List your culinary disasters.

what was i thinking?

also, never combine a decent napoli sauce with vodka and corn chips. never ever. especially when you are trying to impress a girl.

my son invented "vanilla sauce" last week: glass of cold water with a crumbled-up corn muffin in it. holy shit he wanted me to taste it! so I did! it was wretched!

IT IS SO NOT VIABLE!!

(the time i made corn beef hash made me totally wonder why this is a foodstuff humans put in their mouths and then write down to go in recipe books...) (i can actually cook also, this wasn't my failure to follow the instructions)

I got this big huge bag of really great tortilla chips last week and used most of it making tasty nacho platters- tortilla chip foundation, covered with Mexican-style jalapeno taco cheese, a big wholloping layer of refried beans, and more cheese. Unfortunately I ran out of cheese right before I had a huge urge to have these again (they're like my new favorite DIY dinner thing) and, failing taco cheese, a moment of divine idiocy struck me:

Hey, I have plenty of individually-wrapped slices of Kraft American cheese. That should be a decent substitute.

A minute in the microwave, and there was a layer of what appeared to be melted yellow plastic between the nachos and the beans. I attempted to salvage what was left untainted by the petrochemical mess, but I think I accidentally got a bit of nacho/bean/oh god that can't be cheese it can't it can't it can't actually in my mouth and let's just say I'm going to be drinking many, many cans of Pepsi tonight to kill that taste.

Rang my mum, on the basis that mums know everything: "Mum, how do you get burnt-in rice off a saucepan?" The answer, apparently, was to boil some rhubarb in the saucepan and the acid would lift the rice.

An hour later: "Mum, how do you get burnt-in rhubarb off a saucepan?"

A friend wanted to make a stir fry but had no vegetables except some of that pickled italian vegetable stuff in a jar, so he attempted to make a pickle stir-fry.

oh shit

the tilapia, baked first with lemon, oregano and olive oil, then in red wine, with a chopped tomato, onion and spring onion garnish, was not the problem

the cockles, cooked in the red wine sauce, were not the problem

the fresh crab was not the problem...it was in fact very nice

the problem

the problem

oh shit

shoot me

the problem was the fact i drizzled everything

everything

with a sauce

this sauce was made by

oh god

it was made by putting an entire box of thornton's luxury chocolates into a saucepan

yes

into a saucepan

and adding

shit

adding an entire wheel of camembert

pungent, ripe camembert

and then melting the lot over a low heat

adding quite a lot of cognac in the process

and yes

the fish and the seafood

was coated

in this unspeakable concoction

this was to feed a family

a FAMILY

i am the lowest of beings

ewwwwww

i actually had to prevent myself from involving the tinned artichokes, but this moment of sanity was a sadly isolated incident

holy shit you should be SB'd from life

or at least kitchens

i'd like to think once bitten, twice shy...but i'm gonna take a lot of work

I can't top LJ's contribution, and I think I may have mentioned some of these before, but here goes anyway:

1 - sausages (ordinary bangers), served with boiled rice, and topped off with Bist0 gravy.

2 - kedgeree, made with fish fingers instead of smoked haddock

3 - a tuna & sweetcorn risotto, er, thing that just got bigger and bigger as I added more and more things to it. Eventually it filled an entire large restaurant sized wok

4 - never tried this one actually, but a recipe given to me by a relative: Take one large tin of meatballs, one large tin of baked beans. Empty both into a casserole dish. Cover with instant mashed potato. Then cover that with a bag of crushed cheese & onion crisps. Then cover that with grated cheese. Place in oven to cook.

WHY DID YOU DO THAT

because i was trying to outdo the previous two recent instances of me cooking for the family:

hi i love cooking!

and

hi i love cooking!

but sadly, where those were (guarded) successes, this was the worst thing ever

ok seafood + cheese is usually a no-no to begin with with a handful of exceptions, but chocolate?

i was in a strange, excited, crazy spring mood, the sun was out, and i thought "let's blow some minds"

heston blumenthal, i ain't.

the sad thing is, i had a perfectly feasible and pleasant dish until the final indignity

Need to keep it simple - like one of my relatives, whose idea of a starter was to wrap a lump of cheese in a slice of ham...

