The supper fail

With the mrs. out of town for the weekend, I figured I'd welcome her home with a nice dinner.  I'd talked with her more than a week ago about recreating this really great potato chip appetizer we'd had at the Cap City Fine Diner, with hollandaise and Maytag bleu cheese. I thought it was delicious, and was kind of surprised the she'd seemed to like it, too, seeing as she's never liked bleu cheese.

I was a little worried about the hollandaise. I've never made it; whenever I've been tempted before, I've been put off by how tedious and tricky the recipes look.  I'm never very good at patience on this sort of thing.  It seems like I always have too many things going at once to pay enough attention to such a sauce, like it was by its very nature a recipe for failure, and I'm good enough at that without setting myself up for it! But by yesterday I'd forgotten about that history, and found this simpler-looking one that uses a blender to pull things together in way less time. It ended up working pretty well, too, except for the constant splatter through the hole in the blender lid as I was adding the butter.

The next trick was to get out the slicer we inherited from her dad. It needed some cleaning up, but the instructions were clear and, because of dad's great organization, present! I set it a little too thick for the first potato, not factoring in that the raw potato would probably push out on the blade a little. The second one was pervect. I got the slicer cleaned back up, dried and put away, including putting a bag over it so that it probably won't need to be cleaned before the next time we want to use it again.  And the chips came out crispy and tasty!

Finally, I decided on a chuck roast, but wanted a recipe without onion because of how much my daughter hates it. By finally excluding onion from my search, I found this recipe with cranberries; I knew the mrs. probably wouldn't like the cranberries, but as she enjoys jellied sauce I figured she'd enjoy the gravy without any actual berries in it. By the time I got the roast started, I was concerned about getting it done in time, but when the text message announced they were almost home it was apparent that it would be in fine shape.

Aside from the fact that I was cleaning up some spilled albumen when she walked in the door, and was still in scramble mode and needed for her to tend the chips for me while I finished the sauce, everything came together pretty much as planned.

So, where's the fail? Well, it turns out she wasn't as much of a fan of the chips as I'd assumed based on how much she'd consumed at the diner. And that she doesn't like hollandaise any better than bleu cheese. And that the roast was too sweet for her liking. And I suppose the boxes of Christmas decorations that I didn't get squared away because I was busy preparing a meal that she didn't care for and which were therefore cluttering the family room didn't add to her homecoming experience.

I'm afraid that last paragraph might read as if I think she's picky, or even downright bitchy, for not fully appreciating my efforts. That's not the case at all. I'm just disappointed that I wasn't able to please her as I was trying to.