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My wife doesn't spend much time in the kitchen but sometimes she gets the urge to cook and insists on doing so unsupervised. So the other week she announced that she was going to make scones. I was dubious because I was pretty sure we had few or none of the required ingredients but I let her do her thing. When she pulled a tray of what looked like hockey pucks from the oven I asked how exactly she'd made them. - We had no butter so she used sunflower oil-based margarine - We had no milk so she used soy milk - Normal flour instead of self-raising - Corn starch instead of sugar ("I thought it was icing sugar"  )So she had essentially made hardtack. And that's why I do all the cooking.
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Jan 7, 2014 09:17
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Mister Macys posted:- made the Alton Brown ginger beer. Used metric instead of imperial cups. Too weak and watery. Went until today not knowing that there are different cups for metric and imperial. I wonder how many recipes from internet sources I've cocked up because of this and just chalked up to my own incompetence 
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Jan 7, 2014 17:36
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deadly_pudding posted:Went until today not knowing that there are different cups for metric and imperial. I wonder how many recipes from internet sources I've cocked up because of this and just chalked up to my own incompetence I moved to Canada from the US almost exactly a year ago and am just now learning this (after confirming with my husband that Canada uses metric cups). This explains so, so much. 
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Jan 7, 2014 18:46
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Hmm, this has been educational: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit) I guess US cups (236.5mL) are not the same as imperial (284mL). Metric cups are 250mL. Japan also has their own 200mL cup. Also explains why rice measuring cups are 180mL (about 3/4 US cup)
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Jan 7, 2014 19:41
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Steve Yun posted:Hmm, this has been educational: I'm never ever baking.
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Jan 8, 2014 03:56
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Steve Yun posted:Hmm, this has been educational: Yeah I just don't understand why America insists on measuring mass with volume still. It's loving absurd.
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Jan 8, 2014 04:07
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Boris Galerkin posted:Yeah I just don't understand why America insists on measuring mass with volume still. It's loving absurd. Go back to Russia you motherfucking commie. USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!  Two-hundred thirty-six 'n' five or FIGHT!
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Jan 8, 2014 07:40
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Boris Galerkin posted:Yeah I just don't understand why America insists on measuring mass with volume still. It's loving absurd. We're doing it right, the rest of the world is messed up. 
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Jan 11, 2014 01:01
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I was a latch key kid growing up, and only have one older sibling so I spent a lot of time in the house alone - and often bored. I was about 9 when I got it in my head I was going to make a chocolate cake for dinner with the grandparents on the weekend. I went through mom's recipe box, found a handwritten recipe, and went to town. Everything went pretty smoothly until I got to the frosting. The recipe called for confectioner's sugar, which we were out of. My 9 year old brain figured sugar is sugar and in went the granulated. Grittiest frosting ever. My grandmother very graciously ate a slice and commented how great it was. She got me a cookbook for Christmas that year, though!
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Jan 11, 2014 19:11
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Tagichatn posted:Sounds good to me. I put Cajun spice on mine sometimes. Throw some Old Bay on regular buttered microwave popcorn and gain a new appreciation for life.
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Jan 11, 2014 19:47
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Pff jerk seasoning on popcorn you made in a pot and poured real butter on.
