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I figured out why my cornmeal cake turned into a blunt instrument. I glanced at the recipe and apparently noted the proportions but misread the amounts of the two types of flour, so instead of using one cup of flour and half a cup of cornmeal, I used two cups of flour and one cup of cornmeal. Oops.
Definitely worse than Yoon's apple crumble disaster, in which she forgot to put in the sugar in the crumble topping, but I salvaged it, or at least made it edible, by adding more sugar and butter and putting it back in the oven. The cornmeal cannonball had to be flung into the dumpster, where it landed with an echoing boom.
Tell me about your worst cooking disasters.
Definitely worse than Yoon's apple crumble disaster, in which she forgot to put in the sugar in the crumble topping, but I salvaged it, or at least made it edible, by adding more sugar and butter and putting it back in the oven. The cornmeal cannonball had to be flung into the dumpster, where it landed with an echoing boom.
Tell me about your worst cooking disasters.
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It didn't end well.
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They came out so hard that they didn't even crack when they were put under the leg of a desk that a student sat on.
[*] I was born in Korea and adopted at three months by non-Korean parents.
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I nearly chipped a tooth.
They were so tough that when we catapulted them off of the 10 story roof towards the concrete below, they didn't break; they just bounced away in the direction of the quad.
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Meanwhile, the egg ran down around the edges of the vegetables and sealed itself up against the sides of the pan with a nice solid coagulated-protein bonding, and then proceeded to cook itself airtight, along with the cheese, over the vegetables. (There was probably too much egg, in retrospect, and definitely too much cheese.) And the temperature was probably a little too high, and the vegetables were very moist and started to steam, and there was nowhere for the steam to escape around the edges of the egg. So I was cheerfully cutting up cucumbers and then I heard a weird splutter and then it... exploded.
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And I did manage to screw up Jell-o once by not stirring it long enough. -sigh-
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But I think the one that is the most gut-wrenchingly nasty, judging from people's reactions, is the night I closed the bar (this was during grad school). I used to find some of the customers waiting outside for me at three a.m. when I had finished the cleaning required of me. I used to be a bit scared by this, but in those days...yadda. Anyway, one of the men who waited there was a friend of my father's, who had discovered that I worked at that bar. He would stay until past closing time, and complain about his wife. Clueless twit I was, but even I picked up on the fact that H thought he could solve some of his problems by screwing his old friend's daughter.
So I always refused to go home (or to a motel) with any of them, but if I felt danger, I'd invite them to go to the Carrows over on State Street and we could talk it all over, and I would listen and be so sympathetic they get free therapy, not free sex. It worked in that none of them did anything violent the next night, but that's aside.
So one morning, there I was in Carrows with H, after a week of finals, and class in a few hours. I was so exhausted that when the waitress served the coffee, as H was whining on about how his wife didn't understand him, I reached for the honey to put into my coffee, but got the barbeque sauce instead. I poured in a good dollop, stirring. He paused, mouth open. I do remember that distinctly, because it briefly brought me out of my torpor.
"Are you going to drink that?" he asked, or words to that effect.
I gave as how I was indeed, I needed a caffeine boost as I had class in four hours, and home was still a half hour away, up in Isla Vista. (These were the days of 55 mph.)
He watched me drink. I shuddered, but just kept on drinking. It was about three sips later that I realized the coffee tasted worse than any coffee ever.
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I can really only think of one time that the result was so horrible it had to be thrown out immediately, and that was the time I was fourteen or so and tried to make Turkish Delight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Delight). I still don't know what the hell happened, but I somehow ended up with a giant brown gelatinous glob. It was scary-looking, and I didn't even try to eat it.
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I still can't bake.
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That still beats the time I tried to make brownies from scratch without any eggs (hint: don't do it), but only just.
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(Although it was only a couple of weeks ago that I forgot to add sufficient acid to a vegan cake, which can only rise if there's enough acid to interact with the base, making bubbles and height. Poor linoleum-square cake.)
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Unfortunately, only a couple of us were around the night we actually baked the cake, none of us had brought a cake mix or a cake recipe, and we'd gathered at the house of a friend whose attitude toward baking I can summarize by her recent attempt at a birthday cake, where I had to explain to her that stirring something by hand for less than a minute is not enough when the recipe calls for 5 minutes with an electric mixer.
We ended up wandering around the kitchen, throwing eggs and butter and flour and chocolate into the bowl more or less at random. Anti-Stirring Friend tried to heat up butter in the microwave, and it exploded, all over the microwave, with a power I hadn't know butter possessed. (Said friend also has a tendency to set kitchens on fire, which luckily we were spared.) For some reason we decided to throw all-natural organic peanut butter into the mix, which was especially unfortunate because I hate the taste of all-natural organic peanut butter. While the "cake" (it was more of a monster cake-like brownie) was baking, someone had the brilliant idea of making frosting from scratch.
