I Quit Cooking …

[Italiancook]

I'm not going to cook another thing this week. It's been a frustrating, aggravating, expensive week in the kitchen. One flop after another.

Sunday, I tried to make Martha Stewart's "Eggnog" from her website. I turned my back for only a minute and the nog boiled and broke. I threw away a quart of whole milk, cream, and a dozen eggs.

Monday, I made Spanish Chicken with Rice. The rice was partially raw at the end of the cooking time, and the chicken was pink inside. I don't know if the issue may be my oven, but I threw away the recipe.

Today, the Carrot Soup/dried bay leaves fiasco we've discussed.

I have a 3 pound chuck roast in the refrigerator. I was going to make a Pot Roast tomorrow. I've decided to toss the roast into the freezer, since so much of what I've made this week ended up in the garbage can. I don't want another example of wasting money, time and energy.

Anyone else ever have a week like this, or is it just me?

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• This topic was modified 8 years ago by Italiancook.

[luvpyrpom]

No, it's not just you. I've many a baking days like that, too. I've burnt two loaves of challah and a huge pan of brownies once. Didn't bring anything to work that weekend. Coworkers asked me why I didn't bring anything - when I said I had burnt everything, they said that they would still eat it. I've cut back on my bread baking drastically since the beginning of the summer so I'm sure I'll be making more mistakes as I try to get back into bread baking again.

[BakerAunt]

I'm sorry that the week has been so frustrating. Take a day to catch your breath, then when you go back into the kitchen, make a recipe that you know will come out right, so that you begin to rebuild confidence.

[Mike Nolan]

I've had days where I couldn't boil water without a mishap!

Usually I try making some kind of 'comfort food', doesn't have to be fancy, just yummy. Spaghetti with cheese toast is one of my favorites.

[Italiancook]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I feel better now. I remember my mother saying a year before she died that she didn't know how to cook anymore. So a week of time/money "disasters" worried me. I'll take BakerAunt's advice and stay out of the kitchen today. Tomorrow, I'll make pancakes -- surely I can't mess them up. Although spaghetti sauce sounds fool-proof, too, Mike. Bread . . . I don't dare try that for a while after this week. But I was thinking about making a loaf over the weekend. Not now.

I guess I need to send hubby out for an oven thermometer to make sure my oven is heating properly. But I don't really think it's the oven. It's probably me.

The Cubs won; I lost.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Italiancook.

[Mike Nolan]

Whenever something comes out differently than I expect it to (sometimes for the good, more often for the bad), I treat it as a learning experience.

Is the recipe flawed?

Is my equipment flawed or inadequate for the task?

Was there a problem with my ingredients?

Was there a problem with my procedures?

Was there an unexpected event?

[navlys]

Last week I messed up "breakfast for dinner. I forgot to put butter in the pan and the eggs stuck to the bottom (of non-stick pan). I burned the toast and underbaked the hash browns. I swear there were goblins messing with me. When my husband complained I said " that's it. I'm not cooking anymore!". Well this week I tried it again and everything came out perfectly. I guess the goblins went to someone elses house. ps.don't mess with success.

[Italiancook]

navlys, it sounds like your goblins sent some of their friends to my house. Thanks for sharing. I'm glad you "got back on the horse" and everything has turned out for the good. I guess I'll return to the kitchen, but I put the 3 pound chuck roast in the freezer. Until I know I'm over this messing up spell, I don't want to take a chance on such an expensive cut of meat.

Thanks for your input, Mike. It may be that my oven is not heating properly, since the chicken & rice didn't cook through. Other than that, I have to blame myself -- human error. Lack of focus, probably.

[Mike Nolan]

I've told this story before, but not on this site.

When we were first married, we were living in an apartment in Chicago. My wife tried making me an Angel food cake for my birthday. It was a lovely brown on the top, so she inverted it on the counter to cool.

A few minutes later there was kind of a 'floop' noise, she looked and the mostly-liquid cake had collapsed out of the pan onto the counter. The top was tasty, the rest was way undercooked.

Fast forward a few months to Thanksgiving. She makes a turkey in the oven. The top was nicely browned, but the inside was totally raw. So it went back in the oven and we finally ate turkey about 2 hours after dinner had been planned.

It wasn't until after Christmas that she figured out that the lower element in the electric oven in our apartment was totally dead. So she had broiled the cake and the turkey instead of baking them.

[Italiancook]

I am laughing out loud over your story, Mike. Be sure and tell your wife I am NOT laughing at her. I am laughing because it's a new bride story. I have one of those, too.

I was a newlywed. I had never met my in-laws, but friends of their family were coming to town. I really wanted to impress them, since I figured they'd tell all to my mother-in-law. I went to the local butcher and explained that I needed a cut of meat that would showcase my culinary abilities even though I didn't have any at that time. I also mentioned that it was such a special occasion that I was willing to break the budget.

He sold me a prime rib roast, wrote down cooking directions, and explained how to carve it. He assured me my in-laws would receive rave reviews about me.

I felt so proud when my guests and my husband were seated in the dining room waiting for me to bring out the roast. The kitchen and dining room were connected by an open doorway. Everyone had a clear view of me as I walked to present my roast.

As I walked toward everyone, I knew the meat looked gorgeous. Not just to me, but to my husband. His face was beaming with a huge smile. I knew I had a home run. It was at that exact moment that the unthinkable happened.

My roast lurched forward and fell off the platter onto the dining room floor!

My mother's-in-law friend saved the day. She jumped up, ran to the roast, picked it up and said, "I can fix this."

She washed off the roast, put it back in the pan and shoved it in the oven long enough to dry off the water. She put it back on the platter, had her husband carve it, and yes, we ate it. I was too mortified to pay any attention to how it tasted.

Many decades later, after her death, I asked around my husband's family to find out if this quick-thinking woman had shared my failure with my mother-in-law. She had not.

So I do not laugh at your wife; I laugh with her . . . as one bride to another.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's the followup to the cake/turkey story, though.

A few years ago (by which time we had been married for about 40 years), she went to make an Angel food cake and it came out really strange. Edible, but the taste and texture were all wrong.

A couple weeks later, she went to make another one. She got down what she thought was the same container of cake flour that she had used before, and that's when she figured out that it was a container of powdered sugar.

[Mike Nolan]

I do most of the cooking and baking these days, and I've tried Angel food cake about a half dozen times, so far none of them have been winners. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, I've tried 2 or 3 different recipes and several sets of baking instructions.

But tonight's souffle was delicious, as mine always are. I think next time I'll take a bunch of pictures and do a blog post on souffles, they're not as difficult and touchy as their reputation suggests.

[BakerAunt]

Either my mother or my grandmother dropped the turkey on the floor one year. It was rinsed off and the family ate it!

[Italiancook]

These stories go a long way in making me feel better about wasting so much money and labor on last week's flopped endeavors.

[Mike Nolan]

In one of the episodes of The French Chef, Julia Child dropped a chicken on the floor in the middle of preparing it to go in the oven.

She picked it up, rinsed it off, and said into the camera, 'Remember, nobody sees what happens in your kitchen other than you."

In one of the episodes of the Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr is listing the various steps he's about to do when a pan catches on fire. Without missing a beat, he takes a kitchen towel, beats out the flames, says 'Then we beat out the fire", and keeps right on cooking and talking.

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