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Jan 11, 2014 20:09
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When I was in year 9 (age 14) at school we had a cooking activity day. And one activity was a breakfast competition, I worked with 3 other clueless classmates and we decided on toast, soft boiled egg and mushrooms. Simple enough right? Well one girl insisted on raw mushrooms because she eats them "all the time" at home and I was told by some idiot to put soft boiled egg in cold water like it was hard boiled. I did not question their knowledge so had to cringe as the teacher tasted cold boiled egg, raw mushrooms and some other random scraps while trying to keep constructive. Most other teams made food that was passable. It further cemented my low place in the school pecking order. I swear by pressure cooking but it doesn't come without its downfalls, mainly burned or mushy rice. I once made kedgeree that came out black as tar and I didn't think the burning smell could have been the pressure cooker because it's so wet in there. Now I use a rice cooker for rice, unless its a risotto then the pressure cooker is perfect. I steamed one red mullet for myself as a test before I fed everyone else but it was too undercooked and as I dug deeper I found some translucent meat. So I spent the next couple of days freaking out about food poisoning, it was OK though because it was pre-frozen so any creepy crawlies would have died. But still I was making GBS threads myself with fear. I did the same fish dish again a few days later for all the family and cooked it just right that time! My cooking skills are semi-decent and always improving, so I can whip up something tasty and fueling. But I always consider it a disaster when it doesn't agree with my siblings' and dad's tastes. My personal taste is quite exotic, I like anything spiced and I like to try new seafoods and exotic vegetables. My main "go-to" cooking style is North Indian, I find dal and rotis some of the easiest meals to prepare. My mum also shares my taste. But the rest of my family like familiar, blander stuff so it always annoys me when I see them moaning about fish bones and leaving loads of it because it's too spicy and/or healthy. I rarely have spectacular disasters luckily. But I don't take mistakes that well so I end up in a loud, tearful rage at the slightest thing. I have learned to go with the flow recently from studying South Asian food, which is mainly adding things to your preference and cooking till it looks good. Not a cooking disaster as such but I dropped a ceramic pot of corned beef hash on my toe in Nov 2012 and lost much of the food to the dogs as it splatted everywhere. What was left of it was tasty. But I was kept awake all night by the throbbing pain in my toe and the bruised nail only recently grew out completely last month. I spent a year with what looks like the Apple logo on my toe! Blowfeesh fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 21:27
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I had a bunch of egg yolks leftover from making angel food cake, so I wanted to try making a flan. I thought since it required a bath like cheesecake that you could do the cheesecake trick where you put the tray of water on the rack below your pan to prevent leaks. Wrong. I ended up with chunky, curdled pudding. I ate it as punishment for my failure. Blergh.
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Jan 12, 2014 18:10
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Skinny King Pimp posted:Throw some Old Bay on regular buttered microwave popcorn and gain a new appreciation for life. Ugh, popcorn that tastes like Maryland.
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Jan 12, 2014 19:22
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Skinny King Pimp posted:Throw some Old Bay on regular buttered microwave popcorn and gain a new appreciation for life. Ranch dressing powder  Olive oil drizzle with salt and just a little pepper is also acceptable. Edit: Stories! The first time I spent a weekend at home alone, I burnt the poo poo out of a pot of rice and had to air out the house for like a whole day afterwards. One time, in college, my roommate forgot he was boiling water in a stove kettle. For whatever reason, the whistling thingy didn't work that night, and the pot boiled completely dry. The enamel paint on the bottom of the kettle melted onto the burner coil. deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 19:53
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My biggest cooking gaff wasn't fully my fault. Back in college I shared an apartment with 3 other people, and one day I was having a lovely day and decided to make some chocolate chip cookies to make myself feel better. I was going around the kitchen, added in ingredients as normal, when I get to the salt. I was heading to the cabinet for the salt container when I noticed a tiny shaker of salt near the stove. "Why did someone put salt int his tiny shaker? I'll use some of that." So I take a tsp of that, add it in, and start mixing. I taste some of the dough, and noticed it had an odd savory taste to it. Thinking it might have been the handful of Chex Mix I had eaten while cooking, I try clearing my palate with OJ, then milk, but keep getting this odd taste. "Whatever, maybe it'll be OK cooked." I bake up a pan, and try a cookie, but it's still off. I wonder what I did different, when I recall the tiny salt shaker. I shake some onto my hand, and it's white like salt, but a different shape. I taste it and UGH it's terrible! Whatever was wrong with my cookies was because of this mystery not-salt, so I dump everything and go sulk in my room. Later in the evening, I was in the kitchen cooking when one of my roommates comes home. Me: "Hey, come here." Her: "What?" Me: "What's in this tiny salt shaker? I used it in cookies and it tasted terrible." Her: "WHAT! You used that in cookies?!" Me: "Yes, but WHAT is it." Her: "It's Sara's MSG." Sara was Asian and did a fair bit of Asian style cooking, but I had never seen MSG in the house before. I griped a bit that it should have been labeled, but it was pretty funny after the fact, and then put a big piece of tape with MSG on the tiny shaker to prevent other mistakes.
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Jan 14, 2014 14:29
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This falls into the miraculously not catastrophic category. I post this both out of shame and thankfulness. I have what I guess you'd call a thick-walled, handle-less aluminum pan. Looks like this. (edit: url because the url tags converted to an image and I don't want to leach and dunno if that counts http://www.slamdunkpro.com/Resources/Deep_Diedsh/aluminum-taper-pan.jpg) The thing fit near perfectly on a rack of one of those little Smokey-Joe Weber grills. I used it for making paella in the parking lot of my now wife and I's first shared apartment. It worked pretty good for that, considering. That isn't the horrible part, in fact, that part is downright successful. Do you know what wasn't? Deciding I should fill that thing 1/4+ of the way full with oil and frying felafel in it. On the grill. Literally feet away from a wood frame building of garage stalls filled with who-knows-what. I did this twice without thinking a god drat thing about it, and it turned out great both times. Then one day, I don't know what I was doing or watching, but it hit me like a bolt out of the blue that perhaps that WASN'T the best thing to be doing. I can't imagine how close I was to an instant 3-alarm structure fire doing that.
