Are you the Mrs. Cake?
I guess so. Could you turn your precognition off for a moment?
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
Vulcanized Duck! With or without sulfur?
My containers of cayenne pepper and ground cinnamon look remarkably similar.
My three-year-old will never eat cinnamon toast again.
I was making “clean out the fridge” soup, when I came across some broccoli. Since the point of the soup is to clean out the fridge and eat everything that’s still edible, I threw it in without thinking.
You know what broccoli looks like after it simmers for two hours? It didn’t taste bad, it just looked really, really gross.
The referent for the “and penis ensued” bit here.
That thread was one of the things that lured me into becoming Yet Another Doper. (Thanks, Anastaseon!)
:smack: I hadn’t seen that particular SDMB-ism before. I just thought it was a typo. :wally
#1 - Baking soda is not the same as baking powder. Biscuits turn into hockey pucks when you make that mistake.
#2 - Be careful when working fast-food. I once tried to move an entire tray of buns to the grill at once. One palm + one griddle = PAIN! I didn’t have fingerprints for three months.
I will repost a long ago post of mine from long ago to demonstrate just how much effort you can put into crapping up a meal.
Okay so I went to this restauraunt. I ordered a dish called southwest fettucini. It was really good. A mediumish cream sauce with finely chopped onions, peppers and southwest spices. I also detected white wine and a citrusy flavor. I’m not sure how good I described it, but trust me it was mouthwatering.
A while after that I decided to try to make something simlar myself. Mediumish cream sauce: check. Onions and peppers chopped and cooked: check. White wine… Hmm, no white white, just red. Well I’ve gone this far put a little red wine in. Citrusy flavor… crap no lime juice… no lemon juice… no extract… Just orange juice. What the hell, put a little in, what harm can it do. Wow. what an unappetizing color. The red wine and orange juice and have turned it into a toxic looking sludge with colorful specs in it. Oh well, it can’t taste too bad right?
I’m not quite sure how to desribe the taste. First of all, even a little bit of orange juice has much more sugar than I realized, and there is a good reason most cream sauces don’t have much sugar. It tasted really syrupy, and orangey. Something also really brought out the onion flavor. The red wine was also way too strong, and combined with the sugar to produce a flavor reminicent of crap wines like Mad Dog. So basically it turned out as Fettucini covered with a toxic-waste looking oniony-orangey-Mad Dog syrup.
I am so glad I was eating alone that day, cause if anybody else had tasted this crap they would have gotten a judge to issue a restraining order preventing me from ever going within 50 yards of a kitchen.
I didn’t instigate it, but was involved in the resolution.
Not my fault but it annoyed me. I was making hassenfeffer (“if I didn’t know better, I’d swear this was carrots”) at work one day. At one point in the cooking process I was supposed to add a quarter cup of marinade back into the pan. Unfortunately, I had to step out of the room and a co-worker decided to “assist” me by pouring in the marinade - all three cups of it. My hassenfeffer became hassenfeffer soup. We ate it anyway, but I was pissed off because everyone must have been thinking what a lousy cook I was.
The first time I made a Christmas turkey dinner I was trying to impress my fiance and some friends. It seemed pretty straightforward except for the gravy. Called my mother and asked her how to make the heavenly stuff she always served up.
Well, says she, just use equal amounts of drippings and flour, add the giblets, add water and stir until gravy forms, and blah blah blah. Piece of cake, I’m thinking. No mystery there.
So after the bird cooks, I carefully measure everything left in the pan, which came out to about two cups or so of grease, and dump in two cups of flour. See, she didn’t tell me not to use it all. On top of that, I dump in about a quart of water, which disappears like it just landed on the sands of the Kalahari. Hmmm. Okay, another quart of water, which evaporates like a Democrat’s lead in the last election.
By the time I had added enough water to create a mixture resembling library paste, a 4" x 24" x 14" pan was completely full. Most people ate some to be polite, but it had the all the flavor and consistency of spackle. After dinner, I went into the kitchen and was actually able to lift the pan and contents up off the stove just using the spoon which had been left in the goo, which had solidified.
A long, long time ago, when I was in high school and not such an excellent baker as I am now, I decided to bake a cake. I had this nifty little cookbook that had a basic cake recipe, and many different cool variations on decorating the cake. I decided I wanted to make a Christmas tree cake (not sure why, I don’t think it was even winter, but I felt the need to bake, and it was there). So I baked up several different-sized layers to make a tiered cake. Only, I missed the place in the recipe where it said to double the basic cake recipe, so my tree was a little bit flat and squatty. So, on to the icing. I whipped up a batch of icing, but I didn’t have any green food coloring. So I thought, that’s okay, it will just look like a snow-covered tree. Lovely.
