a little potato with your salt?

Meal planning is not my forte. I make dinner every Thursday night. And most Thursdays roll around without my having planned anything. Like this morning. I was thinking potatoey thoughts, probably because we had some on hand, so I looked up "potato casserole" on foodnetwork.com. I found a promising dish with the simple ingredients of potatoes and cheese. Feeling adventurous and thinking culinary thoughts, I made some changes to the recipe to spice it up (and to substitute for what we didn't have). Cream of chicken instead of cream of celery, less sour cream, more cheese, corn flakes instead of potato chips...etc. I started extra early and rocked out to TobyMac's new cd as I grated potato and cooked chicken (something substantial to add in).

Finally it was dinner time: the casserole came out smelling devine. I heaped my darling family's plates with large spoonfuls of casserole yumminess. And then I took a bite. It tasted like...salt. I took another bite just to make sure: yup, it tasted like salt, with a hint of potato and a whole lot of corn flakes on the side. My dreams of becoming the next Food Network Star vanished before my eyes. Paula Dean had deceived me. Or maybe it was just that I forgot to consider the salt I put into the cooking chicken, and the salt in the cream of chicken soup, and the salt in the extra cheese while I was pouring in what the recipe called for. Thank goodness we had loads of delicious home-made applesauce to eat.

And I'm sure the dogs enjoyed their well-seasoned dinner.