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Jan 16, 2014 04:26
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So my friend has this oven cookery book. It asked you to make a breadcrumb coating using flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs. NO MORE INSTRUCTIONS THAN THAT. So s/he put the flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs in a bowl, and mixed it together. After the first stir, s/he realised what they meant.
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Jan 16, 2014 15:44
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So I was making chocolate chip cookies and two things went wrong but it worked out amazingly well. First, I nuked the butter and it was too hot so when I poured it on the chocolate chips they melted so now they're just chocolate cookies. No biggie. However I went brain dead and instead of adding 2 and 1/4 cups of flour I added 2 quarter cups of flour (a half cup) and thought the batter seemed a little funny. Well I baked them and they turned into a super thin sheet of what I'd describe as a cookie "crisp". I had to slice it up with a pizza cutter and the family devoured them.
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Jan 16, 2014 19:21
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Croatoan posted:So I was making chocolate chip cookies and two things went wrong but it worked out amazingly well. First, I nuked the butter and it was too hot so when I poured it on the chocolate chips they melted so now they're just chocolate cookies. No biggie. However I went brain dead and instead of adding 2 and 1/4 cups of flour I added 2 quarter cups of flour (a half cup) and thought the batter seemed a little funny. Well I baked them and they turned into a super thin sheet of what I'd describe as a cookie "crisp". I had to slice it up with a pizza cutter and the family devoured them. That actually sounds downright delightful
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Jan 16, 2014 19:34
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The first time I ever made a cream cheese frosting I didn't let the cream cheese or butter get room temp completely and it turned to a soupy mess. Recipe said if it's a little thin add more powder sugar. I kept adding it and it never rely got thick. I added over a cup more on top of the poo poo load the recipe called for. Still ate it.
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Jan 16, 2014 19:43
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Croatoan posted:So I was making chocolate chip cookies and two things went wrong but it worked out amazingly well. First, I nuked the butter and it was too hot so when I poured it on the chocolate chips they melted so now they're just chocolate cookies. No biggie. However I went brain dead and instead of adding 2 and 1/4 cups of flour I added 2 quarter cups of flour (a half cup) and thought the batter seemed a little funny. Well I baked them and they turned into a super thin sheet of what I'd describe as a cookie "crisp". I had to slice it up with a pizza cutter and the family devoured them. This happened to me, but my dough was prefect and chilled for 24 hours, so I was super excited to get some cookies. I had turned on the broiler and didn't noticed until the cookies were in the oven. They melted instantly.
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Jan 16, 2014 20:36
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I threw four habaneros in my cast iron to saute with some mushrooms and onions this morning. I went to drop a deuce and when I took the lid off upon returning to the kitchen I had a coughing fit. I smashed everything up with a spatula and it got even worse. My wife, three rooms away, started coughing in her sleep. I cracked six eggs into the mess and ate it as quickly as I could. Then I drank milk and wondered what endorphins people are always talking about.
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Jan 16, 2014 22:44
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dino. posted:So my friend has this oven cookery book. It asked you to make a breadcrumb coating using flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs. NO MORE INSTRUCTIONS THAN THAT. Do you not know what gender your friend is?
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Jan 16, 2014 22:52
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Tagichatn posted:Do you not know what gender your friend is? Dino is really bad at genders. He thought I was a lady for like 9 months and we chatted multiple times a week for that duration.
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Jan 16, 2014 23:23
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I do, but I don't want to out the guilty, even though s/he isn't on this website. Also, what Casu said. I seriously thought he was a chick.
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Jan 17, 2014 03:49
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:pancake mix When I was little, I wanted to make an artisan bread. We didn't have flour.... you see where this is going. A sweet, salty, basily mess of simultaneously raw and burnt fluff. And also, who here has confused baking soda for baking powder, or vice-verse? Worst loving poundcake I ever tasted or propped a door open with.
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Jan 17, 2014 05:09
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My friend who's always posting about her new favorite recipes told me she was going to try and make doughnuts last weekend...
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Jan 17, 2014 13:11
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Somehow, "ice cubes don't cool down oil because water and oil don't mix, and we'll get water pockets" is even worse here than the obvious. Maybe because the water pockets part is this close to figuring out what will actually happen.
