I realize that this should be in the MPSIMS: November 1999 section BUT since it is a milestone in my life and that I’ve just passed the 1000th post mark, <hands on hip>I’m entitled.
After years of being a total retard in the kitchen and botching meal after meal. All edible, but the taste is very bland.I have a habit of leaving out ingredients (which I’m told, is bad.) It has been asked of me for the second Thanksgiving in a row to bring to my sister in laws
( Martha Stewart wanna be) party (get this) A
bag of potato chips.
Now, I call my mother ( who can cook for 30 people as easy as pie) to just gloat over this fact because my Mother just cannot beleive she raised such a nincompoop in the kitchen. She analyzed me (now you know where I get this annoying trait from)saying that *I must be very disapppointed and hurt * by this. Is she nuts, in a couple of years, and by smushing the chip bag on route to Her Highnesses house, I figure I’ll be demoted to “Just bring paper plates” .
It’s all a part of my master plan.
Of course, to celebrate this milestone, I decided to bake Toll House cookies. True to my domestic impairement, they tasted funny. A little bland. Like baked cardboard with chocolate in them. I forgot to add regular sugar. (Heh) I think I will take these with me to the Thanksgiving day dinner for dessert. HAH.
Buhahhhahhhahhhahahahaha
(More and more, I’m starting to feel like Wally from Dilbert.)
Actually, this brought back nostalgic memories. My mom was a nurse and a nutrition nut, well before it was mainstream. She used to make us sugar cookies, but without the sugar in the dough. They were sweetened only by the colored sugar she sprinkled on the top. We loved them, didn’t know any better. The sad thing is, that even to this very day, regular deserts always taste sickeningly sweet to me, at least for the first mouthful.
I often surprise people by being almost competent when it comes to cooking. Not that I’ve ever baked anything, and it’s mostly just heating up anyway, but I’m still better at it than my Mother.
Shame I really don’t enjoy it, and don’t eat proper food most of the time anyway.
I would like to say that the recipe called for BROWN SUGAR, which I had. And the other regular stuff. Which I had too, and forgot. Hubby, (who after a 36 hour work day and he’s not a doctor) came home and ate the swill I gave him for dinner. ( s’getti) ate one of the cookies and declared it good. Apparently his taste buds have started to die off.
Within a few years I suspect I will be able to puree cardboard and bake it and he wouldn’t be able to tell if it was my meatloaf or not.
Lemme parlay an actual phone conversation with me, the newly wed and just discovering the room called kitchen and my mom, who has never been out of the kitchen. FYI, I also live a 15-20 min. drive from a store, so just running out to pick something up is a pain and we didn’t have any neighbors ( other than phsyco’s) at the time.
“Mom, I’m making meatloaf and I just realized I don’t have any bread for bread crumbs. What can I use as a substitute.”
“You could use crushed saltines.”
“Ummmm, No saltines. How about graham crackers.”
(Very audible groan and the sound of her biting her tongue)" Run out to the store and by some crackers."
“No way, I’m already in my slob clothes and it’s pouring outside…Hey! I got it…how about Grape Nuts? Can I use that?”
“Oh DEAR GOD…” (Begin parental lecture…)
(My brother, the former professional chef, called after my mother hung up in total frustration and asked me to name everything in the pantry…after a listing to my pathetic stock of nothing, said for me to make hamburger. Now THAT I could handle, except I had no buns and, of course, no bread…)
If anyone ever accepts an invite to my house, it is advisable to bring a dish to pass.
Oh, man oh man oh man…this is painful. Just wait till Chef Troy sees this thread.
Shirley, may I recommend “Cooking for Dummies”? Not because I’m belittling you, but because I own it myself and think it’s a good beginner’s book to the theory of Making Stuff Taste Good.
Heh…wanna hear incompetent? It happened in foods class in high school. We were making pie. The group next to me was assigned blueberry pie. When they presented theirs for the class to eat, it looked weird. There was no blueberry filling, only a purple dough-y thingie.
The teacher asked them what they did and they had no clue. So she went thru the instructions with them, step by step and asked them to describe how they did each step. It turned out that the directions said to mix the ingredients for the blueberry filling in the crust and they read it to mean that they should mix the filling and the crust together, not mix the filling while it was in the crust instead of mixing it in a bowl.
And you know, it tasted kind of good.
I, on the other hand, LOVE cooking. The only thing that prevents me from doing it more often is the clean up. I despise cleaning a kitchen and doing the dishes. So the rule is if you don’t cook the meal you clean up. I live for Thanksgiving. I volunteer to cook the meal every year. This year I’m cheating and ordering 2 pies from the Schwan man (shame on me!).
MaryAnn
The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.
It may interest you all to know that I was once like S. Ujest. I did not have a child-prodigy skill at cooking. In fact, when I got my first apartment and was faced with the need to fix dinner, I had the same thing every night for over a week: grilled cheese-and-salami sandwiches.
So Shirl, there’s hope for you. But you have to want to change. If you do, I’m here for you. Just stand up and say, “Hi. I’m Shirley, and I’m a sucky cook.”
