Roasted Carrot Confession...

They look ok, right?

I said it at the dinner party last Saturday night, and I was telling the truth.  I am not a natural cook.  My main impetus for joining in the Barefoot Contessa fun was to get better at cooking, since my husband is ridiculously good at it and I want to be able to cook at least maybe half as good for him as he does for me.  I have a long way to go, because remember, this thing doesn't come natural to me.  When I was a kid my mom told me to butter the bottom of the pan, and I did just that.  I turned the pan upside down and buttered the underside of it.  I was very proud of myself; I was very thorough in my buttering. 

They say history repeats itself, and well, it kind of did last weekend.  No, I didn't butter the bottom of the pan again.  Here is what I did do.

I volunteered to bring the roasted carrots to the Barefoot Contessa dinner party two Saturday nights ago.  Everyone had raved about how good the recipe was, and how simple it was to put together.  They were right; it is simple, but it sure did take me a long time to peel and cut up all those carrots.  I was making a double recipe, so that was some of the reason why it took me so long, but it was still fairly tedious.  If you're short on time, you might try using frozen carrots instead.  I was able to get everything done just barely in time, but they looked pretty.  I didn't have much of a chance to taste them after they came out of the oven, because I had to hurry and leave for the party. 

The carrots made it to the party and seemed to make a fairly good showing for themselves. 

Fast forward to Monday evening, two nights after the dinner party.  My husband and I are making greek food for dinner.  I tell him we don't need to buy flat leaf parsley because I still had some left over from the roasted carrots recipe.  We get home that night and he pulls out the remainder of the parsley.  He looks over at me and says "Amy, that isn't parsley.  It's cilantro." 

Oh wow...that means I just served a dish of roasted carrots covered in cilantro to a whole bunch of ladies at a dinner party.  Some of them I'd never even met before.  Wow.  Whoops!  Guess it pays to smell the "parsley" before buying it rather than just assuming that the veggie is what the label says it is. 

I wondered why I wasn't as impressed with the carrots as everyone else had seemed to be in their own blog posts about them...guess the cilantro explains it!  Sorry to anyone who had the carrots and was a little confused.  I promise the next dish I bring to one of our dinner parties will be certified cilantro free (CCF).  Now everyone understands why it is very important that I continue to try to learn how to cook.  I do stuff like this all the time...just usually not when I'm cooking for a large group of people at a dinner party!