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Perusing the latest issue of Cook's Country, a
publication I quite enjoy, I was astounded when I came to the "When Things Go Wrong in the Kitchen" section at
the back of the magazine. It is intended to be funny, but what it really shows is that people need to learn when to
throw things away. No matter how thrifty you are or how closely you need to watch your wallet, sometimes it is simply
best to throw away your mistake and start over from scratch. A good time to consider this action is when food is
burnt, bad or if you have been eating leftovers for more than a couple of days.
Witness the following incidents, all harvested from the kitchen disaster stories in Cook's Country:
- A woman wanted to make homemade noodles the way her grandmother did. The recipe looked like it would not make enough, so she added to it until it was several times the original size. She and her husband ate noodles for more than two weeks and it was years before they wanted to eat them again.
Why did they keep eating? Did they feel the need to punish themselves? Eggs and flour are not so expensive as to cause bankruptcy from throwing some away.
- A woman added far too much saffron to a chowder she was attempting and produced something smelly and barely edible. She "forced" herself to eat it for supper and to have a "big bowl" for lunch the next day.
Again - why? Eat cereal for two days, if need be to compensate for the cost, but there is no need to torture yourself.
- The worst story by far is about a woman whose daughter added 3 tablespoons of salt to a recipe instead of 3 teaspoons, three times the required amount. She "hated to waste all that batter" so she tripled all the other ingredients and made 24 dozen cinnamon rolls, the majority of which were given away.
Here's some cooking math that may help this woman in the future:
1 ruined batch of dough 1 new batch of dough
= 2 batches of dough
3 x 1 ruined batch of dough = 3 batches of dough.
Congratulations. You have now used
more dough that you would have if you had thrown away the flawed dough, not to mention the fact that little money was
"saved" by giving away several dozen batches of cinnamon rolls. Next time, just start again. Your
"thrifty" sensibilities may be shocked, but at least the logical portion of your brain will prove that it
continues to function.
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3-07-2006 @9:20AM Raspberry Sour said... I'm flirting with grumbly and curmudgeonly this morning, so I have to pipe in with my two bits, which is to say that these really don't seem so horrible to me. I was expecting grand disasters, not penny pinching cooks. I'm not sure how forcing yourself to eat a messed up recipe even warrants mention- were they really so short on kitchen disaster stories?
As for the woman who gave away her cinnamon rolls, that strikes me as a decent thing to do, even if born out of kitchen foolishness. The noodle woman could have taken a lesson from her.
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3-07-2006 @10:24AM Jumper said... I have one for you. Years ago my brother bought several bushels of peaches to make peach preserves and to freeze. He also decided to make some peach jelly, well something went wrong with the jelly and it didn't gel.
Instead of throwing it out, he used it as a syrup. For a long while his family had to eat peach syrup on their pancakes and waffles and anything else that needed syrup.
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3-07-2006 @10:28AM Justin H. said... They should make a spinoff magazine filled only with expanded versions of these riveting stories.
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3-07-2006 @12:32PM bobbe quinlan said... I gathered some kitchen boo-boos from a group of women in my writing club and put them in a chap book. It was funny and I sold many of them to the booboo makers to send to their kids.
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3-07-2006 @12:46PM Myron said... On several levels, these stories reinforce my intial impression of the magazine and its intended audience. I'm a long time cooks illustrated subscriber but this new magazine doesn't do it for me.
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3-07-2006 @1:39PM Jenny said... Some people are just like that. My husband says that until he married me, he didn't realize that rice and pasta are cheap and aren't really things you need to conserve on. This was after several meals where I asked him to make the rice and found he'd made less than one serving. Apparently his mother taught him to use as little as possible.
I still like the Cook's Country recipes, but I could do without any of the story sections.
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3-07-2006 @4:42PM cybele said... I accidentally put in a quarter cup of salt instead of a quarter tablespoon for a bunch of caramels when I was a teen. My solution was to make the caramels extra small when I cut them up and covered them in A LOT of chocolate.
Now salted caramels are all the rage ... who knew?
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3-08-2006 @11:30AM red said... We were out of milk and my husband knew I keep evaporated milk for just such emergencies. He grabbed the can and proceeded to make Kraft Dinner. He tasted it and found he had mistakenly grabbed the sweetened condensed milk. Bleah!
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3-08-2006 @2:14PM z said... Correction in New York Times:
"Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/dining/08dcxn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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3-08-2006 @2:48PM JK O'Key said... I have had a couple of experiences with being a too thrifty cook. One was as a teenager I was baking persimmon cookies and added double the amount of persimmon pulp to an already doubled batch of persimmon cookie dough, so I double the dough again and baked persimmon cookies until I never wanted to see one again. Fortunately they freeze and can be used later. The other was like the peach syrup comment only mine was with pomegranetes, but this turned out to be a disaster that turned out to be a discovery. Family loves pomeganete syrup and I use it for addition to vinegraitte dressings and to marinate meats.
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