Pride before the fall....knew it would come!

Well, I knew it would happen!  I knew that when i confessed my pride in the kitchen the other day that it'd come back to bite me!  But it wasn't the leftovers that night...it was the dinner party we had for about 20 friends last night.  It had to be a big group...of course!

Stuffed potato potluck.  Good idea right?! Since the group was at our house, i thought I'd bake the potatoes.  First, let me confess that i do struggle with a little discontentment over my oven.  It's too small and doesn't bake evenly.  For someone who cooks alot and had a convection oven for years, this has been a really bad backwards step. (And one day I'm going to do a post on why convection cooking is FAR superior. If you have a convection oven but use the regular setting...you are sorely missing out and wasting the best feature of your oven....but that's another post for another day.)  Anyways, i had 24 potatoes to bake and i figured that since it literally used every inch of space on the baking racks I'd need to cook them longer than normal. And i sat them directly on the racks so that the air would circulate better.  BAD PLAN!  The potatoes started to drip potato juice and olive oil and it was burning on the heating coils and making an awful smoky mess all in my house!  I turned off the oven to take the potatoes out (so at least it wouldn't keep burning the stuff while the oven was open), put them onto baking sheets, and put them back in once the smoke cleared.  Then i had to run into the dining room and asked the Hubs to turn the oven on, to which he replied "ok."  Apparently he was ok'ing something else entirely b/c 15 minutes later when i walked by, the oven was OFF! Guests arrived and potatoes were rock hard...i cranked the oven up to 400 and thankfully they finished and the smoke was completely cleared in about 40 minutes!  Still though...guests arriving to a smoky stinky house with rock hard potatoes for a potato bar...not exactly how i like to throw a party!

And, if that wasn't enough, as i was cleaning up at the end with 2 couples still hanging around, i bent over to get the Clorox spray from under the sink and totally surprised myself and everyone else with an audible cloud of something a little less fresh!  I'm not kidding you...i laughed so hard and turned so red...and couldn't blame it...the source was obvious. So embarrassing! My friend W laughed so hard and said "now this is the kind of authenticity you want to see in a friendship"...although I'm pretty sure we'd all be ok if that particular authenticity went back into a closet for awhile!

Despite the pitfalls, it did actually turn out to be a successful gathering of a neat group of people!  The Hubs is in a men's intensive Bible study and has formed friendships with these 6 other guys and i tell you, i haven't seen a group of men so genuinely love each other maybe ever.  It's been neat to see him encouraged, and a delight to get to know their families better as well!  Next time we have them all over though i think maybe we'll make tacos and I'll take a Beano before everyone arrives!