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Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Lunchbox on 06 Dec 2010, 19:17
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Man, so, you guys know it's Christmas in a bit, right? And you've already had your respective Thanksgivings and started Hanukkah and whatnot. And we cook a whole bunch during holidays, so there's bound to be something stupid happen.
My favourite holiday cooking story is a few years ago, when my short-sighted great grandmother decided to pour brandy over the chocolate-coated ice-cream pudding and try to set it alight.
I also attempted to make gingerbread men this weekend, and put them in the oven without turning it on. I was so confused, 15 minutes later when I went to get them out, as to why they hasn't even started solidifying.
Do you guys have any holiday cooking disasters? Regular cooking disasters? I am all for reading your stories.
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I once made peanut butter cookies! Except that the white, granular substance in the clear jar on the counter was salt. Not sugar. My dad nearly puked when he shoved a whole cookie into his mouth.
This year's disaster is that my beloved, beloved mixer, Martha, is sick. Something has come loose and it makes her shake something fierce when I try and make things. So she is at the shop for repairs. I hope she will be okay.
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My sister once did something similar with a meatball recipe. Instead of 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt, she added 1 1/2 cups.
One thing I like to point out for times like this. Everybody stresses about making everything about a big family event/dinner perfect. But really, who ever remembers a perfect event? Obviously you don't want to screw something up on purpose just for the lulz, but if something weird happens, and nobody died because of it, then take a deep breath, relax, and look forward to how the story will get told and elaborated on in the years to come. Someday, it will become part of the family legend. :-)
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Instead of 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt, she added 1 1/2 cups.
I don't know if I could even find 1.5 cups of salt in my kitchen.
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I have this carrot soup recipe, and it's really good, except every time I make it, I use four times the cayenne pepper by mistake. I think it's supposed to be 1/8t, but I'm already holding the 1/2t spoon from measuring salt, and use that instead. EVERY TIME.
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A couple of years ago I managed to blow up a chicken with rice based stuffing. There was an audible bang as the carcass split and the resulting oven cleaning took several hours.
Warning, if you explode a chicken, the skin will weld itself to everything.
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I actually had a terrible one recently. I was back home and cooking spaghetti for the team my Dad coaches. My mom makes it so plain and boring so I decided to mix in my own blend of spices (including a ton more italian spices as well as cinnamon, a bit of dark brown sugar, and just a splash of vanilla extract. It's delicious). While digging through the spice cabinet, I found a bottle of coconut extract, and a small brown bottle with no label that I assumed to be vanilla extract.
It wasnt. It was more goddamn coconut extract. Who the hell needs two bottles of coconut extract and has NO vanilla?
Suffice it to say it was the worst spaghetti I have ever tasted. Everyone else ate it and didn't really complain though.
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We tried making the filling for a meat pie the other day, but something went wrong and the bottom of the pan burned. The house still smells like charred pork guts.
My grandmother's fudge recipe is really strange. You could make it five times under the same exact conditions and only one batch would come out properly. :psyduck:
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My ex-husband's favorite pie was pecan pie, which is basically made of sugar, corn syrup and eggs poured over nuts into a crust and then baked. There's probably some butter in there, too, but it's mostly sugar. It's insanely sweet.
The first time I made it I accidentally doubled the sugar. Yeah.
Another time I made a cheesecake with my grandmother's recipe, and it came out looking amazingly delicious. The crust was the color of oreos, and the cheesecake part was golden like caramel... I had overbaked it by AN HOUR.
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My mom made creamed tuna once, and even though she's normally an excellent cook, I think she kind of had a brain fart that day and used tablespoons of salt instead of teaspoons. We happily ladled it onto our toast, collectively took a bite, and collectively spit the bites back onto our plates. Someone had the bright idea to feed what was left to our dog, because dogs will eat anything, right? No... our poor dog took a sniff, put her tail between her legs, and crawled under the porch.
My sister-in-law decided she'd try to make muffin tops when everyone came over for some holiday or another. She didn't realize that there's a special tin that you make them in, so she just put dollops of muffin batter on a cookie sheet. Muffin batter is runny but not so thin that it will go everywhere immediately... within a few minutes of putting it in the oven, she just had a sheet full of muffin goo that was dripping off the edges and burning in the bottom of the oven.
The first year I made Thanksgiving dinner by myself was a few months after I'd gotten married, and I got to use our lovely new knife set. I was happily chopping celery for the stuffing and realized something was wrong when the sound went from "chop chop chop chop" to "thhhkkkk." Luckily the knife was so sharp that when it went through those few millimeters of fingertip it kind of cauterized it so I made it to the sink before I bled all over the stuffing. Sadly, I didn't learn right away and ended up doing that two more times with various vegetables. I'm pretty good about using "kitten paws" when I chop stuff nowadays.
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AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
That was horrifying.
I'm glad you've learned about kitten paws now.
/shudder!
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What the hell are kitten paws.
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That's where you cut the paw off a kitten and use that to hold your vegetables while you chop them...
Or maybe you curl your fingers under to get them out of the way.
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I can't believe I didn't think of curling my fingers under! Thank god, I've been running out of kittens.