So the cake is done, and it’s sitting on the kitchen counter. My dad comes over and looks at it, and he’s trying not to laugh. He whispers, “It looks like a boob.” :o I was very sensitive and shy at that point in my life, especially about things that had to do with S-E-X and assorted body parts, so I was mortified. Because it really did look like a boob–all it needed was a little pink at the tip.
The happy ending to the story is, now I’m a pretty good baker, and none of my cakes look like boobies.
ME
Did you know that, if you’re trying to bake a cake at an elevation of 7500 feet, the normal recipe probably won’t work so well? If you don’t add extra flour and water, you’re most likely going to end up with…well, as one of my friends delicately put it, “That looks like a birthday tumor, not a cake.” A collapsed tumor, no less.
Christmas Day, 1993. **Rhiannon8404 ** and I were celebrating our first Christmas together as a married couple. We lived in a second floor apartment, above a large family who always ran their heater during the winter. As a result, our place was rather warm this particular day, so I was wearing shorts.
We made a beautiful turkey for dinner, and I made pumpkin pie for dessert. I took the pies out of the oven, and had to marvel at my culinary skills. I took one over to the table to show my wife.
This is about the point where I learned that it’s not a very good idea to make a custard-filled pie in a nonstick pan. As I lowered the plate to show off the perfectly cooked pie, I felt the filling begin to slide as I accidentaly tilted the pan. Not wanting my beautiful creation to wind up all over the kitchen floor, I quickly stood up and leveled out the pan.
Unfortunately, I over-corrected just a tad, and instead of going all over the floor, the filling wound up mostly on my legs. My first thought was, “Aw great, now I’ve got to clean up this mess, and I ruined one of the pies”. After spending a couple of seconds wiping the filling off my legs, I came to a realization:
This was not just pie filling I had spilled, it was pumpkin flavored napalm!
By this time, the pain was really starting to set in. I redoubled my efforts to clean off my skin, now using a wet washcloth instead of my bare hands. Luckily, my wife showed much more sense than I at that point, and hauled me off to the bathroom where I sat in a tub full of cold water for 10 minutes or so.
I refused the suggestion that we take a trip to the Emergency Room, as I did not want **that ** to be my lasting memory of our first Christmas. I put pn a pair of loose sweats and we set out to find a convenience store that was open at 9:00 PM on Christmas, so we could buy some gauze bandages. Our search only took about 20 minutes, and I made a full recovery.
I can’t remember if we ever did eat the other pie, but we found some filling stuck to the counter while we were cleaning up prior to moving the following August.
Oh man, this had to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few dumb things in my day.
My grandma had given me a bunch of beautiful garden-fresh tomatoes so I decided to make salsa. I had all the necessary ingredients, and the recipe called for six cloves of garlic. Instead, I put in six BULBS of garlic.
The salsa looked and smelled ok to me at first, but after I ate some I just felt there was something not quite right (duh).
I took some over to my dad the next day, and he says, “OMG, what did you to to this, this is the worst salsa I’ve ever had!” Haha, this coming from the man who will eat absolutely anything, even rotten food.
It took forever to get that garlic smell out of my kitchen, and to this day, I cannot stand salsa, straight garlic, or cilantro.
When I was about 10, my mom decided to let me bake something for the first time. Naturally I wanted to really impress her, so I decided to pick the most unusual and exotic recipe I could find. Obviously this would be the Brazilian Coffee Cookie.
I was following the directions to a “T”. I measured ever so carefully, made sure to combine the ingredients in the correct order and so on. Of course, the main ingredient in this recipe was the coffee. It called for 2 cups, as I recall. I put in the 2 cups and moved on.
When the cookies were done baking my mom called in the whole family (all 7 of us) and everyone sat down to be served their Coffee Cookie. When everyone took that first crunchy bite, they tried their best to offer a smile, but they just couldn’t help themselves. I was very upset of course, not understanding what could have gone wrong.
Naturally my mother quickly located the problem: Coffee must be added to a recipe in liquid form, not in crystal form! Lesson learned…
Eggs explode when the water boils away.
I can’t quite resurrect all the thought processes involved in this one, I’m not even sure if thought as such was involved… I’m vegetarian and I’ve successfully
(re)invented quite a few meat dishes as veggie alternatives but not this time. The original was a pasta with piquant sauce, involving bacon, mushrooms, onions, olives and wine vinegar. My version substituted fake bacon of some kind – nb this never works, fake bacon is only good in fake bacon butties with lots of brown sauce. Then I realised I’d forgotten to buy mushrooms so I decided to use cauliflower instead. Cauliflower and olives: yuck. Cauliflower, olives, tvp, fake smoke flavour and vinegar: unspeakable, let alone inedible. And I attempted to serve it up to eight people.
