Dinner disaster and strange flashbacks

Tonight I made a dinner disaster.

This one compares with the time I made a stirfry with flank steak and didn't know to cut the steak on the diagonal. (For those who don't know, I'll point out that cutting WITH the grain creates a great shoe leather, almost impossible to chew.) It also ranks up there with the time I made a red snapper dish that was so fishy it made me gag (and I'm a seafood lover; I think the fish wasn't fresh). It's been years since an incident of this caliber; I'm a decent cook, but about every 5 years I do a doozy.

Tonight it was a home made chicken pot pie, Cooking Light style, with lots of root vegetables. I'm in a fall mood, and it seemed like comfort food.

I went to buy the groceries a couple days ago: celeriac root, parsnips, sweet potatoes, potatoes, carrots. I thought I'd be creating a gentle melding of delicious nutrients...yum, yum.

I went wrong with celeriac. I didn't expect it to be available at Trader Joe's, and it wasn't, so I went to Thriftway. I didn't see it at first, even though I was staring at every bin of produce. Finally, I found the sign: celeriac (celery root). It didn't look the way I'd remembered it; I remembered it being a kind of a hard, knotty root ball, but I discounted my memory as it's not an ingredient I use very often. What they had in the bin labeled celeriac was more of a long tuber root, with the top and bottom chopped off. Whatever.

Whatever is right. What I bought, I discovered AFTER an hour of chopping, simmering, stirring, whisking, seasoning, baking, rolling (dough) and setting the meal on the table is that I bought horseradish.

You know, the kind of thing where a tablespoon can feed the whole table. Only I used the whole darn horseradish root in my chicken pot pie. NOT celeriac.

Oops.

To say that it was inedible would be kind. Dang it! Oh well, we all had a good laugh.

And in a totally unrelated post...
For my birthday I asked for, and received, a video of Tessa's life, which had been trapped in the camera for four and a half years. Watching it gave such sweet joy; our gorgeous baby getting a bath; Christmas presents; Easter egg hunts; birthday parties.

The first haircut scene took my breath away, though. May 7, 2005. I saw the date in the lower left corner of the screen and all I could think was, "I had cancer, but I didn't know it yet. I didnt' know that on May 25 my whole world would get turned upside down."

It was hard to breathe, seeing that. And remembering the moments that followed.

I also saw, briefly, myself bald and with a crewcut. I was smiling for the camera, catering to Tessa, cheerful voice, but I know better. I know it wasn't happy at all, even when I was pretending.

And on that, I must go to bed. I ate just enough of the chicken-horseradish-pot-pie to feel rather ill, and I think I'm going to have to sleep it off!