Cooking failure

So, I try to be a good wife and prepare well-balanced meals for my husband and myself. And I try to mix things up a bit and at least once a week make a new recipe, something besides our usual macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, and frozen pizza.
The other week, embracing my Polish heritage, I decided to cook pierogies. I brought out my Kitchenaid mixer for the first time to make the dough. And while that was mixing, I made some mashed potatoes and sauteed some onions to put in the filling. The recipe makes 50 pierogies, which is way too many, so I decided to make a half recipe. Everything was going well. Then I got the dough out of the mixing bowl and tried to roll it flat (a first use of my rolling pin). The dough seemed really sticky. It was really difficult to handle and manipulate. I was having trouble cutting it in circles and folding it, filling it and pinching it.
Looking back at my recipe, I realized I'd halved all the ingredients in the dough but one: the water. I guess at that point, I could have turned it into a whole recipe and just added the full amount of the rest of the ingredients, the flour, eggs, oil, etc., but I had already removed the dough from the bowl and gotten it stuck all over the counter and the rolling pin. It was basically just a waste of two hours with nothing to show but a lot of dirty dishes and some very sad looking dough blobs mixed with cheese, mashed potato, and onion. I think at the end of it all, we probably just ended up eating spaghetti or one of the other usual dinner entrees.
But, just so you know, I tried again a few days later, taking care to only add 1/2 cup water, and the pierogies turned out great!
Just last week, I brought out my white chicken chili recipe. It's just a simple crock pot recipe. Mom always tells me to just 'throw' some ingredients in in the morning and it'll be ready when I come home from work. The chili recipe says to cook for only 4 hours, but, trusting my instincts, I figured I could leave it on low all day and it would be fine. How wrong I was. After work, I got home to a very charred crock pot, the smell of burnt chili there to greet my nostrils. All that work in the morning for nothing. We ate out that night.
I'm gonna try the chili again today, this time watching the clock a little better. I'm home, so I can keep my eye on it. Hopefully, I'll be able to report a success!

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