You’re telling me there are recipes for low elevation? Like sea level?
Chili.
I was 17, and I wanted to learn to make chili. I’d recently seen a show on the Fruge where he says that any food can be used to make chili, just add some peppers and some then whatever’s in the fridge and usually you’ll have a nice chili.
So, well, I tried it.
I ate chili for a week, while my parents and sister were on vacation. So I was home alone, and didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing my mistakes. And I was sure I’d have mistakes. Doesn’t everyone when they learn to cook?
I didn’t actually make any mistakes while I was alone making chili. I think Murphy was waiting to ambush me. That or for my pride to ambush me. Either way, it wasn’t a long wait. I’d been making small batches of chili - just a pint or so a day. And it was coming out well, and dependably well. I could say I could make chili, now!
So, the next day I tried to make a chili to end all chilis. And I ran out of fresh hot peppers. And I didn’t want to go to the store to get more. So, I checked the pantry, and there was a can of jalapenos. I thought it was a little can. I opened the can and dumped 'em into my chili. I’d been using similar amounts of the hot peppers (so-called by the local IGA), so I didn’t think I’d have any problems.
Let me take a moment here to date myself. This was 1985, and I was in middle America suburbia. The word jalapeno was something that only showed up in die hard mexican restaurants, like Chi-Chi’s. I didn’t realize that the hot peppers that I was getting from the supermarket were, I think, Anaheims. Anaheims are not to be confused with jalapenos under any circumstance. And I’d just dumped 7 oz of chopped jalapenos into my pint of chili.
I had leftovers for the first time that week.
But it hadn’t really tasted bad. Just too damned spicy. So, I used that half pint of atomic fire chili as a starter for a couple quarts of chili, and invited some friends over. I added more veggies, and meat, but no more peppers. We all agreed it was good chili, and everyone helped me finish the chili. Well, the meat and veggies, but for some reason, no one was eager for more juices than they absolutely had to take… and still everyone there was so red in the face we all looked sunburned. (Even the dog - who insisted, since it was people food, he wanted the leftovers.)
Scallops
I like making the standard bachelor meal - the meal in a single pan. I can’t often get away with that, but stir fry and other things that combine all meal ingredients into one dish are popular items in my kitchen. One day I was feeling particularly flush, and got some scallops, I marinated 'em in white wine, with a touch of garlic, and some shrooms. I then put 'em into a pan, set them to simmer, and got adventuresome. I took down some spices and added a few to the pan. I don’t recall all the spices I’d added, but it was smelling very good at this point.
Then I decided to add some rosemary.
Whomever last used the rosemary hadn’t put the sifter top back on firmly when putting the spice away. It rested on top of the jar of rosemary, so I assumed it was firmly on, and went to shake some rosemary into the pan.
Spices are such, because a small amount imparts a large flavor to whatever they are cooked with. Having two tablespoons of rosemary dumped into one’s simmering scallops doesn’t make for a gentle flavor.
Not really willing to throw out my scallops I tried to eat 'em.
I still can’t stand rosemary to this day. 8-(
I’d classify this tale as heroic on my part, although tragic from my then-girlfriend’s point of view. When still dating, she bought some snapper and wanted to try out a blackened fish recipe. A teaspoon each of black, white, and red pepper, which was supposed to be enough to treat the two pounds of fish she had bought. As I found out later, it didn’t quite work out that way. In fact, the way she did it, it was just enough to cover one side of one piece of fish. The (seemingly) obvious solution…more pepper. Enough to create a solid armor of butter-soaked spice surrounding what were otherwise just innocent pieces of fish.
Now, I don’t particularly like spicy food. Upon chewing that first bite, my face started flushing. By the time I got halfway through the first piece, sweat was rolling down my face and tears were forming in the corners of my eyes. After taking a bite herself, she realizes that she doesn’t like the meal she’s prepared. Tentatively, with a worried look of trepidation on her face, she asks, “Do you like it?” Not only do I say I like it, I persevere and finish what’s on my plate. After another bite, she knows how bad she thinks it is, and says as much, pushing her plate away. In the grip of an overwhelming sense of chivalry, I take her fish and proceed to eat that also. “See, it’s not so bad”, I say. Decidedly not the easiest thing to do convincingly, as I was wiping my brow and rubbing tears from my eyes.
I paid for my actions later that night with a couple bouts of “running” for the bathroom. A small price to pay, however, as we’ve been married for four years and still laugh at the “fish incident” when it comes up.
Oh, yeah - I do most of the cooking. She cites that as one of the reasons she married me. Bully for me!