This tweet came through my stream yesterday from Hollee (one of my favorite people), after I had put on Facebook that I had spent hours baking my favorite Homemade Granola that I’ve made a kajillion times only to have the recipe go awry somehow.
I tasted the granola, that I was going to gift to the Teachers at Princess’ school for Teacher Appreciation week, and it was awful — it had a sort of plastic-y taste.
Frustrated and disappointed were just the tip of the emotional ice-burg.
Her tweet got me thinking though, do y’all really think that everything I make always comes out perfectly and deliciously?
That thought sent me (and still does) into gales of much needed laughter.
Oh y’all — I am so far from the perfect cook — I’ll get so excited about a new recipe and spend time creating it and cooking it only to taste it and think– “Well, damn. That’s about 10 shades of wrong”
There are nights where Nathan gets all excited about a new dish that I’m making because of the smells or the way I’ve been hyping it up only to end up with a Supreme pizza from Pizza Hut instead.
Hollee got me thinking — would y’all like me to share these blunders and then possibly, if I figure out what I did wrong, how I fixed it?
Would y’all be willing to share YOUR kitchen damns?
I’d love to hear about them and we’ll probably all be better and more confident for seeing that others aren’t all June Cleaver-Martha-Betty Crocker all the time, too.
So — Get Ready — Get Set —-
Go — Share your Kitchen Damns in the comments, please.
Who knows what solutions we might find amidst the commiseration and the laughter.
I love this because for as much as I love to cook, I have had plenty of bad results. I just posted about it recently: http://www.shellywildman.net/2011/04/fabulous-friday-food-from-great-to.html
Shelly, I’m so glad you shared that!
I had one last night and it wasn’t the first time. We love rice, should have had stir fried veggies & rice last night for dinner. I forgot you have to ACTUALLY TURN THE RICE COOKER ON to have rice for dinner.
OOPS! I’ve done that with my crockpot before, such an annoyance! 🙂
I don’t know, I always think it’s refreshing to know that there are other people around that are just like me. I’m guilty of kitchen blunders myself, but I’d rather share the good than bad. Just last night, I was making bread {something I’ve ton for years}, and I let the bread raise too long the second time, so when I touched the bread to put it in the oven, the bread sunk. Although it tastes good still, it’s pretty ugly {it would not win a ribbon at the State Fair}.
I think it would be nice to see if you did happen to have something not turn out the first time, what you did to fix it.
Thanks for weighing in JeNae 🙂
I didn’t know that bread could rise for too long — see, I learned something!
In the winter I tried to make these mushrooms from the Pioneer Woman site: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2010/09/burgundy-mushrooms/
They take NINE HOURS to cook and the smell was absolute heaven. The smell of the mushrooms and especially the wine… to die for. I was starved by the time I sat down to eat… only to dissolve in a massive mouth pucker from the salt content! Turns out the bouillon I used was WAY too salty. The entire dish was ruined, but it still smelled so good! I have yet to make them again, but will try with a homemade broth that won’t overwhelm the dish with salt.
I also made chocolate chip cookies once using salt instead of sugar. I always buy salt in a box, but just this once had bought bulk salt to make homemade playdough. I forgot I had salt in a bag and just assumed it was sugar. Again– the cookies smelled so good and I hustled the kids off on an errand trip with the promise of cookies in the car. OOPS. They still talk about “Mommy’s really bad cookies”.
I’m so impressed that you made something for NINE HOURS {faints}
Ugh — Salt is one of my nemeses.
I would love to hear more about your kitchen blunders. Not because I take delight in your misery, but because I’d love to know how you fixed it the next time around. 🙂
Sure 😉 It’s totally so you can delight in my blunders 😉 LOL
I think I may have to start doing that.
I was improvising a turkey stuffing casserole one night with just the things I had on hand (you know, the night you have needed to go to the grocery store for over a week and just haven’t made it yet). Anyway, I used a chicken bouillon cube to give it a little flavor and when my husband took his first bite of casserole he bit into the bouillon cube that HAD NOT dissolved! Humiliation! He won’t let me forget it 🙂 He says I have never made a bad meal, just a bad bite!
“He says I have never made a bad meal, just a bad bite!”
LOL — love it.
