Balsamic Vinegar Can't Redeem Rash Decisions

Tonight, I was excited about dinner. I've been using this new and pretty neat search engine, supercook.com (Thank you, Monika) because it allows you to enter the contents of your kitchen and then pulls up recipes based on what you have. (You have to enter everything, though. Every trivial spice, every pantry staple.) Anyhow, I've learned through trial and error sites to follow and sites to avoid. For example, allrecipes.com tends to be a little crappy. Recipezaar.com isn't much better; it's not that they're bad, but they're a catch-all with no editing process, so if a recipe doesn't work it can still be posted. Granted, most home cooks can glance through a recipe and envision the results, so it's really just a process of whittling out recipes that aren't your style. But one good site that I love, and usually use for special occasion dinners is epicurious.com, which is (so I gather) the archive site for Bon Appetit online. I picked out a dish for tonight that was a simple way of preparing chicken; sauteeing onion and garlic, adding cubed chicken breasts, then letting it simmer in some balsamic vinegar and dijon mustard and sprinkling a little basil over the finished dish. Easy, right? I figured I'd serve it with couscous and roasted broccoli -- not my first choice, but we had it on hand.
Then I made the mistake of reading the reviews and taking the advice before I tasted the original recipe. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Lots of posters said the sauce wasn't sauce-ey enough, so they added chicken broth or white wine, or a combo. My husband ranks dry food up there with pride, lust, envy...you get it. So instead of just tasting the finished dish that was simmering and smelling delicious in a little bit of balsamic and mustard, I pulled out the divine remnants of the Lacheteau Vouvray from last night and...poured the whole thing in. The WHOLE THING. This is like, 1/4 of a bottle. So now I'm staring down at my lovely chicken, onion and garlic which is drowning in a light brown colored, sickly sweet smelling liquid that used to be a perfectly matched, perfectly proportioned and perfectly flavored light glaze (or so I imagine, since I DIDN'T TASTE IT FIRST!). At that point I succumbed to the crying baby who was trying to climb up my leg and let my husband (who himself is a pretty good cook) try to redeem a moment's folly.
After I put little Charlotte to bed, I returned to the kitchen to find the sauce reduced by 2/3 but still a horrible color and tasting like reduced white wine, cold broccoli that I had pulled from the oven too early so instead of being crispy was limp, brown, and generally lackluster, and couscous that I had added too much liquid to and was thus clumpy and mushy. My wonderful family ate it with smiles and reassurances, while I drank most of the wine I had bought especially to go with this meal, which thankfully I managed not to ruin.
I'm now drinking tea and eating cookies and going to bed right after this post, so I can get up and search for my misplaced cooking mojo in the morning.