A Slight Delay

We’ve all bombed in the kitchen. If you haven’t yet, don’t worry, you will. Some of my favorite food writing of late has been other people’s kitchen mishaps; it’s not schadenfreude, so much as just being happy that I’m not the only one who’s screwed up a dish so badly it could only be identified by its dental records.

So let’s peek in on some foodie misfortunes, shall we?

Andrea Meyers (of Andrea’s Recipes) has posted My Top Ten Culinary Flops (So Far), which is essential reading if you’re feeling sorry for yourself or your cooking. Sample:

6. The sugar free pumpkin pie. Once again, I was pregnant and this time not feeling so well. But family was arriving the next day for Christmas, and I needed to get this pie done. In my fog of all day morning sickness, I forgot to add the sugar and baked the pie without any sweetener whatsoever. It was a very savory pumpkin pie that we ate with lots and lots of whipped cream.

Meanwhile, over at Man Eat Food, MF snatches a pyrrhic victory from the jaws of necessity with Marsala Massacre (here’s hoping he remembered the Five Second Rule), and suffers for his art with
Seared Tuna Steaks or: How I Learned to Stop Paying Attention and Burn My Hand.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, a few of my personal favorites:

1. Gravy. Enough said. I don’t think I’ve done a gravy correctly, ever. Or much of anything else that requires a roux, now that I think of it. At one end, there’s the underdone roux, which has turned a couple of my sauces into something akin to wallpaper paste. But I’m versatile, and I can also burn a mean roux. In my defense, I have to say the gravy was a lovely shade of brown. The taste was another thing altogether, though. Picture making shortbread cookies with an acetylene torch.

2. Fetuccine Alfredo. One thing I learned from my mother’s cooking was being willing to “wing it” from time to time. One thing I learned from winging Alfredo sauce (left out the eggs, tried doing it with a roux instead; see above) is that sometimes you’re better off paying attention to the recipe.

3. Aunt Olga’s Lemon Cake, circa 1992-93: There’s nothing wrong with Aunt Olga’s lemon cake. But don’t ask me how, or why, after I’d greased and floured the bundt pan the cake managed to come out in several large chunks. If it hadn’t been for someone’s birthday, I probably wouldn’t have minded so much.

Two honorable mentions:

4. Mashed potatoes: These mashed potatoes, made by a certain someone, have attained near-mythical status. The texture was a bit off, and yours truly made the mistake of telling that someone that they were lumpy, or gummy, or something. As a result, Someone and Dad had mashed potatoes I don’t know, every night or so for the next week, but I didn’t. It was a looooong time before I dared criticize Someone’s cooking again.

5. The winner, by far: Some places will flame drinks or desserts. My father once flamed TV dinners so thoroughly I thought we’d have to call the fire department. Loosely speaking, Dad’s logic was that if the instructions said to bake ‘em on a cookie sheet at 375 for 35 minutes, they’d be done much faster if you turned the heat up to 475. Oh, and the cookie sheet got left out altogether.

Now, maybe this could have worked in more skilled hands. I don’t know if anybody ever asked Jacques Pepin how he did his TV dinners. But when you forget that the stuff’s in the oven (after also having forgotten to turn on the oven timer) in the midst of a game of Rummy, you’re playing with fire. Literally. Once the smoke alarm alerts you to the fact that dinner is in flames served, you’re liable to come back to something that has more to do with Francis Bacon (circa Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X) than with Julia Child: incandescent chicken nestled among nuggets of charred corn, a brownie that looked like the aftermath of some late-50’s hydrogen bomb test, and stalactites of plastic hanging from the oven rack. If a kid decided to turn the bombing of Dresden into a diorama using only stuff found in the freezer, he could hardly have done better.

But hey, it’s early yet. I figure I’ve got plenty of time for several more disasters in the kitchen. I’ll keep you posted. Meantime, the menus for takeout are in the drawer under the microwave.

Tags: Food, kitchen mishaps, recipes, TV Dinners

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Food, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.