Cooking Disaster!

So last night I planned to make a baked beef risotto for dinner. I assembled all the ingredients, chopped onions, fried the beef, threw the other ingredients in, stirred and brought to the boil. The next step would have been to put the lot in a casserole dish and bake in the oven while enjoying a glass of wine and watching the news.


That was until I saw the little black floating things.

At first I thought maybe the stock cubes hadn’t dissolved well enough and I attempt stirring the mixture some more. Then I started to scoop the little black bits out and tried to examine them closer.

Now I’m not sure how many of you might have this problem, but I’m short sighted and have a stigmatism in one eye and I wear contact lenses. The lens in my left eye is for looking at things at a distance and the lens in my right eye is for reading and working on the computer. Together they work in unison and I have no problems, except for focussing now and again, which is simply a matter of aging. However, I can’t see little things close up unless I take my contacts out. So I couldn’t really see what the little black things were.

There were so many of them. I kept scooping and scooping and there were more and more. I eventually thought I had better put the whole lot aside and throw it out when it was cold.

But what to have for dinner? Two days away from pay day and there is not much left in either the fridge or the pantry and very little left in my wallet. And I’m about to throw away what would have been dinner and lunch the next day. I’m not happy!

Luckily I have some frozen bolognaise sauce and some spaghetti in the pantry. Spaghetti bolognaise it is!

When my boys got home I asked them to take a closer look at the floating black things. Sure enough they proclaimed them to be “bugs” and one look into the leftover Arborio rice in the packet showed us where they came from. I knew it had been in the pantry for awhile, I just didn’t realise it had been there long enough to get bugs!!!