Apology to American Cooks

I have had to do a lot of pride swallowing lately as I disgrace the name of all American cooks. I probably should ask for your forgiveness if you are a good cook, just in case you ever come over. Every Sunday we have a dinner in-between services, which I cook the main dish for. In the past few weeks I have served meat loaf with potatoes that were supposed to be in the middle but had bubbled all over the place (was tired so I was pretty excited when Eric found box potatoes, just not so excited at how they worked in meat loaf), soggy tuna noodle salad (I can't do more than one thing at a time lately), over-boiled potato salad (just sat down for a "minute" and was awakened an hour later to Eric saying, "Jess, there's no water in this pan. Do you need to do something with these potatoes?"), and just yesterday, my biggest disaster ever, tuna noodle casserole (I didn't have a pan big enough to do it in the oven so decided to try the crockpot. Let's just say you couldn't even tell there were noodles in it and we served it on bread.) There was a day when I had all kinds of cake decorating supplies and instructions. My mom use to say that I was overly attached to my pampered chef cake decorator as I was even known to fill it with mashed potatoes and decorate my shepherd's pies! Instead of serving the dainty carrot cakes with the miniture carrots on them, I'm wanting to serve the cake before anyone sees it as usually the sides are caving in, besides the fact that I'm still experimenting with the vanilla powder we buy here and water so that it doesn't taste too bitter in my frostings. So, again. If you are a good American cook and ever hear a Ukrainian talk about how bad American food is, please forgive me. He probably was a victim of my cooking.

P.S. My husband says that I am over dramatic and that no one would know that anything was wrong if I didn't say anything...and people still went for seconds. I did find a great way to use the tuna noodle casserole - cook it in crescent rolls with cheese sprinkled on top. Yum.

P.P.S. Jolene shared an excellent article from Christian Womanhood Magazine about missionary wives on her blog, With Love from Ukraine. Not only do I think it would be a blessing for missionary wives to read, but would also give those interested insight into the lives of missionary wives. There was so much there that I could relate to - the lugging of water, washing clothes by hand, pressures to do more...I'll stop and let you read it for yourself.