Cream of carrot soup. I juiced two pounds of carrots, reserved the juice, and tried to cook the pulp in chicken stock and white wine to see if it would break down and become useful as an ingredient in the soup. It didn’t.
So I strained the pulp out, and added the carrot juice, and some heavy cream and fresh tarragon, salt and pepper. Then I added some roux to thicken. It didn’t setup the way I expected, but the flavor was very good, and the color was good. It still needs something though, something for texture.
I will keep trying. Maybe if I cooked the carrot pulp in a pressure cooker…
Yesterday was my husband’s B-day. I made him the cake he requested, which was peanut butter cake with peanut butter icing. It’s like chewing a blanket. Even the frosting is dry. What’s up with that?! Last four cakes I’ve made including strawberry for my son, mock Butterscotch Krimpet, and a Julia Child Orange Cake with Orange Frosting, have totally sucked. I give up for a while…On the other hand, the parmesan potatoes and blue cheese/chive cream sauce for the steak was to die for…
Roast beef and potatoes.
Season beef, put in oven, wait. I’m not sure how it could have gone so horribly wrong, and yet it did. It’s the worst thing I’ve made in memory.
The ugliest thing in recent memory was the crustless quiche that for some reason got stuck to the pan (I swear I greased the pan). The flavor was pretty good, just a total presentation fail.
I made flat, chewy, meringues the other week. I can’t quite call them a fail though as they had chocolate chips in and those people who liked them ate the lot
Probably my worst fail came about through oversubstitution. I was trying to make a vegetarian version of a bacon dish (not really a good idea, fake bacon makes nice sandwiches but their flavour doesn’t go as far as the real thing). It was an Italian “piquant” dish involving vinegar. I had that. I didn’t have the main vegetable so I substituted cauliflower. Finally I served half a dozen people with a vinegary cauliflower mess with flavourless strips of fake bacon floating in it. It has taken me about fifteen years to be able to speak of it again.
Looking at the recipe and some of the comments this is not your fail. I am a big crock-pot fan but not for veggie curry’s. The comments all say this is under seasoned. What jumps out at me is “fat free”. This is spices a small selection of veggies and water. Even the info on the link claims RDA of 1% of fat and 1% of salt. Both salt and fat are major components of flavor. To be clear I’m not saying to throw in a super fatty/salty hunk of ham. This recipe has fail written large all over it.
My first take is add some salt and use some coconut milk.
Don’t juice the carrots, cook them until tender in whatever liquid you’re using and then blend. It tastes like cream soup with no actual cream added. I add ginger and a little roasted butternut squash just to round out the taste.
My recent failure was soup related too. I make a cream of broccoli soup and always have some in the freezer. Instead of using chicken stock in the latest batch I decided I would use the water from cooking the broccoli. Apparently in the drain/reserve/measure step I completely lost count and used way too little liquid. On the plus side it’s working as condensed soup. I just add more water or milk when reheating and it’s edible again!
I know that’s how it is usually done, but I wanted to try something new. I was thinking if I made the soup with the pulp first, then add in the juice at the end, the carrot color and flavor would stay bright, rather than carrots that had been cooked until they were mush.
Did you at least try to make up for it (later) by cutting it with something else or increasing the recipe by half again? Stuff like this happens, but it’s not unsalvageable. (Unless you do what I did many years ago at a friend’s kitchen. While making pumpkin pie, I reached for a clear plastic container of salt instead of sugar. I realized what I had done as I poured about half of it in and realized the crystals didn’t quite look like sugar to me. Yeah, there’s no salvaging that unless I wanted to a hundred or so pumpkin pies.)
Wow, that really is a recipe fail. Quite often, when people complain about recipes, I find that it’s not the recipe’s fault. This is clearly a case of a bad recipe. You need oil; you need the spices to dissolve and get fragrant in the oil for a minute or so. (A lot of flavors are oil-soluble). Also, I would probably up the curry spices by a bit, but you can do that to your taste. And salt. And probably a paste of garlic and ginger. Where the heck is the salt in the recipe?
I tried to make Maple Cream/Maple Butter a few days ago. Only just now can I no longer smell burnt maple syrup. Candy making is apparently really precise.
If you think mammal liver is disgusting stay away from cod liver. Gooey, grey, tasteless lumps floating around in cod oil served on flatbread.
Had a mishap not that long ago. I made a big pot of John’s Spicy Hen Jungle Stew (secret recipe), for the whole collective (seven people) plus some more, and while it turned out absolutely perfect, I forgot that two of the people in the collective are vegetarians, one can’t deal with spicy food, one is allegric to beans and another one to maize. The last one besides me that could/would actually eat it was away visiting his parents. I had to eat around 15 - 20 litres of John’s Spicy Hen Jungle Stew by myself, breakfast, lunch, dinner and evening.
By the way, the recipe ain’t that much of a secret, so if anyone wants to try it I’ll post it. It’s very suitable for poor, lazy, gluttonous people looking for a way out of having to make dinner more than once a week.
I was preparing to bake a vlaai a couple of days ago but the recipe I used must have had a huge typo somewhere because the dough turned out extremely and irrecoverably runny.
So I added more milk and eggs and herbs and made yeast-dough pancakes. Topped with cream cheese, chopped nuts and parsley, rolled up and cut into small rolls. Very nice, but very much not a vlaai.
Get a hen or more, a big a pot as you can find, add hen (or bits, if you cut it up) in the pot and cover with water. Add some salt, herbs of choice in a cheesecloth and let it cook on low heat until the meat falls off the bones (six or seven hours).
Take the hen out and separate bones from meat (save bones and skin for broth, if you’re that kind of person.) and reduce. Add whatever vegetables you want or have at hand, in order of cooking time. I usually add chopped up potatoes (with skin), some slightly crushed cloves of garlic, onions, whole tomatoes, canned beans, canned maize (sweetcorn?), whole bell peppers, celery and beats. Dried mushroom is also nice. I cook the potatoes and tomatoes out, to thicken the mix. Add a spice mix (be generous!) consisting of cayenne pepper, black pepper, salt, cummin, a wee bit of coriander, thyme, a little bit of lemon or lime squash and a little honey, then add the meat. Stir, mash, or whatever you feel is appropriate, garnish with some fresh herbs, and done!
If it’s to spicy you can reheat with a little milk.
Now, it takes quite a while, but it makes itself and it tastes better and better the more time it gets to rest. It is best the third day after making it. It is cheap, healty, tasty and you’ll relieve yourself of any cooking duties for the most part of a week.
Yum! (And yes, canned maize could be called “canned sweetcorn”, but for some reason I don’t pretend to understand, when it’s in a can, we drop the sweet - we call it “canned corn” or “a can of corn”.)
The hardest part of that recipe, believe it or not, will be finding a nice tough old hen. I’m pretty sure I know a market where I can get one, but all our supermarket chickens are young males. Even our “stewers” are just slightly older but still immature males. I’ve been wanting to stew a hen to see what they’re like, and I will use your recipe to try! Thanks!
I love the 4-star review that criticizes those who hated the recipe, saying they’re used to an American, overly-salted diet… and then goes on to recommend that you add a chopped onion, more spices, more chili powder, some lentils, and then salt to taste once it’s in your bowl so you use less salt. The reviewer ends by thanking the recipe poster for the recipe that apparently only works if you treat it like it’s Stone Soup. :smack:
Just have to add my recommendation - The Indian Slow Cooker by Anupy Singla. Awesome cookbook, but watch out for the occasional recipe where no salt is mentioned. And always precook spices in a little oil.
Yes, please.