What a waste of time!

Last night, I was exhausted. I left work a bit early because I was falling asleep at my desk. I got home and started making Chile-Spiced Sweet Potato Tamales (Sunset, November 2004). Zeb offered to make dinner but I thought I could handle it. Cooking tends to relax me and I really enjoy it. Everything started out well. I got the corn husks soaking and the sweet potatoes, coated with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon, roasting in the oven. It smelled so good - a bit like french toast. An hour later, I had mashed sweet potatoes laced with masa flour and chipotle chiles. The recipe called for steaming the tamales on a rack in a covered pot with simmering water. Well, this seemed a bit too much engineering for my tastes and I have an awesome steamer so I thought I'd just use that. I managed to fill the corn husks and tie them up pretty well for having no experience whatsoever. I loaded up the steamer and set the timer for 30 minutes. Recipe called for 1 hour to firm the tamales but I thought I would just check them out halfway. I then curled up on the couch and half slept, half watched television. The timer went off (around 8:45pm) and I went to go check out my tamales. Now usually, the steamer gets pretty hot so you have to be careful when opening it. Funny thing though, there was a bit of condensation on the inside but it was cool. My tamales weren't firming up at all. I started it up again, quite puzzled, when I looked down and saw that some idiot (me) forgot to plug the damn thing in. Back to the couch...30 minutes later....hot squishy tamales. At this point I'm so freaking tired, Zeb put me to bed. He kept the steamer going for another 40 minutes but it never worked. I didn't get dinner and he had cereal. Stupid tamales.