Blue cheese walnut pasta. I forget where I got the recipe from now but it was absolutely inedible. I went back and made certain that I’d used the proper amounts of everything, since I rarely screw something like that up. We tossed it.
Allrecipes is also horribly bland, though a good “wikipedia of food” in certain cases.
This past weekend I was baking in the SO’s poorly outfitted kitchen and was making a recipe I’d made a thousand times, whole wheat banana bread. I was making it with Whole Foods bulk-bin whole wheat instead of King Arthur’s white whole wheat so it looked a little different, a bit browner. And it had a thinner consistency, must have been the Midwest…
2 minutes in the oven and I realize I used the oblong, goofy looking half cup measure instead of the whole cup measure for flour :smack:. I actually salvaged it by stirring extra flour into the 3 mini loaf pans with a fork, but some of the chocolate chips melted so it looked oddly dark brown (but still tasted great!)
For me (somebody who is a big fan of spice), I just make a mental note to double or triple the pepper/red pepper flakes/ Tabasco or whatever hot thing it’s calling for) on All Recipes.
A good crab cake might be my favorite food ever, so this one is especially heartbreaking.
I can’t remember the exact recipe names, but I’ve had a couple of misses from Mark Bittman’s International cookbook. One was a braised lamb shank recipe and the other was something curry-ish. Both were pretty much inedible, which is odd because I’ve never had a single miss from my tattered, stained copy of How to Cook Everything.
Speaking of retro recipes, I discovered this blog recently and it’s an hilarious time suck full of horrifying and baffling recipes. The tuna recipes are particularly disturbing.
I posted it here when it happened a couple of months ago - I was making my usual double chocolate cookies, and I thought the dough looked a little sticker than usual. “No worries,” I thought, “the dough doesn’t look exactly the same each time I make it.” So I put the first tray of cookies in the oven, then I saw the measuring cup full of flour that I had measured out and forgot to mix into the batter. If ever there was a :smack: moment in a kitchen…
And I will admit I did this, too (forget to add the flour) to a batch of pumpkin bread. Two coffee cans of batter, full of expensive pecans, bubbling away in the oven…
Holy crap, you at least have to check out her Quick Brownies (sweetened condensed milk + chocolate chips + walnuts + vanilla extract + a little salt = decent brownies) and Tunnel of Fudge Cake (mix together a batter that includes Jiffy Fudge Frosting Mix blended in, cook exactly long enough, and you magically get a “molten lava”-style fudge-filled cake). Those actually looked good, and the tester’s husband enthusiastically agreed!
I think they’re “the same” in that, in both sets, 1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons = 6 teaspoons. The difference is in how a fluid ounce is defined.
IIRC, in the UK, a fluid ounce is the volume of water that weighs one ounce at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. 1 ounce = exactly 28.349523125 g (BTW, this is the same in USA measurements), and if you assume that 1 cubic centimeter of water weighs 1 gram, 1 British fluid ounce = about 28.35 cubic centimeters.
In the USA, one fluid ounce is exactly 231/128 cubic inches, or about 29.57 cubic centimeters.
Hey, since this came up in the other thread, do you by any chance still have the recipe available? Another thought that occurred to me is that the buttermilk they have there may be different than here in terms of acidity. I know that what we call “buttermilk” in the stores is different than traditional buttermilk that was leftover from the butter making process. Don’t know if the same holds true over there or if the acidity between the two products is that different, but that would certainly be another possibility.
What I thought sounded like a delicious summer pasta salad became this giant bowl of fuckery. Too many ingredients, I should have known better. All those textures, gah.
I find that many times the amount of soy sauce in a recipe is holysweetjumpingjebus salty and it can be cut down drastically - make up the volume with mirin/sake/chicken stock or even plain water. Can’t find the recipe right now, but one in particular was for a mongolian beef - I think it called for half a cup of soy sauce, and the next time we made it we did 4 teaspoons soy sauce and the balance some sake we had sitting in the fridge and thickened with corn starch.
WHen I can be forced to make stuffed mushrooms [highly allergic to portobellos, and even breathing the cooking fumes can trigger an allergic reaction now, it has been getting progressively worse over the years] I flip a cooling rack over and put it in the pan and set the filled shrooms on that to keep them off the bottom of hte pan and any liquid that may have cooked out.
Sometimes it isn’t even the recipes that suck - I once sent a letter to the publisher of Frugal Gourmet’s 3 Ancient Cuisines with something like 90 or so corrections in the blather he [or whomever] was spouting about the cultures …since one of my major hobbies is actually cooking from medieval and renaissance cooking documents [cookbooks as you will, but most people don’ t think of them as cook books because sometimes they are nothing more than a listing of ingredients.]