We haven’t been shopping for a while, and our fridge is a little low on food, but I noticed while trawling through the freezer the other day, a leg of lamb I’d forgotten I had. Great, I thought. Thursday and friday dinner sorted.
So I bundled it into a tray for defrosting, and this afternoon started roasting. I poked it a few times, added some taters, did a little basting…
With all that poking about, it wasn’t till it came time to actually carve the thing that I actually looked at it, and thought… that’s a funny-looking leg of lamb.
This would be because it wasn’t actually a leg of lamb. It was a corned beef.
:eek::smack:
Fortunately, I had chosen to do a slow roast, which on a leg of lamb makes the meat succulent tender and juicy and, as it turns out, on a corned beef makes it turn out…edible. If still rather salty. I have no idea how one would eat a corned beef which had been roasted at an ordinary temperature, but I suspect hacksaws would have to be involved.
Anyone else have a Cooking Blonde Moment recently?
Not me, but back in the 70s people from my company would go to Nilo Farms, a hunting preserve owned by Olin Chemicals, a popular thing was the duck hunting. One of my friends had shot ducks, and was given them wrapped in freezer paper and flash frozen.
Flash forward to a couple months later, cold nasty winter. In the mood for something comfortable, he decided to cook up the duck in a crock pot [don’t ask me, I’m not a guy and I make no attempt to interpret what goes on in their minds when they aren’t thinking about sex:p]
Being clueless, he just unwrapped it, plopped it in the crock pot with a couple onions and random veggies, some wine and turned it on and left for the afternoon.
He never bothered to see if it had been drawn [innards removed] before freezing.
At least it had been plucked so his dogs had a nice dinner :smack:
In my high school class on Bachelor Cooking, I learned that baking powder and baking soda aren’t interchangeable. We used the “biscuits” as hockey pucks.
Oh! I get to tell what my daughter did last night!
She’s seventeen and doesn’t have much kitchen experience, but I needed some help, so I handed her a very simple chili recipe and asked her to put all the ingredients in the crockpot for tomorrow. I also gave her my Vidalia Chop Wizard. For those who don’t know, it’s one of those gadgets sold on TV. You put a small piece of veggie in this thing, close the lid, and it forces the veggie through some blades that dice it up nice and easy. I usually chop things properly with a knife and cutting board, but the Wizard is a nice shortcut. Or so I thought.
The child called me for help just a few minutes later… she had put an entire onion with the skin on into the gadget and forced it about halfway through. It was good and stuck! I was actually impressed she got it so far in there, but the thought that she didn’t know onions need to be peeled really slew me.
My ex had a bag of beige round discs in his freezer. “Ooh! Scallops!” says he, and he sets them out to thaw, then into a sautee pan they go.
Once these things started to disintegrate, he took a taste and discovered that he was actually making seared mashed potatos. Tasted a bit odd with the white wine and lemon juice, but they were at least edible.
Way back in college . . . I was renting the ground floor of a small house, and one day I decided to make chicken soup. I cut up a whole chicken and put it in a large pot along with the appropriate veggies and water. I then put the pot on the stove, over a large flame.
Since I had been up the previous night, I decided to take a brief nap.
Several hours later, I awoke to a house full of dense smoke, and a fireman breaking down the kitchen door.
When I first started dating Barracuda she invited me over for dinner. She proudly showed me her newest experiment: onion stuffed tomatoes.
“Hmm. Where did you get the recipe?”
“In this magazine. See? Onions stuffed with tomatoes and grilled.”
“Ummm. I think it calls for tomatoes stuffed with chopped onions, not the other way around.”
“Do you think so? I have to admit they do look a little strange…tell me; did I screw up as badly as it looks?”
“How about we go out and get a pizza?”
“I’ll get my jacket.”
And the incident passed into the folklore of our marriage.
We had a friend that managed to screw up instant mandu (dumplings). We were hungry after a day of snowboarding and she volunteered to cook them (ie drop them in boiling water and leave for a few minutes, then serve).
