Dinner: travesty or triumph # 140206

So, we've established that my housekeeping skills are sub-par. What we haven't discussed of late are my cooking skills. 
It took me a long time to not hate cooking. I had to change my perception of what cooking meant. I had to undo the association of housewifery and exchange it with a more fundamental approach before I could begin to undo the loathing I would feel towards my stove and oven.
A most un-housewife occupation.  I began to look at cooking at its most stripped down self. I chose to be a novice chemist, versus a hack housewife with crappy cooking. Chemistry.  Cooking is nothing more than chemistry.  Knowing which spices will interact well with others and how their properties change when heat is applied and even how heat is applied and how much heat is applied - it is all chemistry.  It's like knowing that CO is going to kill you but CO2 is what we exhale.
It can be subtle,  rosemary and thyme on chicken,  but only rosemary on beef or, mustard powder for deviled eggs but not scrambled eggs. Or huge, always chop your veggies before cutting any meat with the same knife or cutting board unless there's a cute doctor in the ER who's number you think you can win while exploding from both ends simultaneously.  
Cooking = chemistry.
There have been the culinary equivalents of toxic chemicals to have been ladled onto our plates, many of which my loving husband has at least tried to swallow and just as many that even our dogs wouldn't eat... an Asian inspired ginger pork roast comes to mind. But each and every one of those culinary disasters were hard won lessons in chemistry (vinegar is not the best marinade,  contrary to popular belief as proven by that poor catastrophe of ginger pork).
So, despite my ineptitude at consistently dusting the blades on our ceiling fans, I've become a pretty good cook. I mean culinary chemist. On tonight's menu, lightly breaded baked chicken breast with sautéed mushrooms and broken lasagna with peppers and capers in a lemon garlic and olive oil sauce. It. Was. Good. Yum.
Chemistry can be so yummy.
Just don't ask me to bake, that kind of advanced molecular chemistry continues to elude me unless it comes from a box.