When Good Dinners Go Bad

I'd like to consider myself a decent cook. By decent, I mean that I can put a meal together for company and everything is ready at the same time and usually tastes good. I'm not what you call a "fancy" cook, meaning I rarely use the ingredients that they cook with on Top Chef or the Food Network. I'm a meat and potatoes kind of cook. I think one of the things I like to do best is throw a bunch of stuff in a pot and make a soup or stew or pop it in the oven to make a casserole. Sometimes, it doesn't always work out. One such case was a dish involving leftover pasta. I thought I would create something like the Olive Garden has, a tortellini and chicken soup. It turned out terrible. The pasta cooked down so much it resembled a big pot of congealed bacon fat and I had used canned chicken, which I think evaporated into thin air. I was so disgusted that I slung the whole thing, pot included out into the back yard. And to make matters even worse, I had left a bag of trash outside on the porch and the wild critters had torn it all to shreds searching for bits of food. Want to know what was about 10 feet way from the trash? Yep, the concoction I had thrown out the night before, and it was untouched. You know it's a good dinner gone bad when the wild critters won't even eat it!