Aiming for vindication, I fail miserably

Sometimes life is rather ironic. Last night was such a night.

Tanner, my dear, sweet and completely clueless 11 year old "forgot" to tell me that I was
supposed to help his school class cook for a fundraising dinner they were hosting last night. So at ten after five we were racing down to the high school to cook. Yes, you heard that right, apparently I had been volunteered to cook. For other people. Who were arriving to eat at 7.

Inside I snickered. Vindication. After liberally using exaggeration about my lack of baking skills in my previous blog posts, here was my chance to prove to myself, my son and the BLOG WORLD that I am in fact a Domestic Goddess.

And then they handed me the recipe. A recipe for quiche. At least I think it was for quiche, because it was COMPLETELY IN FRENCH. Yes, the entire recipe was in french. ANOTHER LANGUAGE. You understand that following a recipe for me is hard enough as it is, but in FRENCH?

"Ok", I think, "this is a class of french immersion students, surely someone can help me out". I am assigned four 10 and 11 year old boys as my cooking partners. You can see where this is going now can't you? Me, for all intents and purposes appearing to be a competent mother of four, assigned 4 young children to cook with. Did I mention none of them could follow a recipe either?

We chop and saute. Things smell good. Very good. I have HOPE.

I bake the pie shells (pre-made THANK THE LORD!). We mix and stir. Something looks wrong. I check the recipe. I re-check the recipe. Seriously what the heck is a Centi-Litre and why on earth do french recipes use that measurement? Tanner and I do some quick conversions again. We think we have done it right. We HOPE we have done it right.

The filling is looking awfully creamy to me. But what do I know, at this point my cooking confidence is so low I am going to follow the recipe (as much of it as I can!) and trust that it will work out.

My pride, my hopes at vindication, are tied up in this turning out.

We bake. And then bake some more. And some more. We raise the heat. We lower the heat. The pie crusts are now awfully brown and dried out looking. But the quiche filling? Liquid. No setting. No firming. Bacon, mushrooms, onions floating in egg and cream.

I pull out the recipe. I bet you didn't know that "farine tout-usuage" is FLOUR? Neither did I. Apparently I was supposed to add 100 grams of flour. Just how much is that anyways? Those four nasty little boys forgot to add FLOUR to the sauce. So, technically I was in charge and never noticed either, but let me tell you I blamed them loudly.

We pulled out the quiche. I dumped every scrap of sauted vegetables I could find to fill up the shells. I grated and re-grated more cheese. They looked ok, but none of us were volunteering to taste them.

I made a new sign. Crossed out "Quiche" and wrote "Tarte De La Creme". It sounded good to me.

And those 4 french immersion students didn't protest too much either.

And then Tanner and I? We (in his words) "booked it out of there" at 7:05 just after the quiche (minus the flour) were served, but before anyone had tasted them.

IT'S NOT MY FAULT.