"It's not really burnt to hell."

Peej blogs primarily about cooking and presents the perfectly-prepared, finished dish in the form of a photograph. Even what she recently referred to as a failure is tastefully done and had me drooling, but she laments:

People have the impression that I'm this master pastry baker so I thought I would bare my soul here and show a lemon meringue pie-gone-wrong.

She then dissects what she did compared to what she oughta done.

My heart bleeds for her. BLEEDS! Really!

That's a failure?

You want to know what a failure is? Try the baked ziti I fixed for dinner last night.

It's not like I've never fixed baked ziti before, either. I already had the sauce in the freezer, the same sauce I've been making for a long time.

The ziti was in the cabinet, the same brand I've been using for a long time.

Used the same cheese I always do, too, for the topping.

Except when I pulled it out of the oven, instead of being cooked it was . . . and I burned the crap out of my hand, too.

What went wrong? Damned if I know. If I knew it wouldn't have turned out the way it did. Maybe I turned the oven on the wrong temperature setting, or maybe I screwed up when I set the timer, or maybe . . .

People pay big money at fancy restaurants for dishes listed as Blackened (fill in the blank), right? So what's wrong with Blackened Ziti?

Peej photographed her "failure." If I had mine, it would show a double-strength, draw-string garbage bag, because I'd have tossed it in the trash once I finished jackhammered it out of the pan . . . if I'd had the time but before I could, Da Kid came in from work.

It's not as if we didn't have any other food in the house. There's leftover roast and leftover baked chicken and leftover veggies, but grabbing a plate from the cabinet, Da Kid headed straight for . . . IT, excavating about a quarter of the pan.

After he'd crunched his way through that, "The Eating Machine" went back for more.

"It's all in the way you look at it," he said. "It's not really burnt to hell, Mom. It's 'Extra Crispy.'"