Dinner fiasco! FAIL!

I know, I know, you can't win them all! But, tonight's dinner, what a disaster!

Tonight was to be Mexi-Cali tostadas, sounds simple and tasty, right? Simple...NO. Tasty...well, I didn't get that far. The recipe I was using was from Forks Over Knives: The Plant-Based Way to Health and so far the recipes have been great! It called for a can of beans with corn mashed together with salsa. Now, I make my own salsa, have been for years. I can make red salsa, chunky salsa, green salsa and with spiciness to satisfy your palate. I do make it the lazy way, most of the time. So, I start out with my can of organic diced tomatoes, add the cilantro we got from the CSA, add a red onion(I usually use white but thought red would give a great flavor), with green chilies(canned, from Costco), I then added garlic, lime juice, salt and chipotle sauce, blended it up, boy did it look good! As my 10 month old stared, the blender is so noisy, I got the back of tortilla chips to give it a try. Most of the time it just needs extra salt and maybe lime juice. At first it tasted a little bland so I added a little more salt and some lime juice. I then tried it again and BAM the bitter hit me like a bag full of bricks! I thought I was crazy, you know that crazy you get when you're in a hurry, the hubby is late from work, the kid is in to everything, and you just want to get dinner going with good salsa? Yeah, that! The second time just seemed worse, so dang bitter! I tried the cilantro to see if that could be it, nope, tastes of cilantro. I tried the lime juice, nope. I then tried the chilies, they seemed bitter. Now, I had opened a can of chilies and put the left overs in the fridge but to be honest I couldn't remember when. It couldn't have been more than last week, the smelled fine. :) I thought maybe they were bitter because they were in the fridge too long.

Try number two. Another can of tomatoes, another onion, more cilantro, and some chilies from a new can. After blending it all together, I tried it and BAM yet again, it's bitter as a my husband's IPA's(damn, they're bitter!). The hubby was brave enough to try the chilies straight from the can, he didn't even have to say anything, it was all in his face! Salsa-FAIL.

At the same time as all this was going on I had shredded some carrots to put on top of the tostadas as a garnish. We had some golden beets(never had these before) from the CSA and I thought I'd shred those as well. I've done it with other beets to add to coleslaw before, what's the harm, right? I decided to try the beet before shredding, guess what was wrong? Yep, bitter! Bitter, bitter, bitter!! Perhaps it was the bitter left over from the salsa. I don't know, they went back in the fridge as the salsa went down the drain. I was frustrated with all this I asked Sam to just order Chinese food, luckily we have one very close by.

Well, I'll head out tomorrow and get salsa and try again with tostadas for tomorrow nights dinner. We'll see, wish me luck! Quite the dinner experience. Oh well, something to laugh about later.

Cheers and happy eating!