We didn't actually have any actual frosting ingredients, so instead we wound up with some horrible mixture of sugar, maple syrup, blueberries, and anything else even vaguely sweet, heated up on the stove.
It would've tasted okay if we'd left out the peanut butter and the sauce. As it was, it did not taste okay. The next day a few of us bought green icing, covered the browniemonster, and filmed it under a sprinkler, with all that sweet green icing flowing down. And we did in fact never have that recipe again.
I would say "this is what kids had to do for fun before Youtube," but Youtube was around.
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So I poured in olive oil because I didn't have butter, realized it was probably too much, decided to proceed anyway, and started stirring in flour (hoping that white whole wheat flour would work the same as all-purpose). (This is the type of thing that happens when I decide to cook at 10pm.)
Cooking flour in olive oil smells *really bad*, but I kept going. After I had a sludge, I decided it was about the right consistency for a roux, as the internet said something like a paste. I couldn't figure out how to make a sauce from roux, so I just dumped in the entire container of leftover sauce I had.
In about two seconds, everything miraculously congealed, and I discovered what I had before was decidedly not the texture of paste, but what I now had definitely was.
I then tried to pour in tons of hot water in an attempt to salvage and still have sauce. It did indeed make the roux not-paste, but then it turned into a mucky soup that tasted like flour.
I ended up tossing the pasta in olive oil, sprinkling on salt and pepper, and adding the cooked mushrooms I had prepared, but three days later, the kitchen still smells like burnt flour.
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I'm hoping to use the two cups or more of salt before my mom comes home in three days, but the likelihood seems dim. Even if I do like my stuff salty.
Also, staving off worse disasters by not being overeager with the oiled salt sounds like a good idea...
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Once I left the baking powder out of chocolate mayonnaise cake, but since it ended up dense like brownies, that wasn't too awful. Worse would be the time my mother decided that mayonnaise and Miracle Whip were similar enough that it would be okay to put Miracle Whip in chocolate mayonnaise cake. Um, no, it turned out.
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Another time, I was making a cake that was supposed to contain 3/4 cup of honey, and I put in 1/4. I tasted it when it came out of the oven, and it was wrong, and eventually I realized what I'd done and had to throw it away and start over, which was particularly annoying because the cake also involved grating some large quantity of carrots, and I'd had to do it by hand.
There was also the time I was visiting my parents. My mother had apparently not used ginger in her cooking for a long time, because, when I added ginger to my almost-completed applesauce cake batter, I discovered that the ginger was full of tiny bugs.
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As a kid, I went on occasional cooking jags for some reason. I recall once I decided to make meringues (probably on the basis that we had all the ingredients and it looked simple). Since I hadn't asked for permission to use the electric hand mixer I whipped them by hand, which took bloody forever but worked. However, next time I made them I did have permission to use the mixer, so naturally I whipped them too much and couldn't salvage them.
And then there was the time, years later, when I was making hummus and my father bought the tahini (or whatever) to put in it - except he got some variety with sugar in it, which would be fine for making halvah but is not so wonderful for hummus. I did not realize it until I had mixed everything up, and adding lots of extra garlic didn't work.
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The worst disaster was inadvertently adding the chilli powder TWICE to a Thai curry...
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I was calm enough to grab the tray from the oven (with mitts on!) and to dump the flaming nachos into the sink and to run water over them.
I'm still not certain if my parents know about this.
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Or! I once put pomegrante juice in a jello salad (I put in a mixed juice without checking) and ended up with jello-y soup.
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She does the same thing with the powdered sugar, and the container is the same size and shape, and, look, when you're reaching for the all-purpose flour and you get a proper-looking container full of white powder, do you really stop to examine it closely?
The cookies weren't actually inedible. Much flatter and chewier than one would normally expect, though.
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First - Vanilla extra and soysauce may look the same, but are not. And you will unhappy if you attempt to use vanilla in your stir fry. More so because it will ruin in the seasoning on your wok. Apparently it /never comes out/ of the seasoning and thus anything else cooked in the wok for the rest of time will end up smelling like vanilla, at least until you either throw the wok out or spend the hours scrubbing off the seasoning to get it down to plain metal and then spend the time to re-season it.
Second - anise seeds and cumin seeds, again, may look very similar, but chili made with anise seeds is inedible no matter how much you can't stand to waste it because that really was your food budget for several days of the week.
