Chicken Nicoise

Have you ever been trying a new recipe for dinner and, the further you got into it the more disgusting it smelled?

That was me last night.

I made this great chicken broth, white wine & garlic sauce that smelled delectable.  The recipe called for fennel and leeks (two veggies I'm not real fond of), but I'd decided to leave them out.  I cut up my cucumber and tomato (which had slightly rotted...but I cut most of that out - come on, we're in Seminary!) and Nicoise olives.  I hate olives.

The recipe then called for me to dump said cucumber, tomato and olives into the wine sauce and sautée them.  It also called for 1/4 cup of fresh basil, which of course I don't have, so I dumped some dried basil atop the cucumbers and put on the lid.

My kitchen began to reek.

I cannot even articulate to you how disappointing it is for a beautiful wine sauce to go from fragrant and flavorful to stenchy and suspicious.  The cucumbers were turning a very unusual shade of yellowy-translucent, reminding me a lot of the kelp that Japanese restaurants give you as part of your salad and you're supposed to like it.

When finally my "healthy," "veggieful" new recipe attempt was finished, I was ashamed to put it before my husband.

"What smells good?"  He asked, in a valiant attempt to make me feel better.

"It doesn't smell good," I moped.  "It smells like..."  I trailed off.  No sense making it any worse than it already was.

We sat down and stared at the Chicken Nicoise in the dish before us.  It looked summarily disgusting and smelled even worse, if that's possible.

Joey put on a brave face and dished himself up some chicken.

"You have to eat one of those cucumbers," I said, gloomily.

"I hate cucumbers."  Joey replied.

"You still have to," I glowered.  And, just to show him how awesome I was, I took one of the yellowy, translucent cucumber spears and put it in my mouth.

It was...there are actually no words for how disgusting it was.  Think slimy, crunchy, chewy (the skin part), and lukewarm all at the same time and that'll at least get you started.

Joey saw the look on my face and smirked.

"It's terrible," I told him, "You don't have to eat it."

"That's why I made sure you tried one first," He said.  "It looked disgusting."

And he was right.

The salvageable part of the meal was the chicken, the remainder of that white wine sauce that hadn't been contaminated by whatever made it smell so bad, and the "Herbed Couscous" which, oddly enough, tasted more like the 1/2 teaspoon of Tabasco sauce the recipe called for than any herbs I've ever experienced.

Joey saved the meal by pulling out the carton of Blue Bell ice cream.  Otherwise I think we'd have gone hungry.