I need to cleanse my body and soul with some real food, like, now

Get a kebab...

cooking the tilapia twice was jaggerism #1 -- you may need to learn some basic fundamentals of appying heat to ingredients before you try actual "recipes" again

nah i just divided the 30-minute cooking time into 20 and 10

and it wasn't a recipe, it was entirely improvised

i am wretched

nah i just divided the 30-minute cooking time into 20 and 10

^^ his point still stands my friend.

louis get a cookbook and learn to cook someone else's recipes!

this is a good idea

making olive tapenade as a topping for grilled swordfish

I didn't know how salty it was supposed to be
I didn't know how grilled it was supposed to be

the end

an entire box of thornton's luxury chocolates
adding an entire wheel of camembert

did you get this idea from a Ween record?

Lucky LJ didn't try and follow the instructions in Beefheart's "Ice Cream For Crow"...

Recently, I walked to my local grocer (a distance of about 1.5 miles) to procure the ingredients for a large stir-fry, which was to serve as several days worth of sustenance. I returned home, thawed poultry, chopped veggies & started heating up the wok, only to realize that I had failed to purchase wok oil, which I was completely out of. A schlep back to the store was out of the question (lazy), so I rooted through a stash of unfamiliar Asian products my girlfriend had left in the cupboard, in search of a reasonable substitute. Unfortunately, the best thing I could come up with was rice vinegar. Of course, the resulting concoction was disgusting, but I tried to pretend it was tolerable & ended up making myself sick in the process. The rest of the gigantic portion was discarded, and I ended up having to walk back to the store anyway, to get something else to eat.

great thread. i don't think i've had a culinary disaster in a few years, but i have a theory that the heating element you use can make or break a dish. one year i had an oven in a rented apartment that produced bad food no matter what i cooked, but as soon as i moved to a new place with a different oven, the food was good again. i get really good vibes from my current oven.

My mother says that quite a bit. Particularly wrt gas vs electric ovens. There's also this false sense of confidence from having an electric fan oven - "it's a fan oven, the temperature will stay even, it's designed that way!" - that just doesn't work out in practice.

Not quite on the level of "melted Thornton's chocolates over fish", but I once tried putting chilli sauce over vanilla ice cream - absolutely disgusting...

i don't know...i think that's in the same bizarre ballpark

i once had salmon with a jack daniels and chocolate glaze that was really good, but was cooked by you know a real life chef in a restaurant

i mean tilapia cooked in red wine is suspicious too...

i just can't get over louis's dish. i mean, it is beyond strongo cuisine isn't it?

i'm sorry louis to single you out but seriously that all blew my mind

Where did you come up with 30 minutes cooking time for tilapia?

There are starving AIG execs in New Jersey who could have used the food you ruined --

i expect louis's family looked at their plates and calmly ascribed what they saw to his streak.

Were you on acid when you did this? Good lord.

See, the idea of culinary experimentation is a noble one, but you have to have an innate, deep understanding of flavours and how they work or might work together. It isnt something that comes easily, it takes years of cooking basics and branching out - so I've found, anyway.

BUT ANYONE KNOWS CHOCOLATE DOES NOT BELONG ON FISH :|

Unaware of their potency, using a handful of extra small dried chilis in a pasta sauce. It was more than beyond hot. To even call it hot would be a category mistake, it was in a whole new dimension.

Haha, OMG, Louis, what on EARTH were you thinking? Did you not taste your chocolate and cheese concoction and go "nah, this is horrible, I'm not ruining everything by actually using it"?