Third - Cumin and Cinnamon may share several letters and set sitting next to each other in the spice cabinet. They can not be substituted and cumin flavored horchata is not a good idea. (Fortunately, we realized what we'd done and managed to skim almost all of it off, so there was only a tiny bit of slightly odd flavor.)
Other cooking life lessons I or friends have learned over the years - baking powder and baking soda, they are not the same and can not be substituted for each other. Leeks which are still slightly damp and thrown into too hot oil may explode... this may set your celing on fire. No, really, do not go away from the toasting nuts, they /will/ burn the second you're not paying attention.
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My mother and father were living in Pasadena in the early seventies while my father was at CalTech for his doctorate. They had a stipend, but were still on a tight budget.
So when my mother found an entire five-pound package of chicken thighs at the supermarket for fifty cents, and they were the correct color for chicken, smelled fine, and had no visible defects, she grabbed it in a heartbeat. (I don't know the actual price for five pounds of chicken at that time; she says this was still an absurd markdown, but not actually so absurd that she was actively looking for a catch.)
She took it home, put it in the pressure cooker, pressure-cooked it for forty-five minutes with various herbs and spices, made rice, and dished it out for dinner.
When my father went to eat it, his fork bounced off the skin. He tried a knife. It bounced too. He tried a butcher knife. After sawing with all his strength for some time, he managed to make a very small dent in the chicken.
They had rice and gravy for dinner and my mother put the chicken back into the pressure cooker, at its highest pressure-- overnight, and all the next day, until dinner time. She dished it out.
A fork bounced off the skin. So did a knife. A butcher knife, applied with full strength for quite a while, succeeded in making a very small dent in the chicken.
At this point, my mother gave up, and tossed the chicken thighs to their German shepherd-coyote mix. She would not, ordinarily, have given bone-in chicken to a dog, of course, but she couldn't figure out how to get the bones out of it.
There weren't any problems. The dog crunched the chicken between her teeth until the bones were powder, without succeeding in denting the chicken with her bite-- please note, coyote mix-- and then swallowed each chicken piece whole. She did seem to be able to digest them okay, although my mother watched her like a hawk for a few days.
Mom has insisted on paying full price for meat ever since.
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I like steamed buns. I have made steamed buns from scratch. It's a complicated operation that I would never undertake solo; *way* too much work. And I no longer live in the same town as my cooking buddy, so no more home-made steamed buns for me.
(I can go out for dim sum now, though, which is something of a consolation. Pittsburgh is still devoid of dim sum, last I heard.)
Anyway. I took it into my brain to go buy some pre-packaged red-bean steamed buns. (The pedant must note that I was still living in Pittsburgh at this point; I just wanted some no-effort buns.) I did not know if such a thing existed as pre-packaged steam-them-yourself steamed buns. I still don't. It seemed like something that *must* exist, though, so I ventured down to the Strip to force them into existence if necessary.
(The Strip is where you go in Pittsburgh to buy food. No smart remarks. The girlie shows are several blocks farther downtown, and mostly closed these days anyhow.)
I went into a random Oriental grocery and bought... well, what I bought were green-tea mochi with red bean paste. I was not clear on exactly what mochi was. I had not played _Okami_ and gotten the explanation of the rabbit with the giant hammer. I figured that if mochi wasn't bun-steaming dough, it was a close cousin, and it could hardly help puffing up if I steamed it, right?
I opened the package (of eight) and pulled out a mochi. It was green, gelatinous, slightly translucent, dusted with cornstarch (to prevent sticking), and had a blob of red inside. I ate it. It was mochi. It wasn't a raw steamed bun. But at that point I wanted to go through with it, because I am a determined figure when there's nothing at stake but some damn buns.
I own a nice, if cheap, bamboo steamer -- of the sort that Alton Brown says not to use because you can't clean bamboo. Fine, whatever. I don't use it much. I certainly wouldn't unpack it for seven (remaining) green... things. Instead, I put a half-inch of water into a saucepan, brought it to a boil, threw in a handful of silverware (for spacing), and balanced a saucer on top. Then I arranged the mochi on the saucer. Dropped on the lid, left for ten minutes.
Feel free to visualize the result.
You are wrong.
In the presence of heat, mochi goes gooey. But not runny, exactly. But it's runny *enough* for the seven green blobs to run together. But not *all* the way together; the dusting of starch had run down the sides and collected in the crevices. Which formed an uneven hexagonal lattice, because how else do you arrange seven circular objects on a saucer? So each translucent green slime-blob in the honeycomb had a melty white cell wall... and a dark little nucleus of red bean paste.
One of the cells was dripping off the side of the saucer.
It was the most *biological* looking thing I've ever made in my kitchen.
Tasted fine, though.