51ºÚÁÏ

Which means that if you are me, weekends are for disappointment.

I like to go out for dinner on Fridays, or at least get takeout and eat it at home. It is a delineation between the work week and the non-work weekend, an edible demarcation that marks the end of five days (more or less) of arduous labor (more or less).

In a very real sense, it also hearkens back to my halcyon days when reporters would all go out for beers every Friday and talk about the stories we had covered over the past week and why we hated whichever editor did not happen to come out with us.

Eventually, all the editors came to join us, too.

One recent Friday was no different. After I finished writing a story, I went out with my wife to a neighborhood Mexican restaurant. It’s close and it’s convenient and it’s often disappointing. Why we don’t go to the much better Mexican restaurants that are in the next neighborhood over, I’ll never know.

I got the same dish I had the last time we went, a chile colorado that is actually quite good. But it is also quite spicy, which keeps it off the list of possible selections for my wife.

So she got tacos. Or at least she ordered tacos and was served a plate of things that looked like tacos — pieces of grilled chicken on corn tortillas. But the chicken had no discernable flavor whatsoever, and the tortillas were not much better.

She was disappointed.

So the next night, Saturday, we decided to skip the hard part part about making dinner ourselves again and instead we just heated up some pre-marinated chicken that we bought from a national chain I will only identify as Adertray Oesjay.

The package was called Savory Herbed Chicken Thighs, and the herbs included basil, cilantro, mint, rosemary and such aromatics as onion, garlic and lemon peel. My wife read the ingredients aloud, and we both agreed it sounded good.

That was because we weren’t thinking. Neither of us paid attention to a four-letter word: Mint.

I love mint in my iced tea, and that’s why we grow it (in a pot, because otherwise it will take over your entire yard and the eastern half of Missouri). Backyard mint can also be used to make an interesting spearmint ice cream that is worth trying once and maybe twice. It is absolutely necessary in mojitos, and many people enjoy a mint sauce with their lamb, though I am not among them.

Otherwise, mint has no good place in cooking. It is far too sharp and assertive to be used in, say, Savory Herbed Chicken Thighs. Dinner Saturday was like eating a boneless chicken thigh-shaped pot of mint.

It was a disappointment.

Sunday, we gave up and did the cooking ourselves — all of the cooking, not just heating up a package from the store. I decided to make my favorite kind of pot roast.

That’s a chuck roast braised in canned tomatoes, fresh-squeezed orange juice and reduced red wine, flavored with a couple of cloves and a stick of cinnamon. For added depth, I first sautéed some chopped onion, carrot and celery.

It was delightful — rich with flavor but not with fat. The meat fell apart at the merest glimpse of a fork. The hearty sauce kept the meat moist. I served it with roasted potatoes, which may actually have been better with the sauce than the meat was.

It was fabulous, and not a disappointment. Not a disappointment at all.