My dad once put salt - he figured it was sugar - in his yoghurt. He started gagging. My mum asked what was wrong but he couldn't answer and only pointed at the glass of yoghurt. So what does mum do? Tastes it as well. Dual vomit fest. hahahahahahaha

I once did a pasta sauce with spinach. Had washed it... but not enough. The dirt didn't really add anything. It was horrid. :-)

improvising in cooking is fucking hard, don't ever try and do it until you've been cooking for years.

I always follow recipes but am starting to feel I've some sense of what flavours go together. The only things I improvise on are like marinades for chicken...

In my defence, if I was cooking something with the absolute priority of being nice, I wouldn't be nearly so outlandish. This was as much surreal performance art as it was cookery. With our stomachs as collateral.

Don't start that bullshit. Yesterday you were all "oh my god what have I done" and rightly so, and now you're trying to run the "oh it was performance art" bluff? I just suggest-banned you again.

I think it takes somebody who really hates their family to perpetrate performance art on them.

This incident seems a bit emblematic of yr approach to life, doesn't it, LJ?

yeah exactly if someone in my family did this I'd be raging.

Well, the performance art aspect came in the melted box of Thornton's, and I still hoped that what I made would taste nice; the ingredients were washed, dressed and prepared as food...I'm not denying for a minute that it was a grotesque failure, and that I heavily regret it, and that it was disgusting and wrong-minded etc etc but if you're suggest-banning people for relating anecdotes of their own amusing slip-ups then you really shouldn't be a site moderator. I mean, my latest post was written with the intention of looking at my mishap in a slightly more light-hearted fashion, and you come over all hardman about it? Give me a fucking break. xxp

If this was performance art, I'm sure yr family is grateful you weren't naked. I mean, you WEREN'T naked, yea?

he's not jamie oliver now is he?

I wasn't naked, I had hoped to impress and was thus all cut-up when I realised it had failed, I apologised to my parents (who were understanding and described it as a "learning curve"), and my brothers didn't touch it, opting instead for a pizza. Oh, how I hate them all. Next time I'll fucking include strychnine.

Wait, you hate them for not eating yr awful meal?

Quit riding me or I'll make you a casserole

LJ, you'll be lucky if they don't respond by sneaking a turd into the next meal they cook for you.

Also, don't complain about being ridden when you arrive at the stable with the saddle strapped to yr back.

Owwww.

I made a huge dish of linguine, about 2 pounds, with a kind of rich lemon zest cream sauce. For some reason though I had the impression that "lemon zest" meant the white stuff on the inside of the peel -- what I now know is called "pith." Should have been tipped off by how many lemons and how much time it took to grate as much "zest" as the recipe required. Lemon pith, if you've never eaten it, has the weird quality of tasting really awful but also like something which you can imagine acquiring as a taste -- so I actually ate quite a lot of this, thinking, "this tastes weird but it must just be a challenging flavor I have to learn to appreciate" -- but at some point I called my mom who told me that I'd ruined the whole thing and would I please stop eating it.

Haha ok now thats a mistake I can easily see being made :) In fact I used to get pith and zest confused in my mind too - thankfully I never made a dish out of it though :)

when I first met my husband he had this thing about leftovers & eggs. whether it was leftover chinese food, or steamed veggies, or...whatever, he was always adamant that they worked perfectly in a scramble with a few eggs the following day. I never really enjoyed this trait much, but I tolerated it. Mostly I'd bow out, but sometimes he'd start preparing while I was sleeping and surprise me with a plate of whatever...creation he'd made. This all came to crashing halt on the day that he decided to mix up Country-Style Pork leftovers with his eggs. Country-Style Pork = boneless pork spareribs, covered in this thick, rich brown sauce that mainly consisted of Soy Vey, liquid smoke and other things I can't remember. It was so saucey that, when mixed with the beaten eggs, the eggs stayed in little separated chunks as they cooked in the frying pan...they just didn't want to hang out with the sauce AT ALL. And this was one of those days where he dished it all up for me and then came and woke me up. I sat down, looked at my plate...it looked like dog food and barf. I looked over at him and just said, "Dude, there's no way." The look of it was SO bad I couldn't even try to taste it. He ate one mouthful and spat it into the sink. It was SO very, very wrong. And whenever he gets wistful about his leftovers + eggs = magic breakfast, I remind him of the Country Style Pork fiasco. So now leftovers are just leftovers.

