The purpose of this blog is very simple. It is meant to help us learn from (laugh at) our mistakes in kitchen. I seem to be making a hell of a lot of them. We've talked with a friend that this kind of blog would be a breath of fresh air... and when yesterday I bumped into this lovely site of people who tried and ruined the recipe and I laughed so hard I couldn't breath I decided to share some of my own FAILS. It is not fair that only I get to laugh at my stupidity in the kitchen.
Don't get me wrong, I consider myself a good cooker, since everything I make is eatable in the end. (Except for that one time when I burnt the kale stew and still attempted to eat it. Brrrr...)
I have lived with a woman who was perfectly capable of burning down a pot of boiling pasta. I have a good man, raised by that aforementioned woman, who is munching on anything that is remotely eatable and doesn't contain broccoli, cabbage, sour cabbage or mushrooms. Too bad that the majority of my favourite food contain one of the last 3 ingredients :/
I believe that to Err is human, and I hope everybody is with me on that. I, for example, have a thing for Jamie Oliver and his programs. I come home totally wasted after a day of work and sit on the sofa watching them.
He goes: "This is so simple, fantastic recipe which you just must try!"
I think "I must try it!", and keep sitting. He goes on:
"It is so cheap, just 1 pound per portion, so easy to prepare yourself! Look, you just throw in some eggs, milk, flower and sugar together... ", while on the screen it looks like spoons and measuring cups have all went extinct and he continues, " and then you just wrap that cake around the fruits like that, like you don't care about it at ALL".
He goes : "You must try it!"
I go: "I must try it"
He goes "I swear it is so simple, you won't regret it"
I go : "It looks simple, indeed, there is no way I will regret it!"
He goes : "Ohhh, so delicious"
And I keep drooling...
I think "OK, I can do it, I can not care about folding something". Afterwards I percolate and come to the conclusion that everything that was in the recipe is available at my home, I start and pour in similar way as he did on TV and his "lazy simple version" looks like piece of art, whereas mine looks like someone vomited on the plate...
And then I regret it :D
Yesterday in the new program on how to save with your leftovers, he took leaks and zucchini and started stewing them. I was all ears for this could be a cheap dish... and then goes like that "and then you take your leftover salmon from yesterday and a filo pastry". Needless to say at this point one would need to do that leftover salmon and a filo pastry. Second of my favourite quotes from that particulate episode was "Oh, when I feel lazy, I don't even peel the garlic cloves"... and I envisioned my significant other vomiting on his plate when that garlic skin stays in his throat. Ehhh...There is the TV truth and the real truth.
Other of my epic fails included trying to make a foccacia bread from Gordon Ramsey's recipe. What he said on his show was that one needs to just sprinkle sea salt on the bottom of a pan and then pour the dough on top of it. The bread tasted good, but we needed a hammer and a chisel to get it out of the mould.
The same feeling I get when in the evening I sit on my facebook and view through my stream, filled with lovely pictures of food posted by many blog owners, which look so delicious and so simple. I divided those blogs by "it looks good and simple, but when I tried to do it it tasted like sh**" and "it looks hell of a complicated but worth my time, which usually in my version will look like someone vomited on the plate".
Recently I tried to make a millet based cake. Everything tasted great, the cake looked good, until I opened the mould and it decided it had better things to do on the floor and it flew.
-.-
Things got even more complicated when I decided to become vegan. If you have ever seen a complicated recipe, multiply it by 2 and it will just about be one of vegan stuffs. Not by means of preparation, but rather by means of ingredients. The problem lays in substituting butter and eggs and milk by all kind of mixes of nuts and seeds and funny sounding oils. The worst sad feeling (-.-) I get is when I read "Add an egg replacer of a brand XXX.". Because, you know, they are all available around the world (sarcasm).
When you attempt at doing some of the raw vegan recipes, hmmm...
Many times I go hearing "and then we add fresh coconut water", or "fresh almond milk", or "fresh dates"... and I go ....o.O....Fantastic, how am I supposed to get those in Finland... IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKING WINTER.
For example my attempt at this banana cake (the video recipe is available for it here):
The recipe for that absolutely fantastic vomit like copy is as follows:
The banana-date cake:
Roughly 800 cal
(I used what I had at home)
Sauce:
100 ml of coconut milk
3 large dates
6 small dried dates
1 ripe banana
1/2 tea spoon of cinnamon
(I suggest also 1/2 tea spoon of cacao powder)
Base
4 ripe bananas cut into slices.
Don't get me wrong, it tasted like a heaven on a spoon, provided you closed your eyes!
My today's failure, namely the donuts from the oven. You may or may not have known this, but the Fat Thursday is coming this week, so of course I have decided to prepare something for it, but since I am a vegan who tries to watch her fat intake I decided to combine two recipes, one from which I got my ingredients, which you can find here (minus the oil and instead of water unsweetened soy milk) and the method of preparing it from a Polish blog Kwestia Smaku. I was hoping for everything to look like here:
But instead I got that:
First fail was when I discovered, after working the cake, that the warm margarine is still in the microwave. Second fail was when I inserted frozen berries as a filling into the prepared buns - it never occurred to me to defrost them! You can clearly see which ones have frozen inside and which ones have jam... hint, yeasts growth is a function of temperature.Then I realized I cannot really glaze the buns with eggs, so I did it with water...
The third and final fail was when I discovered that there is no ounce of powder sugar in the house and all the kid pomades were used on gingerbread during Christmass....
To top it all I deliberately choose to use cellphone camera, as I believe that it pretty much tells you how it really looks like, without staging the lightning.
Doesn't change the fact that there is maybe 5 pcs left after 1 hour :D
So, since little disappointments build character, let's keep on cooking!
Stay tuned, I already chose a recipe for my birthday cake and I am aware that at least 2 ingredients are unavailable where I live. I envision utmost FAIL.
And if you have any of your own fails, please share with me and the rest of the world... it's not fair that only perfect dishes get to go to nice galleries :)
See the beauty in ugly :)
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