What really crappy food item have you made lately? Did you blame the stove, the pans, the recipe? I have a brand new stove and brand new bakeware, and the recipes came well recommended, so I think I have to take credit for my recent disasters all by myself.

Make me feel better; tell me about something you made that didn't quite work out.

-- Anonymous, January 31, 2001

Answers

Beth, I ruin pasta. I overcook pop tarts. I tried to make that Raspberry Fudge Cake on New Year's Eve, and came up with a Raspberry Fudge Brick.

We eat out a lot.

-- Anonymous, January 31, 2001

I'm usually a pretty decent cook (I'm going to come to your house Beth, beat Jeremy over the head, and cook in your new kitchen. Mark my words. And Doc and Mochi (yes Mochi) will love me because I drop stuff a lot.) but sometimes little things mess me up.

A couple weeks ago I was going to make french toast. I heated up the cast iron pan, added some oil, got everything ready, soaked the slice of bread, tossed it in and realised the pan was never properly washed after the curry I had made a couple days earlier.

Curry french toast is a bad thing.

So I tossed everything for that recipe (ok I didn't really toss it, I just threw the partially cooked toast in the rest of the egg mixture and set it on the floor. Guess what happened next.) and decided to make hash browns.

I whipped out the new food processor and shredded some potatoes. Tossed them in the mildly curried pan and went to work.

Except you really shouldn't make hash browns from uncooked potatoes. I ended up with a big, grey, gelatinous, starchy lump that was brown on the edges and raw in the middle. Completely disgusting.

I took a few bites, gave up and set that on the floor too. An hour later the toast bowl was empty, but the potato bowl remained full for at least half the day. Then the dog got desperate.

Bleh.

Though it proves that roving bands of animals are an asset when one has kitchen disasters.

-- Anonymous, January 31, 2001

Oh, they are, indeed. I made yucky soup for lunch today (actually I just heated it up, and it wasn't my fault it was yucky, because it came that way out of the can), but the dogs enjoyed it poured over their kibble. Plus Mochi got soup on her nose and Doc had to lick it off for her, so we got cuteness on top of kitchen cleanliness.

I don't give them stuff while I'm cooking or after we eat, but if things aren't too spicy or fatty, I sometimes save the scraps to put with their regular food.

-- Anonymous, January 31, 2001

My most classic disaster happened over lunch one day. I was a little disoriented -- work stress or something. So, I decided to bake a frozen pizza. I'm used to tearing open these plastic packages with my teeth, but recently I got braces so now I'm stuck using the scissors. So, I opened the pizza, put it in the oven and 10-15 minutes retrieved it from the oven.

When I went to slice the pizza with my gigantic pizza cutter, I noticed that part of it underneath was slightly undone and wouldn't slice. I rammed and rammed the cutter until I lifted up the pizza up to see I had left the scissors underneath! My Chicago Cutlery scissors were baked onto my pizza pan. I felt like such a knob! Nothing like a little melted plastic with your pizza.

-- Anonymous, January 31, 2001

This should make you feel better, Beth. Consistently, every third or fourth batch of bread I make using the bread machine comes out as something resembling a squashed, shrunken loaf of mutant bread. I can usually do well in the kitchen but apparently putting a series of liquid and dry ingredients into the damn thing is beyond me. It nevr happens to my wife, just me.

Another thing that I seem to have a lot of trouble with is pie crust. In four years of attempting to make pies I've managed to roll out exactly one crust without swearing and walking away in frustration. When she manages to stop laughing, my wife then steps up to the counter and manages to roll it out perfectly in a single attempt. Ugh!

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

When we were first married, my husband and I were really poor, and I liked trying to find recipes in our cookbooks to use cheap food. I had a bunch of tuna that I'd bought on sale, and found a recipe for something called "herbed fish loaf." Today it sounds bad, but back then it didn't. It had delicately seasoned bread crumbs, eggs, and fish - and you could use tuna, so I thought it would be perfect.

Well, it was more like tuna brick. It was *terrible* - dry, hard, with lumps of leathery tuna and hard bread crumbs. My poor husband ate it without complaining, but he usually has seconds of everything and when I asked him if he wanted seconds, he was all, "No, thanks - really, I'm full...." So I sort of laughed and said, "Man, this really sucks, doesn't it?" And although he was trying not to hurt my feelings, he had to agree.

