Happy Monday! I spent an amazing weekend in gluten-free friendly San Francisco and I’ll share info about that trip later this week. For now, inspired by Lauren at Celiac Teen I am peeling back the curtain on my kitchen to show you some of my kitchen failures.
cracked cheesecake
Anyone who cooks knows that sh*t happens. My small kitchen contributes to mishaps like pans falling off of precarious resting spots and wine glasses falling out of overstuffed cabinets and shattering glass shards into dinner. Sometimes I can blame my kitchen but sometimes ideas just don’t come out the way you thought they would and there is no where to place the blame but on your own shoulders.
cookies that taste like garbanzo beans
As much as I like to pretend that every dish I touch turns to culinary gold, sometimes I end up taking two bites of one of my creations, making a face and handing it off to my sous chef; lucky for me his palate is much more forgiving than my own and he usually tells me I am nuts when I declare one of my meals inedible.
Because I don’t bake much, my kitchen failures LOOK like they might be kind of tasty, there are no overflowing cakes or flat-as-a-pancake muffins. My disasters are stealthy.
Take this cedar plank salmon for example.
Looks yummy, right? Wrongo. I rubbed this with a sugar/salt/pepper/citrus zest combo that smelled delicious. When it came out of the oven it looked like heaven and smelled even better. I plated it, took some pictures and dove in and it. tasted. horrid. I had rubbed in heavily (heaped might be a better word) with a salt rub that had a salt to sugar ratio of about 20:1. It tasted like eating mouthfuls of crunchy kosher salt. With a bit of a fishy aftertaste. We scraped off the top layer and tried to salvage the fish but the salt had permeated every flake of salmon. Nasty.
Here we have lump crab macaroni and cheese. This kitchen failure was probably more a result of my picky-ness than an actual mistake in making the dish. I was craving crab mac and cheese, could not get it out of my head so I got some gorgeous looking fresh lump crab meat from Costco, some creamy Fontina cheese and went for it. The Fontina cheese sauce I made was pretty thin so I made cornstarch slurry to thicken it up. The end result looked awesome, all gooey melted cheese and big hunks of crab. It tasted like…caca. Sandy caca. The cornstarch gave the sauce a grainy texture and the crab didn’t taste right to me. Not rotten just a little off and a bit metallic (it came in a plastic tub so this was unexpected.)
My sous chef told me I was certified cuckoo bananas and proceeded to eat most of the dish but I was not havin’ it.
The reason I share all this shame with you is to commiserate with those who share my pain and to encourage novice cooks out there to keep at it and find the humor in the mistakes. Without trying new things I would never have come up with some of my great kitchen successes (bacon toffee anyone?) Have you ever experienced a total kitchen fail? Was it funny or sad or funny then sad or sad then funny? Tell me about it!
ALSO: Don’t forget to enter my giveaway, the winner gets a FREE $40 CSN gift card to use on anything from CSN’s 200+ stores like DiningRoomsDirect.com and AllPotRacks.com (can you guess what I would buy with this card?) All you have to do is comment on the Giveaway post and you are entered to win!
