A number of months ago, a friend of mine pointed pointed me in the direction of A Year of Slow Cooking, which details the efforts of cooking with a crock pot for an entire year.

The blog covers a wide range of meals. So far, my favorite is this simple Slow cooked Shredded Chicken recipe. There’s almost no work to it, and the results are very tasty. And useful. I had chicken for a week+ after I finished.

The second recipe I tried for a small dinner party Friday evening, was Super Easy CrockPot Lasagna.

The instructions are simple, the ingredients delicious. I prepped everything the night before – I found some great Central Market pasta sauce, I snuck in some broccoli and carrots. Mmm. It was going to be good. In the morning I added the requisite water, set the cooker on ‘low’ and went to work.

My mouth was watering in anticipation as I drove home. Oh, it was going to be delicious. As I entered the house, however, there was a subtle undertone of… something suspicious.

Yep. It burned. Badly. As failures go, this one was spectacular. I don’t have any photos (the camera refused to work while pointed at the mess), but you can ask the dinner guests… they can all attest to how bad it was. My suspicion is that the noodles I used required more water than her recipe, and that I somewhat under-estimated how long a work day is, and therefor cooked things longer than I intended.

Time for plan B: I grabbed keys, shoes and ran out the door for the grocery store. 20 minutes later, and I’m improvising cooking instructions, boiling water for the noodles and prepping another batch of lasagna. It’s all about the dinner, right?

It was chaos. It was a rush. But in the end, I had the lasagna in the oven with just enough time to spare for cleaning up the kitchen and picking up the dining and living rooms.

The dinner was great – there was both red and white wines, Kelly brought Dulce de Leche for dessert, also made in a slow cooker. It was a regular crock pot party. (Just, with my lasagna made in the oven – you know, the failure and all…)

I’ll probably try the recipe again, just do it while I’m actually at home and can keep an eye on things.