When Paula Deen Lets You Down

(Now don't hate me because of that title~I adore Paula Deen! However, from now on I plan to only use her recipes that have lots of butter in them. This recipe includes no butter and clearly that was a mistake).

A couple of weeks ago I decided to include my daughter in the weekly menu planning and let her prepare a meal from one of her very own cookbooks.

We chose*Porcupine Meatballs* from her Paula Deen children's cookbook.

It was a very simple recipe consisting of meatballs made mainly of ground beef, Italian seasonings and rice. I was very impressed that The Princess dove right in with her hands making the meatballs. I know some adult women who wouldn't do that;)

The meatballs were placed on a bed of more rice and canned tomatoes, then covered and baked for something like an hour. (If you haven't picked up on it yet, I'm not sharing the recipe in its entirety here. You can thank me later).

Well, after the dish had baked for-e-ver, we took it out and prepared to dig in.

It was so disappointing.

The rice was crunchy and the texture of the meatballs was just...gross. I felt so bad for The Princess, but she was great about it. NO one liked it though.

Since there were a lot of leftovers, I just popped them in the freezer and decided to try to do something with them later.

Well, *later* came this week. I'm trying to clean out my freezer and all, so I thought I'd better deal with The Meatballs.

I had this *brilliant* idea to cut up the meatballs, dump them in my crockpot along with the rest of the rice and tomatoes, add a bit of water/broth, veggies and some pesto for extra seasoning and make a Pesto Meatball Soup.

Boy, was that a mistake! It was more like....how did my husband so graciously say it? Slop. Yeah, that's it....slop.

And although I pretended to take offense to that word, it was the perfect word for it. I couldn't even choke down more than two bites. Vince ate a bit more and The Princess tried it, but Mr. B was having none of it.

It's moments like that when you just cut your losses, apologize to your family and put it down the garbage disposal, folks. And that's what I did.

Then we all went out for burgers after Mr. B's t-ball game.

P.S. I still love you, Paula! Your peanut butter cream pie is to die for!