It’s true, I am my own harshest critic but tonight even my biggest culinary fan (my partner) agreed after a bit of prodding with a sharp stick that this was one of my worst meals ever.
I read other people’s food blogs sometimes and they seem to turn out these perfect beautifully photographed dishes all the time. How, I want to know???
For me cooking is a huge experiment and while these days I am better at it and have more hits than misses, occasionally there are days like these.
It started well enough- a dozen beef ribs from Superbutcher. I’d never been there before-it’s out of my lazy metro-centric 2km radius. They looked good, but after overnight marinading then a slow 12 hr cooking, they should have been fab but weren’t. They were tough.
Mistake two was forgoing my usual knife for a mandoline- a piece of equipment the salesperson told me had been ‘selling like hotcakes since they used it on Masterchef.” I bought it today and it will probably sit in the ‘shit kitchen stuff I’ve bought’ drawer until my next mass clean up. Without veering too much from the subject- the mandolin was ugly, bulky and hard to use. Unless you used exactly the same pressure each time the thinness of the sweet potato crisps varied. Some were thicker, some were thin little bits. (There’s a market- I reckon they were designed by men who a) tend to be physically stronger and b) spend far less time in the kitchen and thus aren’t as pissed off by crappy ‘tools’ as women who still despite everything use them much more often)
In the end, I thought I might as well chuck the broccoli on top of the ribs which were under foil in the slowest part of the oven to cook thinking they might steam and absorb some of the flavours.
So basically tonight’s dinner was sweet potato crisps that looked like those bits of skin from the bottom of your feet when you or your podiatrist use that razor blade thingy, ribs which had shrunken and fallen off the bone (not in a good way-even the dog spent a while thinking about whether she’d give them a go, tried them and gave up) and the broccoli was sort of khaki and oil infused.
A fail whale of a dinner as the almost 13 year old agreed.
Anyway, would love to hear about your worst home cooking experience if you’d deign to share. It’ d make me feel better to know that I’m not alone
May 16, 2012 at 9:12 pm
Good cooks try new things. Loving families tolerate it, because sometimes they get blown out of the water by new awesome. My wife loves Thai green curry and I’ve tried, despite being a fairly decent provider to my family, to come up with a decent one. My wife will regale you with stories of delicious things I’ve cooked her, but the green curry stories are basically 5 ultrafailures and it seems there’s nothing I can do.
Cooking is a passion, and it probably will but might just not produce something that answers the question that is dinner. Laugh, smile, order pizza.
(buy a better mandonline, they are the only non-core cooking gadget I’ll tolerate)
May 16, 2012 at 9:21 pm
I thought 50 bucks for something I’d always done by hand would guarantee it would work well.Plus it was German.They are kings of engineering, ja? It’s true about trying new things I rarely cook the same thing twice; even stuff that my partner and son have loved because there is so much out there to try. It’s disappointing though when a fundamental ingredient like meat lets you down-lets face it if you start with bad ingredients NOTHING you can do will redeem it (my 3 brothers would say tomato sauce fixes all).
May 16, 2012 at 9:37 pm
I made a cherry cake last weekend that i left in the oven for too long because i thought it still looked a little wobbly in the centre. It came out a brick, even the birds wouldn’t eat the crumbs!
May 16, 2012 at 9:49 pm
Oh these are all gorgeous stories. Ours was a ruined Christmas pudding. We decided to cook it in its little basin in the pressure cooker, as the thought of an open pot and all that steam for hours in a Qld summer was too much. Too many cooks… nobody kept an eye on the volume of steam leaving the valve thingie, and the pudding dried out. Not just any dry… canon-ball-black-hard-dry.
We had to use a hacksaw to hack it up and retrieve all the pudding charms and sixpences…
May 16, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Hahaha fabulous.
I, too, hate my mandoline. I want to throw it out but there are so many pieces, i’d have to find them all, first..
May 17, 2012 at 9:54 am
hilarious! I reckon you could write a great post of useless gadgets – I’m smelling a funny, anecdotal cookbook in the making…
Where’s the photo of this disaster? lol
Yesterday I managed to burn a croissant in the microwave, to the point it was black and smoking. (it’s the micro at work, as you know I don’t have one and clearly can’t use one!) I have managed to make the entire space smell – even today with all the doors open the whole studio smells charred.
May 17, 2012 at 9:58 am
Bardon State School is having it’s annual Mayfair next Sunday, you can pop down to the oval on Saturday and donate all your bits of kitchen gadgetry to the Trash/n/Treasure stall. Every year I force myself to donate at least one item from my overflowing second drawer. Sadly, i usually pick up something else that looks interesting… perhaps this year there’ll be a bargain-priced mandoline for me to foolishly purchase.
May 25, 2012 at 4:09 pm
Don’t bother with a mandolin. Get a fantastically sharp knife instead (ceramic is always good) and you will slice as finely as you please.
I have lots of kitchen fails!
My favourite, which still gets rolled out by my now-partner-of-almost-10-years was the first homecooked meal I ever made for him: vegetable risotto. I mean, how can you go wrong? Easy – way, way, way too much stock powder. I forgot to taste as I went along and just kept adding, forgetting what I’d added earlier…
I also have heaps of baking failures because I just won’t follow quantities. Lots of baked batter explosions in my repertoire, although I do now make pretty fail safe muffins and brownies. Cakes, on the other hand, still elude me. I tend to make bricks instead…