The first time my ex-husband made dinner for me, he decided to impress me and made shrimp in lobster sauce. I had never had it before, and he had never made it before. The rice was quite crunchy. There are black beans in this recipe, which I hate, but I tried to choke down anyway. The black beans were hard and crunchy.
It scared me off the dish so much that I’ve never had the courage to order it in a restaurant, but I’m fairly certain it shouldn’t be that crunchy.
Laughing… too… hard… can’t breathe…
Oh god, that was beautiful. I homebrew, and my husband and I have twice dealt with geysering beer from over-carbonated batches. The most recent was my husband opening a 6-liter bottle in the bathtub; the cap exploded off the top and beer sprayed every surface in the bathroom, except that which was shielded by the half-open shower curtain and the outline of my husband. I had to get a mop and mop down the ceiling. We can’t find that bottle cap, either.
During the summers, I used to be the chief pie baker at my parent’s restaurant. Usualy this involved getting up at about 5am three mornings a week. and meeting my sister down at the restaurant for a pie baking extraveganza. I did mostly fruit pies she did an assortment of other pies including a rum custard pie with raspberries and a shortbread crust that was to die for. Anyway, this one particular morning i was slated to do raspberry rhubarb pie, and I made about four of them and some other assorted pies that morning.
When the pies came out they were beautiful. they looked absolutely perfect. Probably the prettiest pies i had ever made.
As it happened, that summer we had a waitress who dearly loved my raspberry rhubarb pies. She was really good all morning, but by close to lunch time she couldn’t take it anymore. She snitched a snibbit at the edge of the pie. It was a mistake she did not make again.
Fortunately for the restaurant she did not try to hide her indiscression, but came and told me. “furli there is something really really wrong with the pie. It tastes all salty.”
The restaurant stored the salt and the sugar in 5 gallon pickle buckets. There was a specific place they were supposed to go back to. They were not marked. It seems that someone didn’t do that, and I didn’t check Instead of 3/4 cup of sugar i used 3/4 cup of salt.
Three incidents come to mind
The cake caper
My buddy’s girlfriend decided to bake a cake for us. This was 1970 when soft margarine was first on the market. Anyway the cake comes out fine. For the frosting she decides to use soft margarine instead of stick butter. The frosting spread GREAT. Easy to make, super easy to spread what’s not to like? Three hours later when we went into the kitchen we found out what was not to like. The frosting did not set up and had just slid off the cake to puddle around the edge of the cake on the plate. Tasted OK though
Real men don’t take quiches out of the oven
When we were first married, my wife bought a two piece quiche pan She prepared a beautiful quiche and placed it in the oven. When it came time to remove it from the oven she got me to do the honors. I pulled the 350 degree quiche (and pan) from the oven. I used both hands to remove the pan from the oven, but then I switched to one hand while I went to move something so I could set the pan down to cool. The one had I was supporting it with was under the center of the bottom. If you know how this pan is built (or checked the link) you know that the bottom of the pan fits inside the outer ring. So the 350 degree ring proceeds to fall off the quiche and land on my inner forearm near the elbow. This causes my arm to jerk upward and I do a perfect quiche toss over the stove and into the side of the fridge. At this point I am so pissed that I grab the now cool ring off my arm and throw it across the room. It hits the wall and one side flattens so it now looks like a capitol D. :smack:
Jalapenos are not interchangeable with Green Chilies
So the wife and I are going to make Mom Unser’s chili (not the exact recipe, but as close I can find on the net) Anyway the recipe calls for 3 4oz cans of chopped green chilies. We did not have any green chilies in stock at the house, but we had a 14 oz jar of chopped jalapenos. Green is green right? 14 oz is close to 12 right? The resulting mixture could have been used to strip paint it was so hot. The kicker was it tasted GREAT, it was just so hot we could barely eat it, and our mouths would not stop burning after we finished.
Well, it’s not so much in the cooking as the tasting…
I have a friend who used to own his own bakery. I was helping out a couple-three days a week, getting paid under the table, just to make it easier on his busy days. I’d done a fair amount of baking on my own, but this was one of my earlier forays into quantity cooking.
One of my first days there he had me make buttercream frosting. Now, bakery frosting doesn’t actually use butter (because it tints the frosting slightly yellow) but shortning. This in and of itself is not a big deal. However, I was making 20 pounds of frosting at a shot.
So I take the shortning, and the sugar, and the vanilla, and the secret flavoring, and start mixing. Everything goes well; I scrape 20 pounds of frosting out into the storage bucket. I take myself & the tools to the sink to soak, and lick some of the frosting off my hands on the way. I wash up, head back, and start another 20 pounds of frosting.
Follow the same as above, including lick some of the frosting off my hands on the way to the sink. Repeat again for ANOTHER 20 pounds of frosting.
After I’ve completed 60 pounds of frosting, I begin working on something else. And realize that I am slowly starting to feel nauseous. Very nauseous. I go to the rest room, thinking it’s something else. I try to eat a sandwich, thinking maybe my blood sugar is low. (HA! It was probably through the roof!)