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Jan 17, 2014 13:22
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I had a roommate who heated up oil to fry something, forget about it, and then I'd arrive home in the nick of time to see smoke everywhere. I took the pot outside, and figuring it was safe out on the sidewalk, I decided to throw in ice cubes for fun. It was utterly volcanic. I knew it would splatter, but the sheer power with which it erupted was stunning, it was pouring vertically out of the pot, about a foot upwards into the air. By the time it was done roaring, the pot was nearly empty. You know what's scary? The moment right before you fry something large in a large pot of oil, and before it goes in just one drop of water falls off your food and into the oil and it starts banging around like a hammer in an oil drum.
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Jan 17, 2014 13:52
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I threw a poo poo-load of ice cubes in a pot of boiling oil to cool it down. I was seven. And home alone. I later entered the culinary profession, continuing my streak of bad cooking decisions.
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Jan 17, 2014 15:29
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We'd throw ice cubes into the deep fryers all the time at jack in the box (first job 15 years ago). At least I learned a few things from that place: 1) Don't eat at jack in the box 2) Don't throw ice into hot oil.
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Jan 18, 2014 05:21
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Or limes. A guy I worked with repairing computers, worked at Old Chicago as a fry cook at night. Thought it would be a good idea to throw a lime into the oil to make fried lime. It exploded and he got some pretty serious burns on his face.
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Jan 18, 2014 05:23
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copen posted:Or limes. A guy I worked with repairing computers, worked at Old Chicago as a fry cook at night. Thought it would be a good idea to throw a lime into the oil to make fried lime. I had to drop what I was doing and sprint to the other side of a kitchen once to prevent some idiot from dropping a whole, in-the-shell egg into the fryer. Had to babysit some real winners at that gig. I'm not normally one to yell, but some phrases, like "Who the gently caress is thawing the halibut in hot water?" and "Am I correct in noting that you're cutting spring rolls on the same board as raw chicken?" seem to just pop out at a much higher volume.
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Jan 18, 2014 13:38
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When I was younger I did nearly the same thing. Had been pan-frying dumplings in oil and after I was done I figured I should cool down the oil before I disposed of it... so poured in a cup full of ice cubes. We had an open kitchen/dining room/living room plan, and there were oil spatters from floor to ceiling for like a 15-foot radius. I took cover under a towel under the bar on the other side of the kitchen island until it mosty stopped, then used the same towel for protection to hurry in and clap a lid on the frying pan. In my defense I knew water and oil didn't mix, but I had no clue that it would explode! (I was like twelve.)
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Jan 18, 2014 15:13
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ExplodingChef posted:I had to drop what I was doing and sprint to the other side of a kitchen once to prevent some idiot from dropping a whole, in-the-shell egg into the fryer. Had to babysit some real winners at that gig. I'm not normally one to yell, but some phrases, like "Who the gently caress is thawing the halibut in hot water?" and "Am I correct in noting that you're cutting spring rolls on the same board as raw chicken?" seem to just pop out at a much higher volume. When I was at a chicken joint, I wish I had been there to see/hear: "Why did you think it was a good idea to make a hard-boiled egg in the microwave?" Also, every new person would try to reheat ribs in the fryer. And I yelled when someone dumped our sauce in the fryer because she wanted crispy food. Man, that stuff is like pure sugar and hot pepper, makes for one hell of a scrubbing job.
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Jan 18, 2014 17:51
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Missing Name posted:makes for one hell of a scrubbing job. For the person who dropped it in the fryer, surely?
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Jan 18, 2014 18:42
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Tweek posted:For the person who dropped it in the fryer, surely? "It's not my job." So no. I quit that place years ago.
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Jan 18, 2014 18:46
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When someone says, "Not my job" I hear, "...because I just quit" You may ignore below this line, I just need to do some venting. --------------------------------------------------------------- IT'S ALL OF OUR loving JOB TO MAKE SURE THIS RESTAURANT FUNCTIONS AND IS SUCCESSFUL! NOW SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND SCRUB LIKE YOU'VE GOT SOME GOD-DAMNED PRIDE!
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Jan 18, 2014 18:57
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I was at a friend's one time and somehow the person started a grease fire in the pan trying to fry something. It was "under control" in the sense that it wasn't exploding or splattering everywhere but still it was on loving fire in an apartment. Luckily I was there in the kitchen because because my friend's response was to turn around and grab the huge Britta jug of water that was being filled in the sink.
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Jan 18, 2014 20:22
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