Professor Snuggles, it's like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cb1DZxIgFc
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I think whether I went to see Cooking Disasters and Holiday Mess would depend on which act was headlining.
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This is not my disaster, but apparently when my father was young he made a roast. The recipe he was using called form red wine. They didn't have any in the house so he mixed Vodka and grape jam. Apparently it was still edible, but not something that was ever done again.
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Yuck. That sounds awful.
Although... does vodka taste like anything, once you burn off the alcohol?
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My mom once made pumpkin soup and put sour cream in it. We were forced to eat all of it.
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I do that. Pumpkin soup, with a drizzle (or dollop, i guess) of sour cream on top to mix in is really nice. Not a disaster at all!.
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(It tasted like barf.)
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I'm sure I've already told the story about the time I cooked scrambled eggs in a glass casserole dish over the gas flame. We were scrubbing egg off the ceiling for days.
A couple of days ago my mum unwrapped the Christmas cake she made last month in order to ice it, and it was covered in an absolute carnival of moulds. There must have been four different strains on there, blue, green, yellow and white. We figure that she put too much orange juice in, so it soaked through the greaseproof paper and into the foil, which reacted with the acid to form some kind of mould-inducing compound. So this year it's a shop-bought cake.
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My mum once made a curry and for some reason poured a shitload of vinegar into it. To counteract this she then put in peanut butter. It looked, smelled and tasted like throw up but there wasn't anything else so we all had vomit for dinner.
Another time she misread the instructions on another recipe and put several tablespoons of cayenne pepper into another curry. It was impossible to eat without screaming.
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I forgot about my dinner once last month, remembered it when the smoke detectors went crazy. The house smelled like a fireplace for a week.
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I'm sure I've already told the story about the time I cooked scrambled eggs in a glass casserole dish over the gas flame. We were scrubbing egg off the ceiling for days.
Once my brother made hard boiled eggs, drained the water and set the pan, with the eggs, back on the burner, which he had not quite turned off, and left the house. There were pieces of egg behind things on the other side of the room. The whole kitchen had to be cleaned top to bottom. Man that would have been something to watch though.
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Yuck. That sounds awful.
Although... does vodka taste like anything, once you burn off the alcohol?
fact: alcohol doesn't actually "burn off" the way we think it does and in fact takes a long time to evaporate even below 50%!! so it probably tasted foul.
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Really! Oh wow. (http://www.ochef.com/165.htm) So all those times my mom promised us as kids that there wasn't any alcohol remaining in the stir-fry after she added white wine... actually in the 5-10 minutes of cooking, most of the alcohol probably remained. Interesting.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v321/NvrTooMuchPython/the_more_you_know.jpg)
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I was watching Julie and Julia last night and it occurs to me halfway through that Amy Adams looks just like lunchy:
(http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/julie_julia08.jpg)
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/still/00001762/julie_julia08.html
And then it occurred to me that her character in the movie basically is lunchy. I mean, it's a movie about a woman in her twenties in the city writing a blog about her adventures in cooking.
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Why were you watching this movie?
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oh hey have I ever mentioned that I'm engaged
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Unless she was the one who made you watch it, being engaged is not an excuse for suddenly growing a pussy and wanting to watch chick-flicks.
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It is her netflix account.
ADDITION: If she doesn't change her mind about seeing True Grit today I will be a little annoyed.
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Good cover. I think you've got away with it.
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I'd watch Julie and Julia. Amy Adams is hecka cute and Julia Child is fucking hilarious and wonderful and Streep is supposed to do the part justice.
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I was watching Julie and Julia last night and it occurs to me halfway through that Amy Adams looks just like lunchy:
Holy ass, did they ever ugly her up for The Fighter. Whyyyyy?
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My mother turned it on when I was home working on papers one weekend (maybe this past spring? maybe this autumn, not sure). It was boring. You people are weird.
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The first time I made a cake at my current house, I used one of Mum's recipies for a Chocolate Fudge cake (very good cake!). And I still don't know what I did wrong, but when I took it out of the oven, the outer crust was mostly burnt, and the inner cake was still molten. And it was hot enough to be bubbling. So then we had this charred brown thing sitting on the bench, with chunks of the crust rising and falling in rhythm while steam rose from the cracks. My housemate demanded to know why the cake had a heartbeat and why I was responsible for this demonic thing in our kitchen.
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My brother did that with a mud cake, where the top cooked right, but the rest of it was still liquid, so the top actually slid off the rest of the cake and the liquidy stuff overflowed the cake tin and into the oven. We have no idea how he did it, but I make my own birthday cakes after that.
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Usually happens when you don't line the tin with paper or use a too tall tin and then the top and sides cook and form a seal.
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I don't know what you mean by that, because I bake a whole bunch and I never use parchment, I butter and flour my pans. The problem, usually, with the outside burning before the inside is even cooked is one of two things: the pan you have used is smaller than the recipe suggests and therefore the time/temperature need to be adjusted, or the temperature in the oven is too high.
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I think it was a combination of both of those things. Either way I've cooked cakes since, just been much more careful, and it's not happened again. Which is a relief, because y'know, cakes should not have a pulse. It's just not good.