I made muffins once and there was a clump of baking powder in them… YUCK
My biggest blunder is one that really impressed my son, and he just loves to enlighten random strangers about it. It was a few years ago, and I was baking some Halloween cookies; the kind that come pre-made with designs in the middle of them. I was making several batches, because I was having a meeting at my house the next night, so I used parchment paper on my cookie sheets.
When I went to take one of the cookie sheets out of the oven, a cookie slid off onto the element, and caught on fire. The whole mess shorted out my oven, which wouldn’t turn off, and the flames were getting bigger, so we called the fire department to make sure the wiring in the wall was okay. I called the non-emergency number, but sure enough, they showed up with sirens blaring. My son was upstairs in the bathtub, and my husband turned off the breaker to the stove, leaving my son in the dark, and screaming for us. It was so embarrassing, and then I was out of a stove/oven for two weeks while we waited to have it repaired.
Yowza. I’m glad y’all were all okay! I can’t believe it completely shorted out the element! YIKES.
I’m so disappointed….I thought u were perfect!
Xoxoxoxo
Some days my biggest kitchen blunder is simply just walking into it! My most recent one was a few months ago at Christmas. I decided to bake a chocolate cake from a web site I follow (not yours) and baked it no problem, tested it for doneness, cake tester came out clean. I froze it when still warm and later took it out and frosted it. It looked wonderful…until we cut into it and served the slices. It looked like a big wet brownie on the inside and actually tasted like a bad mousse. I don’t to this day, know what went wrong and honestly, I’m afraid to try the recipe again. Good thing I had lots of Christmas cookies and squares around for our dessert.
I make a lot of blunders on a regular basis but the most famous one is known throughout my family. When I was a teenager my mom would have me regularly help with dinner. One day she called and asked me to make some mac and cheese and then brown some hamburger meat and add it to the mac and cheese. Sounds easy. Except she never said drain the hamburger meat so I poured the meat, grease, and all into the mac and cheese. When we sat down to eat my dad spooned it up and grease was dripping, it was disgusting. He put it on his plate, blotted it with a napkin and tried to eat it.
We ended up at Burger King.
{{shudders}}
I can just imagine — I’ve done that before, too!
Bad results are part of experimenting. We learn and got better because of it. Just keep on sharing your recipe and keep it up!
That would be a very interesting series to run, even if only as a monthly. I’m certain everyone that has ever cooked on a regular basis has some kitchen blunder stories to tell
I still get made fun of for the ONE time I made crunchy rice, and I pretty much never make rice for fear that I will repeat the offense
Rice seems to be a really big hurdle for so many. Crunchy rice – ew 😉 Did you take the lid off while it was cooking? Not enough liquid? ??
I once made a Rachel Ray pasta dish- gorgonzola cheese & spinach with chicken- and I kid you not: it smelled like the elephant exhibit at the zoo. We called it Elephant Poop Casserole.
We had Chickfila for dinner that night. heh
(In my defense, I don’t think it was really anything I did WRONG. It was just… a gross combination. Or something.)
{snort}
Wow — Did you have to air your house out while you went to Chik Fil A?
LOL no, I called the husband on his way home from work and said PLEASE BRING SOMETHING EDIBLE HOME WITH YOU. It wasn’t too bad until you got up close to it. I actually sat down with a plate of it (he was working late) and before I got the bite in my mouth I was all… WHOA. THIS STINKS. And of course I saved it for him to smell when he got home because WHY NOT?? hah
I like to occasionally post pics of fun things that I cook on FB and all my friends are like you should do a food blog, all your food looks SO good, they don’t see what my husband does though! :0) My latest and to me worst yet blunder in the kitchen was pure forgetfulness. I am one of those (seemingly) rare unfortunates that still use an electric stove, always have, don’t really like or know how to cook on gas. I was making homemade pizza dough at the last minute for dinner b/c my brillant thought of using store bought turned into a nightmare. Get everything mixed up sit it in a greased bowl off to the side in a “nice warm spot” on the back eye of my stove to rise. Thinking that I will cut some time by having the oven preheating while the dough is doing it’s thing I set the oven to the specified 425 degrees. An hour later (at 9:00 at night) I check my dough and see that it hasn’t risen like it is supposed to, then realize that it has been “resting” on the eye that is the VENT to the oven, so bottom of the bowl, dough is burnt, middle semi cooked, top completely raw. We had grilled cheeses for dinner!