Chalk it up to experience

 There are no failures...just experiences, and your reactions to them.  

-Tom Krause

Sometimes, despite our best intentions and our best-laid plans, we fail. It's not on purpose and it's disheartening. But if we get enough distance between ourselves and the failure, we learn. We learn what we did wrong. We gain experience.  Cooking is no different.  It's still an area where I'm learning and I've decided that I'm entitled to a bit of a culinary failure every once in a while.

It's happened a few times. There was the very first time I made meatballs. Disaster. There was the time I made the pork roast pinwheel with cherry jam filling. Inedible. And then there was the time that I attempted to make corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes for St. Patrick's Day. 

I originally intended to share this meal with someone. I had this exchange with them:

If you had to describe the failure of the corned beef experiment in one word, what would it be?

The answer? "Texture."  I'd say that was fairly accurate.

Here's what happened...
I've never really used my crock pot, despite the fact that I've owned it for about four years.  I've only ever melted chocolate with it to make fondue.  But I found a Weight Watchers recipe in the Community Blog for corned beef and cabbage...in a crock pot. Perfect, I thought.

Wrong. I followed the recipe exactly. I used the appropriate amounts of all the seasonings.  I even used the recommended brand of corned beef! I laid the ingredients in the crock pot in the outlined order. Then I cooked it on the preferred setting for the stated amount of time.

The result? Overdone corned beef. Undercooked potatoes.  I think I had the flavor right.  It tasted the way corned beef and cabbage and potatoes should taste. But the corned beef didn't shred. It was solid. It shouldn't be solid.  The potatoes were as hard as, well, raw potatoes.

Where did I go wrong? I'd love to blame my crock pot. I'd love to say it malfunctioned or something. But maybe I didn't have enough liquid to cook the potatoes. Maybe I didn't have enough onions on the bottom to cushion the corned beef. Maybe I am just not meant to use a crock pot.

Either way, this meal didn't quite materialize the way I envisioned. Next time, I'll stick to boiling my potatoes and corned beef. You know, the way it was meant to be done. It's more authentic that way, right?