She managed to dump two whole packages in one small pot and boil all the water off. We were hungry enough to eat it, but I honestly don’t know what she was thinking.
A while ago I was wandering around the outdoor produce market at night and I saw something that is a rarity- beautiful white button mushrooms. So I picked up a bagful. I got everything all prepared to make a nice mushroom masala, but then it came time to put in the mushrooms…
I was once having dinner with a friend and his wife. They hadn’t been married long, and she was just learning how to cook. We sat down at the table, and she served us bowls of what looked like slightly discolored water. My friend and I looked at each other, and we both tried a spoonful. It was basically warm water with a slightly off taste.
A voice came from the kitchen: “How do you like the chicken soup?” We both looked at each other again, and my friend asked “Where did you get the recipe?” Emerging from the kitchen she replied, “I think I saw it in an old Laurel & Hardy movie. They held a whole chicken by its drumsticks and poured hot water through it, into a bowl. How does it taste?”
I’ve never really been a fan of stuff like potato chips or Doritos so my go-to savory snack is a half-assed version of Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits ™: A cup of Bisquick, a cup of shredded cheddar, a bunch of powdered chili-like substance (varies depending on what’s on my shelf), some garlic powder, and enough milk to make everything biscuit-y.
One night I was out of a powdered chili-like substance which, coincidentally, was the same evening I learned that liquid hot sauce kills leaveners and makes bricks.
My sister tried making ribs once. She preheated the oven, then put the ribs in along with the plastic tray and the saran wrap. That smell never left the oven.
I had these beautiful leeks. And I had the picture in my mind of a gorgeous little leek tart: puffy pastry, some sort of aged cheese, a certain amount of creamy quiche filling around the perfectly caramelized leeks. I have the skillz to pull this off, but for some reason, I had an urge to go recipe hunting on the internet.
Where I was seduced by a recipe for a medieval leek pie. Because it was medieval. Even though it used basically a thick pizza dough for the shell, did not caramelize or in any way cook the leeks before they went in the pie, and had an egg filling that featured absolutely no cheese or other flavourful substance at all. But it was medieval! Oh, the romance!
We didn’t even taste it. It just looked and smelled miserable, and I had known the entire time I was prepping it that the recipe minimized the chance of savoury goodness. It went out, pizza came in.
When I was 14, I took it into my head to make fudge. I’d never made it before, never eaten it, had never really even seen it. So I went grocery shopping with my dad. Turns out, Dad didn’t know much about making fudge either. He thought sweetened, condensed milk was the same as evaporated milk.
The fudge I made was like crunchy, chocolatey asphalt. To this day, my younger brother will ask if I’m ever going to make “boo-boo fudge” again. The answer is no.
I have told this story on the board before, but worth repeating.
When I was living in Berlin, my SO’s aunt was married to an American GI. She didn’t speak much English, but was able to shop at the local PX.
One night, for dinner, she made the potatoes and green beans and then opened that wonderful can of deep fried chicken - hey, there was the picture on the label!
Unfortunately for her, it was not a can of beautifully fried chicken - it was a can of Crisco (you know, the one with the PICTURE of the beautifully fried chicken).
She actually stuck her hand in that large can of Crisco, trying to find the damned chicken.
Her husband found this terribly amusing, but her hungry kids didn’t laugh as much.
I tried making REAL chocolate milk by melting some chocolate and mixing it with milk once. I got the mug, threw some chocolate in it and put it in the microwave for a few minutes so it can melt before I add the milk. I pretty much burnt it and threw away a mug.
Several years ago I prevented a friend from making a dish with seven heads of garlic. The recipe called for seven cloves of garlic. I’m still amused that he would think that a relatively small recipe would call for that much garlic. I love garlic, but I have to wonder what that would have tasted like, or if it would have even been edible.
Oo, that could have worked if you oven-roasted the garlic first - cut off the tops to expose the cloves, drizzle with olive oil, roast until the cloves are mild and soft like butter. You can pretty much spread them on bread when they’re like that.