Tuna brick. That *still* comes up every so often in conversation as my most memorable disaster.

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

I have the BEST banana bread recipe. Low in sugar, barely any fat and moist and dense. Yumm! I'm making some tonight!

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

Hey, aren't you going to share, Renee? Share, share, share!

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

I have an ongoing incapability to make gravy. I don't know why, I've had my mother show me a zillion times. It's the only thing I really have a mental block against. Coming from the South, it's quite a handicap if you *gasp* can't make a decent gravy.

One time I ended up with gravy soup. Another time, a gravy ball. Just a big, brown, lump of dough. Sometimes I can get it close to a gravy-like consistency but no matter how much I mess with the flour and oil or water, I end up screwing it up.

My inability to make gravy is an ongoing thing and unfortunately for my boyfriend, something I persist in trying. It may be years before he has a decent breakfast of biscuits and gravy again. *sigh*

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

I just made my mother's hamburger stroganoff recipe for the first time the other night. (note: recipe is here if anyone is intersted)

It's very easy and very tasty. Unfortunately, our meat here is never measured in pounds so i just estimate when buying ground beef. The recipe calls for a cup of sour cream but i guess i didn't have enough beef for so much sour cream. It's not that it tasted bad per se, but it shouldn't taste that much like sour cream. And usually leftovers taste even better the next day because the spices have settled, but this just tasted bland by the next afternoon. Pooh. Next time i will put a half cup and add to taste from there.

But don't feel bad. I'm generally a very good cook but i am probably the world's lousiest baker. I think it may be our oven - it seems that the temperature is too high. But maybe it's just me. We're getting a new stove in a few months so we'll see what happens. My cookies come out like hockey pucks and the only thing i bake successfully is apple crisp and those pudding cakes from a box.

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

I'll post the recipe as soon as I get home....which will be in about 30 minutes.

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

1 and 1/2 c. flour 1 and 1/2 tsp. baking powder 1/4 tsp. baking soda 1/8 tsp. salt 3/4 c. sugar

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2 slightly beat egg whites 1/4 c. applesauce 1 c. mashed bananas ( i used about 1 and 1/4 cup)

Back in oven 350 degrees for 40 to 50 minutes. Check at 40 minutes and if the knife/toothpick/whatever comes out mostly clean, take it out.

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2001

While I AM a Domestic Goddess, I'm more of the "cleaning, decorating, and laundry wiz" type of Goddess. I pretty much stick to recipes on a lot of things (except desserts, since I have a knack for them... mostly because presentation is the key)... but there was a time when I DIDN'T know how to cook At.All. That little oversight didn't, however, stop me from improvising when I wanted to make my husband breakfast when I had just moved into my own apartment when we were dating. I was dead set on making him muffins, even though I didn't have the ingredients or even a mix for them. How hard could it be to modify a biscuit mix into yummy muffins, anyway? I added more milk, and since I didn't want for him to have to eat Biscuit flavored muffins, and had NOTHING to put in the mix besides powdered cocoa, I decided that the powdered cocoa would have to work. I mixed it all up and plopped it in the oven for whatever time I deamed necessary, and when I thought it had been long enough, I pulled them out of the oven. They LOOKED perfect. K got up and I presented them to him. He ate every one of them (I'm a picky eater, so I passed on them :)). Then he drank more glasses of milk than I thought humanly possible. He never once let on how horrible they were.... until I asked him what he really thought "because if you like them, I will make them for you all the time". He told me that he appreciated the effort, but that they were a "little dry... ok... they didn't taste really good". We laughed and laughed, and he drank a few glasses of water. I knew he loved me when he ate my gross muffins, and wasn't going to tell me that they were bad until faced with the realization that he would have to eat them over and over again if he didn't tell me that they were bad. It's my mom's fault, though... she told me that I didn't need Home Ec. or typing when I was in school. I taught myself how to type, and am still working on the cooking thing. There are not many disasters anymore, though... and my husband does a lot of the cooking. He is better at it, though... and enjoys it more. I say, stick to what you are good at. Me, I'll be the one arranging things on the platters, and cleaning up afterwards, thankyouverymuch.

-- Anonymous, February 02, 2001