Finally, I can’t stand it anymore, and end up leaving about 2 hours early, whereupon I go home and lie on the couch moaning for about another hour. I couldn’t eat for the rest of the day.
And I never licked frosting off my hands again.
To this day, I generally can only manage to have one piece of cake, etc., due to the aftermath…which is good for my diet. 
It was…a learning experience.
I was making cococut curry tilipia with coconut milk rice for dinner. I had ordered the organic coconut milk special for the meal.
The rice was going, the sauce was reducing well. It was time for the fish. The fish was stored in the freezer. It had apparently gone bad before I froze it. It smelled so bad as I defrosted it in the sink. It was not usuable.
The meal wasn’t really usuable without meat - it was just rice and sauce. I have no veggies in the house. I have no chicken, beef, or fish. So I grab the only protein in the house. Spam Lite. It was pretty forgettable.
I feel like I may be being wooshed, but…most recipes are meant for sea-level or low elevations (under 3000ft). Things get wacky above that, and so if you look at the majority of cake mixes, etc, on the bottom or something there’ll be a high-elevation modification.
I’ve blocked the specifics out, but when I was working in a pastry shop I ruined not one, but two batches of danish dough. Keep in mind that each batch made approximately 75 danish. I felt so bad about it, I started crying.
In addition to the baking powder/baking soda nonequivalency, allow me to point out that corn starch and corn syrup are two very very very different things. Corn starch is a thickener - a very little bit will thicken a large amount of liquid. Corn syrup is a sweetener.
My sister got these mixed up when she was quite young - probably 15-20 years ago. I forget what she was making. It was some sort of batter. Anyway, the recipe called for a cup of corn syrup. As she was stirring in the last of the cup of corn STARCH, she began to realize something had gone horribly wrong. Being prideful as she is, she decided to get rid of the evidence so we couldn’t make fun of her. She dumped it all down the drain, where that cup of corn starch did its thing and solidified the batter into a huge solid lump in the pipe. I still remember that poor plumber. Needless to say, her plan to avoid our mockery failed miserably. We still make fun of her for that.
That may be the saddest story I’ve ever heard…
sniff
I don’t get it. Were you eating huge chunks of frosting from your hands or something?
Back in college when Mr. Frail and I were first dating, he told me a story from the previous summer when he’d lived alone and cooked for himself. His biggest experimental food success had been mashed potatoes with rum. Yes, you read that right. :eek: Basically, he’d been making instant mashed potatoes and decided to add some spiced rum to make them sweet. He hadn’t had any milk, so he left it out. Well, he told me that it was kind of like a cross between hot buttered rum and sweet potatoes. Nice! I was a college student who liked alcohol more then I should have, so we decided to whip up a batch for ourselves one night.
We followed the directions on the box, then added (a lot of) rum. It was not sweet. It was kind of like spooning chunks of hot, sour, bitter, very alcoholic, half-solidified cement into my mouth. However, I was determined to enjoy it and possibly catch a buzz. After messing around trying to down as much as possible while it got cold in my bowl, Mr. Frail and I decided that it pretty much sucked. When we realized why, I wanted to go throw up: we had used milk in the recipe this time, and it had curdled in the potatoes. And we had eaten a ton of this shit. :smack:
Oh, God, I could hardly drink alcohol for a few months, and mashed potatoes were out of the question. I can still vividly remember the taste, nearly five years later. So gross.
indeed they do.
Nice to know I’m not the only person who’s ever had difficulty with hard-boiled eggs.
bamf
Not huge chunks - imagine licking the beaters but increase it exponentially. When I was in college I’d eat frosting straight from the jar, much like cookie dough, so think of it more as spoonfuls of frosting…very SWEET frosting.
At that point, most of what was on my hands was pure sugar rather than fully blended frosting. I do tend to get hypoglycemic (and hadn’t eaten breakfast that day), so I probably also threw my blood sugars pretty thoroughly out of whack.
It was enough that I have pretty much lost my taste for those type of sweets…although I’m still addicted to Girl Scout Cookies.
When making Chex Mix, take time to note the label on the Worchestershire Sauce bottle carefully. Do not confuse it with the soy sauce bottle. If you do, results may not be as you expect.
Just sayin’, is all.
One time several years ago my wife decided to make some macaroni & cheese. Not the Kraft-in-a-box kind, but homemade. Unfortunately she got to the part where the recipe calls for flour and realized we didn’t have any flour in the house. After scrounging through the cupboards she found one of those packages of bread mix. You know, the kind that you use in the homemade bread mixing machines. Bread mix is mostly flour, right?
Just as she was pouring the contents of this package into the mix, she happened to read the words on the label – “Whole wheat cinnamon raisin bread mix.”
After a couple of bites, we decided to eat out that evening.
One night a few weeks ago I was craving something sweet. We had whipping cream in the fridge, so I asked my husband to make me some whipped cream while he was up. He agreed and I thought all would be well.
Until he handed me by bowl of whipped cream and it tasted wrong. Really, really wrong.
He admitted that in order to sweeten it, instead of using Splenda, he just poured in some white Zinfandel.
You know what it tasted like? Buttered toast. It was very, very weird.