(Update: Some great goofs coming in. I've decided I can't decide on a winner, so I'll be putting up a Poll. Look for that soon!)
I'm working on a blog post about how to recover from cooking goofs, just in time for the Christmas season. In the meantime, I'm going to run this blog's first ever contest!
Submit to me your worst cooking frack-up in the "Comments" section of this blog post. The person whose story I like best will get a dozen sugar cookies, from yours truly, mailed to their home! You have until the end of 2007 to comment. Multiple embar...entries encouraged.
I won't spare myself any embarrassment here. I'll share some of my worst cooking disasters, too.
* Served an inedibly tart apple cobbler at a dinner party.
* Dropped a creme brulee as I was taking it out of its water bath and putting it onto a cooling rack. Hot, liquid custard shrapnel splattered all over my wall and my couch.
* Accidentally made gummy, gross dumplings in a soup when I tried to thicken it by sprinkling flour directly into the soup as it was boiling.
* I burned two cups of onions to my favorite (and at the time brand new) saucier pan. We're talking near chemical adhesion. Better than teflon. It took two weeks of hot water and soap boilings over the stove, plus regular vinegar and baking soda scrubbings to get the pot back in working order.
*Put a whole 4 ounce can of chipotles in adobo in a chili I was making. It was so hot it was inedible. No amount of sour cream or cheese could tame the fire.
* Another kitchen shrapnel story. Chestnuts exploded when I tried roasting them in the oven. You're supposed to carve a big "X" into the skin so this doesn't happen, but apparently my "X" wasn't deep enough.
* Yet another kitchen shrapnel story. Spewed hot blueberry soup all over my mother-in-law's kitchen and my hand because a. the lid wasn't on the blender tight enough and b. hot liquids tend to expand when you puree them (the steam is still escaping).
Good luck!
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4 comments:
Hmmm...
*Once over a Christmas service period I was so tired that I misjudged the level in the deep fryer and stuck my whole hand in while I was trying to fish(haha) out a fillet of battered fish.
*I used a super hot chilli oil in a Tom Yum soup making it hot to the point of inedible.
*Lifted a kettle over the stove top and accidentally tipped about 30ml of water into a pot of oil I was about to cook chips in. The pot promptly exploded, the entire kitchen was coated, and I was covered in hundreds of tiny burn splatters.
*I have several iron pans that I can just take off the stove and stick in the oven when I need to. I once got so flustered that I grabbed one out of the oven with my bare hands and got it about a foot away before I realised it was burning into my hand. Had a strange moment where I got burned even worse (because I didn't want to drop it and lose the stuffed chicken breast I was cooking) and eventually screamed and plastered it over the floor.
Oh, my. Those will be hard to top.
I am starting to form a hypothesis that the worst cooking disaster stories are from people who like to cook and who are good cooks.
My thought on mechanism is that people who like to cook and are good cooks do a lot of cooking. Therefore, they have more opportunities to make mistakes.
People who do not cook so much don't have the opportunity to have such spectacular failures.
Thanks for sharing, and I hope you regain feeling in your hands sometime soon..
Yeah...I definitely can't top any of those, but I want to play too so.....
Over the weekend I made popcorn...which went fine, but I melted too much butter and when I poured it on, it literally melted the popcorn...and all I had was salty greasy mush.....
:-D
-Reg
ok, ok, I've got another one.
Back in high school I was co-responsible for a fire in foods class. The teacher who had been there for at least 20 years, but probably more, said that it was the first fire she'd ever had in class.
We were making pancakes....
But it totally wasn't our fault, there was all kinds of crud under the burner that hadn't been cleaned for...possibly 20 years...
The next day, I was co-responsible for the second fire that she'd ever had in the classroom.....
:-D
--Reggie
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