Phoebe and her bandaged thumb, post exploding wine glass incident
Last week, we asked readers to tell us about their greatest (worst?) cooking failures. People responded with some pretty epic disasters.
Both Sarah and Stephanie had brownie trouble: Sarah forgot eggs and tried to mix them into the cooking brownies. They scrambled. Stephanie, on the other hand, was out of eggs altogether. She mixed dollops of mayonnaise into her brownie batter. It melted, burned, and cracked.
Callie, taking Cara’s older sister Jill’s advice that green onions (aka scallions) were the same as yellow onions, made a rice salad featuring about 4 or 5 cups of rice and about 4 or 5 diced onions. After tasting it, Cara still can’t believe the salad was as edible as it was or that Callie managed to cut up all those onions without crying hysterically.
We randomly chose Seattle Dee as the winner of our BGSK Sweet Treats Calendar. Her failure:
As a new bride entertaining HIS FAMILY I tried out an ambitious menu that taxed my skills and scheduling ability. Rushing to thicken a thin sauce, I popped a pyrex baking dish fresh from the oven onto a hot electric burner. Not such a good plan. First came a loud CRACK! followed by the rolled/stuffed chicken breasts, artichokes and a sticky white wine sauce running over the stove top and onto the floor. While THE IN-LAWS sat, out of sight in the dining room, I threw a dish towel over the mess on the floor and plated and served the solid ingredients. We were SO lucky no one crunched on a sliver of glass - and I still haven’t told this story to anyone else involved in that dinner.
Recently, I tried to make a dinner with every pot and bowl in my repertoire. I was sort of cooking by feel, having a good time, and the menu was looking like it would be salmon in a roasted vegetable broth, with a heap of brown rice pilaf and a topping of sauteed veggie sausage. Soon after I knocked the saucepan full of broth onto the floor, I burnt the rice and overcooked the salmon. Basically the only tasty part of the meal was the sausage, which was also the one part of the meal I didn’t make. -Cara
Months ago when I was baking my birthday cake at my mom’s, I was delighted to use her new fancy mixer, which is the most ridiculously powerful kitchen instrument I’ve ever encountered. I had creamed the butter and the sugar, but when I went to crack in the egg, I managed to drop the entire egg, shell and all, into the bowl. Then, not used to the machine, I pulled the handle in the wrong direction. Hoping to stop the mixing, I’d actually increased the speed, and the beater pulverized the shell. It took me about an hour to pick out the confetti-ed egg shell. - Cara
I am a frequent perpetrator of burning vegetables in the oven, forgetting nuts on the stove, and leaving dish towels too close to the burner and having them erupt into flames. But I think my worst failure was when the oven decided not to work at all. I was having one of my first dinner parties in my new apartment and was serving roasted chicken breasts, rosemary potatoes, and carrots. I was running behind as is, and 20 minutes before people were about to arrive I went to put everything into the oven, and noticed it was not hot. Like, at all. When my friend Mark arrived early, I decided to punish him by making him sacrifice his arm to ignite the pilot light with a very short match. It didn’t work. I spent the next hour under- then over-cooking chicken on the stovetop, transforming the potatoes into greasy, crunchy slices, all in front of anaudience who munched on the raw carrots and laughed. - Phoebe
And a few more highlights from the comments section:
Early in our marriage, I was attempting to impress my husband with my baking prowess. The recipe called for me to blind bake the pie crust using pie weights. I rolled out the crust, placed it in the pan and dropped in the pie weights. As I baked the crust I wondered how this was all going to work…needless to say, not quite the way I planned. When the crust was removed from the oven my husband and I, armed with tweezers, individually removed each pie weight. I bet he was impressed! - Nicole
A few years ago I was dating a boy which I guess I wanted to impress with my cooking prowess and I spent all day basting-on-the hour-chicken wings which I had created a rub for and two different varieties of sauce, a bourbon glaze and a more traditional BBQ… I was rushing to get to the party at his apartment and changed into my cutest football watching outfit: a white shirt, my pink jacket and jeans… the wings were barely our of the oven and I put them into a pyrex bowl with foil, then into double bags. I hustled up sixth avenue and I heard a cracking noise. The glass, going from super to to the super cold air cracked (it was pyrex!!!) shattered and before I could notice fell through the double bags and onto the sidewalk, splashing all the way up my jacket, bbq sauce and glass pieces… in a panic, I ran home leaving the steaming wings and sauce on the sidewalk, changed clothes and ran up the street, as I was walking by the disaster site, there were two things observed that changed my disapointed and frantic mood: 1. People were stopping on the street and looking up…. they thought that someone in a Super Bowl argument had thrown the wings out of the window of the apt buidling above to see if the wings could fly and 2. A homeless man was picking through the pieces licking sauce off his fingers… - Stephanie D
Thanks for everyone’s participation! Seattle Dee, please
get in touch with us so we can send the prize your way.
From our kitchens, which we’re trying not to burn down, to yours,
Cara and Phoebe, THE QUARTER-LIFE COOKS
