounds delicious, right? Yeah, well, it was. It was pretty bangin'. And I ask if you want one too, and you get pretty excited and say, "Sure, make me one." And then I bring you this:
Yep. Ugly.
Part of my failure with tasty but ugly food is idea versus execution. This wrap had great contents but the filling busted out of that wimpy Joseph's lavash wrap. (To be fair, those things are really tasty and excellent for you, and they make awesome thin-crust pizzas. They just suck at wraps. I keep being optimistic, and then disappointed.) But to be fair, I'll tell you what I did.
I started thinking about a plain cucumber and cream cheese sandwich, or maybe spreading cream cheese on cucumber slices and just eating it like that. And then I remembered seeing a pin about hollowing out a cucumber and stuffing a meat salad in to make a carb-free "sandwich." I came home and got the cucumber and the cream cheese out of the refrigerator, and then I looked at it and remembered how much I like dill weed, and told myself, "This could be way better." So I took a bath first and thought it through a little bit before heading to the kitchen. (By the by, I put dill on A LOT of food, and nary a meat or egg salad in my house goes without it. It may be my favorite herb.)
So I come back to the kitchen, and I make the tuna salad. Because I'm using cream cheese, I use olive oil as the fatty element. I'm not a big fan of mayonnaise to begin with - I either use olive oil for good fats, or plain yogurt for lean protein. A teacher told me about the yogurt in 1996 and I never stopped. I put a buttload of dill in there, some lemon pepper, and the other usual suspects, and let it sit while I spread the cream cheese on the lavash, and then cut thin slices of cucumber and put it on the wrap. Then I dumped the tuna salad onto the cucumbers and attempted to roll it. I may as well have rolled it in tissue paper.
But it was delicious, and pretty much exactly what I wanted for dinner.
So celebrate your ugly-tasty concoctions.
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