Things not to do when cooking, part one.

On Sunday, desperately looking for something non-bland to eat and not wanting to leave the house to find it, I made a serendipitous find: a packet of Wendy’s honey mustard salad dressing in the butter keeper in the fridge. I proceeded to squeeze the contents of this pakcet out over several boneless chicken breasts, baked ’em, and boy, was that yummy.
My wife reminded me that we had a whole bottle of such dressing, and told me where it was. (The chaotic space that is our pantry/utility room sometimes requires such reminders, it’s not as if we’re hiding food from each other.) It turned out to be Atkins honey mustard dressing, but I gave it a try anyway.
El wrongo! Here’s why it didn’t work: Atkins licensed foods replace the kind of sugar you normally expect with alcohol sugar. This is why any Atkins candy bars make me almost violently ill, but it also explains why the dressing simply vanished between when I put the chicken into the oven and when I took it out. Having an alcohol component, this dressing, of course…evaporated. Leaving very little in the way of anything to flavor the chicken, much less permeate it and make it yummy.
So there you go: Atkins dressings are pretty much out the window as a marinade or for cooking directly into something. Maybe you already knew this, and this is a “duhhh!!” revelation that I’ve only just had the occasion to stumble upon, but it was a (tasteless) discovery for me.