*chorus of people saying, “HI, SHIRLEY!”
come by my cooking tips forum and start hanging out. Here’s the URL: bbs.bianca.com/mforums/c/cheftroy
We’ll start you off slow – toast or something – and work our way up to, say, meat loaf.
Hey Shirley, forgetting sugar, not too bad, at least your cookies were marginally edible. With my first attempt to bake a cake a few years ago - and we’re talking box mix here - I accidentally transposed two ingrediants. As originally stated, the recipe wanted a cup of water and a tablespoon of vinegar…guess what I did. Although I have to say the look on my brother’s face after that first bite was priceless…
Hey Shirley,
I learned how to cook when I was 4 years old. I learned how to make speghetti (I never spell it right) and tomato sauce. (Yes, with spices) I know now that the mhisketti was over cooked, but my mother ate it. She also had to drain the water, but overall, it wasn’t too bad. I played with spices for several years after that, learned to bake cookies, bread, and some other confections (in addition to several main courses) and now I can eat good meals whenever I want. However, I laughed really hard when you said graham crackers instead…hehehe
OH, so you don’t feel completely alone, My youngest sister (18 now) has a complete inneptitude for cooking. She even ruined Jello. Yes, you heard right, Jello. How you ask? She boiled milk instead of water and then approximated the directions the rest of the way through. It set up in the refridgerator but of course it was opaque. YUCK! She didn’t want to eat it, but got my mother to try it with her eyes closed. Stupid mistake. We still tease my sister about that one. Her and her best friend (incidently also a horrid cook)also ruined tacos (using the packet of seasoning) becuase they did not add the requisite water. It turned out burned (of course) and crunchy. Also during that same time period, they were trying to bake box cakes by broiling them rather than baking them. You guessed it, charcoal on the outside and batter on the inside.
HUGS!
Sqrl
Gasoline: As an accompaniement to cereal it made a refreshing change. Glen Baxter
This is the first time a post has every made tears well in my eyes. “Purple dough-y thingie.” Oh God, I can’t see.
My mom once made blueberry muffins, only she put powdered soap instead of baking powder in them (My sister took powdered soap to Girl scout camp in a calmut container).
Shirley, you know you’ve discovered one of the more important husband secrets: Do something poorly enough, and you won’t have to do it again. Think about the average husband’s cloths washing ability. When you met him were his outfits presentable? I bet so.
Mr Thin Skin: Shirley, you know you’ve discovered one of the more important husband secrets: Do something poorly enough, and you won’t have to do it again. Think about the average husband’s cloths washing ability. When you met him were his outfits presentable? I bet so.
Not true in my case. Before my first married Thanksgiving, my wife’s store was having a pot luck lunch for the holiday. I was invited, as I worked nearby.
The night before we were preparing a couple of dishes to bring. I was making the mashed potatoes, and was only to the peeling stage. I was using a brand new, super sharp OXO brand peeler and small potatoes. Well, I put my hand around the tater too much, and oops! I took a slice off of my left index finger!
The bleeding wouldn’t stop on its own, so my wife had to take idjit me to Kaiser to get patched up.
When we got home, I went to bed (blood loss :)). My wife picked up the peeler to finish the potatoes. She notice some peel stuck to the peeler, but upon closer examination realized that it was the missing slice of my finger!
Well, for about a month she didn’t ask me to do anything in the kitchen. That only lasted about a month. After 3 years, I’d say I do about half of the cooking.
I have been cooking since three or four years old. My mother thought it a good a idea to do this, she supervised early on. By about ten I was making dinners for the family. I wanted to, I hated my mother’s cooking.
My one sister on the other hand finds it great effort to cut premade cookie dough and bake it.
The first time she cooked pizza for everybody, I could smell burning paper. She put the frozen pizza and the cardboard into the oven.
I’m only your wildest fear, from the corners of your darkest thoughts.
Hey shirl…I gotta share this one with ya… I was making a lemonbread recipe and it called for the zest of the lemon rind… well I thought that meant the whole lemon rind and I ground it all up in the blender and added it to the batter. I brought the bread to a Christmas party and it was all prettily sliced and placed on a platter. I was so proud of my addition to the table, (it was my first attempt at baking anything from scratch) until people started to eat it. The whole group was sputtering and spitting out the bread muttering things like "OMG! …wtf did you do to make this so bitter? " and other not so nice comments. To this day… the only thing I am asked to bring to their parties is a date!
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good
things.” --Edgar Degas
When I was still a kid my grandmother read somewhere that sugar was bad for you, so she stopped using sugar in the pies she baked for us. Rhubarb pies.
Shirley, after six years of burning water and starting grease fires, my husband has banned me from cooking anything in the kitchen. I’m 29 years old and I have botched up macaroni and cheese. My idea of cooking a pizza is to stick it in the microwave (the box says that microwave preparation is not recommended, but since when do I read directions). I got ambitious one time and made Swedish meatballs. The entire family ended up in the emergency room with food poisoning. I almost burned down our patio trying to bbq chicken. Luckily for us, my husband is a good cook. Otherwise we would have all starved years ago.
However, I laughed really hard when you said graham crackers instead…hehehe