It must have been a variation that didn’t come straight from Ikea. It certainly had a lot more ingredients than this recipe.
Love the cartoon graphics, too!
Box mixes call for you to add oil. Scratch recipes usually use butter. Also, personally, I dislike the taste of artificial vanillin vs real vanilla, and the box mixes are pumped full of vanillin.
I once spent an hour cleaning squid (I needed the tubes) . When I was done, I weighed the discard, and it would have cost the same per pound if I’d just bought squid tubes.
A boxed cake mix will also quite likely have some dyes and preservatives that a scratch-made cake won’t.
I tried making ravioli from scratch a few times. That was a lot of work – prepare the filling, make the pasta dough, roll it out, cut it into squares, and then fold each individual ravioli around a dollop of filling by hand. The results were good but not amazing, and not really worth all the effort.
There is a product you can buy that turns cooking oil into some kind of rubber/plastic/I dunno what it is.
This is the one I used but there are others who make basically the same thing. It makes disposing of used oil a lot easier.
I made a French onion soup once that felt like it took the entire day to make, complete with a million tears from cutting onions, and didn’t taste any better than packet soup mix. Maybe a little worse.
I’ve made French onion soup from scratch. It did take a long time but most of that was easy…just go back to it every so often to keep things going. Slicing the onions takes a little time but it’s not that bad I don’t think (although I don’t suffer from cutting onions for some reason).
So yeah, you can’t go too far and have to check but otherwise it’s pretty easy.
Personally, I think my soup was better than most but my crouton (or whatever you call it) wasn’t great (store bought).
Lemme guess: even though they weren’t frosted, they still imparted sweetness to it? Wasn’t that it’s hard to imagine what was that bad?
I don’t know if I’d have called it sweetness, but it was definitely odd. A side of corn would have been fine. But my choice was a disaster.
I have made Raviolo al uovo (ravioli with egg yolk) a few times. Daunting but delicious is how I’d describe it. When I make it for company I serve two ravioli on a small plate as an appetizer for each person. Have to have a great main course though.
I don’t think you can buy it in a store, which is why I decided to give it a try initially. It’s a great dish to make for company. When they slice into a ravioli and egg yolk oozes out there are ohhhs and awsss (I never reveal before dinner).
My French Onion Soup hack involves caramelizing the onions overnight in my sous vide.
Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon. Sooooo many unnecessary steps and used up every single pot, pan and measuring utensil in the house and it took a day and a half to make. All for some beef stew. It was pretty good beef stew but for sure not worth all that extra work.
One example that stuck with me-- she calls for braising onions separately. . And then you add them-- to a pot of beef stew where the beef has been braised. With onions.
Heh. When my gf makes a complicated dish I know I’ll be busy after dinner cleaning up and doing dishes. When I make a complicated dish I was pots/pans/utensils as I’m working and I can relax after dinner.
I, too, wash as I go. But you can’t with this recipe. Believe me, I tried.
Fun thread.
As a foodie and a control freak, I have made lots of things in my life that don’t normally get made at home in a never-ending quest to eat things I love exactly the way I particularly want every tiny aspect to be.
Some became regular parts of my repertoire, such as Butter Pecan ice cream. Mine is so bursting with buttery, toasty sweet pecans you almost can’t see the ice cream. But you can absolutely taste it in its creamy goodness. Another that took me years to achieve but was and remains entirely worth the many, many attempts it took to get there is carnitas (the secret turns out to be so very simple I still marvel at how long it took to learn.) My granola is a wondrous thing of pure beauty and deliciousness that I don’t make these days simply because it’s insanely expensive.
Others remain elusive, but usually tasty in the ongoing attempts, like tamales, corn tortillas (astonishingly difficult… too thick, too thin and hard, dry and cracked…maddening.) honeywheat doughnuts…
And then there the ones that you asked for. Three spring immediately to mind:
1. Pastrami:from raw brisket forward it took a few weeks, I think. It was good, though a little strong, but a lot of waiting and fussing and hassle was never going to be worth it when I live in Los Angeles and really great pastrami is easily had. It was more about seeing what was involved and whether I could pull it off at all than my ideal pastrami being so radically different.
2. Gâteau St-Honoré:
I did it, it was a lush dream of a pastry, and the reason I’ll never do it again speaks for itself, yes?
3. Hong Kong egg tarts: You dim sum lovers know the ones I mean. The pastry is unique and it took me a long time to find the recipe for the real deal, no shortcuts, no substitutions. Otherwise, what would be the point? I nailed them, but it was not easy.
Now that I’ve actually done it and I know what’s involved, I don’t know if it’s fair to say I’ll never do it again. With the right equipment in the right kitchen, making it easy? I probably will, they’re too good not to.
My Holy Grail is the most commonplace food imaginable, which is also the most popular not only in this country, but the world as I have read, and I wanna make it at home exactly the way I love it. Of course I’m talking about pizza. I always believed this was beyond my reach because it would involve an insanely costly pizza oven, but as I understand it, the cheap ones that are now available (some less than $150!) really do achieve the exceptionally high temperatures that are needed to make proper pizza properly. An edible bucket list item, for sure.
I would have said this was worth the work at the time. But I have not made it for five years…
I have a few contributions to this thread. The first is Eggs Benedict, especially with Hollandaise from scratch. Everything failed, including whatever mess I had going on for the poached eggs, which I had tried to do with the swirling water method and they did not cooperate. I can’t remember exactly what happened with the hollandaise itself, but it was nothing edible and caused a fantastic mess. Restaurant Eggs Benedict are for me!
The other example is “Sour Meat”, which I think is a domesticized form of German Sauerbraten, the recipe given to me by my boyfriend’s mother. Having never had German food, unless you count a schnitzel here or there (which is easy and worth it), I had three days of doubting myself that I had not just utterly ruined a hunk of meat. Add to that were these potato dumplings, the bigger round kind, for which I got a mix. Those were like boiling glue. I could not figure out when they were done, what they were supposed to taste like, or if they were meant to be flavorless and dense. The roast did end up being edible, maybe even good-ish, but I did not appreciate the dumplings or the stress of those weird sour flavors in the roast.
Good one. I’ve chased smoked corned beef over hills and dales, both stunning success and abject failure dot the scorecard.
I do something different: commercial cryo-cured CB, soaked a few days to draw out salt, smoked with heavy black pepper & coriander rub. I haven’t given up yet but it’s been a humbling cook for me. Inconsistent.
Most likely, you cooked the eggs. Probably happens to most people the first few times they make hollandaise. Poached eggs can also be tricky if you haven’t done them before. My most helpful tip is to run them through a strainer to get off the straggly bits, but then getting the actual poaching down still takes a little practice, whether you use the vortex method or not. Eggs Benedict is definitely not a dish I expect someone to make correctly right off the bat unless they have experience with emulsified sauces and poaching eggs.
Upthread, the idea of homemade French onion soup not tasting better than the powdered stuff out of a packet is utterly baffling to me. Someone done screwed up if that’s the case. 
I caramelize my onions over high heat, so the onion part takes 20-25 minutes, but requires constant attention and constant addition of water to keep it from burning. The “stick-the-onions-in-the-oven-for-hours” (or slow cooker or sous vide) is a much easier, hands-off method. I’m impatient, though.
This is one that I probably will at some point cook again, but not definitely. It was the most pain-in-the-ass dish for me. I don’t mind stuffing pierogi, ravioli, pot stickers, etc. But these tiny little Turkish mantī are just a complete pain in the ass. Each dough square to stuff is about the size of a thumb, or 2cm x 2cm, according to this recipe (I feel mine were slightly smaller, more like a fingertip.) It took forever to stuff all these little things, and there’s like dozens to a single serving. That said, holy crap was it one of the most delicious stuffed pastas I’ve ever had; the mouthfeel of those little dumplings was tremendous. Add the brown butter, yogurt sauce, and a little chili sauce for good measure, I’m in heaven.
It’s been about 15 years since I made them.
There’s a beach in Saint Martin with a tiny beach bar that serves Eggs Benedict, espresso, croissants, and mimosas (fresh squeezed oj and French champagne) for breakfast on the beach.
They accomplish this using a tank of propane for the grill and a generator for electricity for the espresso machine. The croissants are procured from a French bakery down the road in Marigot.
I once complimented the “chef” on the freshly made hollandaise, but he didn’t really understand because of course you need freshly prepared hollandaise for Eggs Benedict.