If your husband were raised in the midwest (assuming you are from the states), the leftovers would like have been compiled and made into a hash or casserole. This would probably have been slightly preferable to the "with eggs" option, but not by much.

*likely

We used to make bubble and squeak that way! But only with left over chopped bits of roast veg like potato and kumera and maybe a bit of cbbage and onion.

my husband serves as a warning re: the limits of 'the scramble'.

I have once made an "alfredo" sauce while stoned using everything white and vaguely dairy or cheese-like in the kitchen at the time. Shit was delicious in the moment tho.

I made muffins once and forgot to put in the flour.

I made a "quick and easy" pasta recipe where you combined everything (pasta, sauce, water) at the start but forgot the water part and wound up with a burned mess and a takeout pizza.

Made some spinach cannelloni, which typically call for a pinch of nutmeg. With the filling still hot in the pan I decided I couldn't taste the nutmeg so I added some more. Still couldn't taste it. Added some more. Still couldn't taste it. Added some more ... until ... It was a culinary disaster of the mildly psychedelic variety.

I have once made an "alfredo" sauce while stoned using everything white and vaguely dairy or cheese-like in the kitchen at the time.

this reminds me of various dairy products I used in lolcollege (yeah, probably stoned) to prepare Kraft dinner when there was a dearth of milk and/or butter: sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt, salad dressing. I guess this doesn't really count, though, as I typically dumped in enough ketchup after the fact to obscure any taste differentials.

I have once made an "alfredo" sauce while stoned using everything white and vaguely dairy or cheese-like in the kitchen at the time.

A friend who was at that time a horrible cook once called me for help after she tried to make a "cream sauce" by using every white liquid she had - mayonnaise, sour cream, yogurt, eventually some flour - everything except cream. She apparently though being white and liquid was enough.

Once I made scones with plain flour by mistake and wondered why they came out like little rocks :(

The biggest disaster I can recall making is a stew that had an artichoke in it, broken up into its leaves. I was about to toss it as inedible, but my Ugandan housemate insisted that I not and he ate the whole thing (without the hard parts of the artichoke leaves, of course).

Oh I absolutely hate to have to throw good food away because it's been ruined. Luckily it doesnt happen to me too often - burning's the only problem these days thanks to a completely useless electric stove which I suspect has a broken thermostat as it just gets way too hot even if I only put it on 100C :(

have never read this before now, good show all

sargnt88 (4:12:49 AM): just for the record
sargnt88 (4:12:52 AM): a run down of louis' recipe
sargnt88 (4:14:06 AM): tilapia, lemon, oregano, olive oil, red wine, chopped tomato, onion, an entire box of luxury chocolates, an entire wheel (? what the hell? lol british has an actual wheel of cheese) of camembert cheese

continuing on the "all dairies are not the same" tip:

This one time I was VERY DRUNK and housesitting for my aunt around christmastime and I had one of those packages of 7-minute pasta alfredo.
So the recipe called for milk, but I didn't have any, but I DID have eggnog, which had me all excited about my new creation: the Xmas Pasta.
So of course I cooked it and of course i didn't even taste this probably already horrible concotion before I went through my aunt's spice cabinet to see how it should be seasoned.
I finally decided on a blend of lemon pepper ("Heeeyyy! I like pepper! and I LOOOVEE lemon! this'll be great!!!") and celery salt (similar thought process).
By the time it was finished it was reaalllllllllllyyyyyy far from edible. The dog wouldn't even touch it. But never wanting to waste food I popped open a couple cold cans of Schlitz and forced it down. ahhh, good times.

what is wrong with yall

Also, to make it bearable I doused it with Tony Chachere's, which is this fantastic southern Louisiana spice blend that sort of makes everything taste better.

(xpost) evidence suggests that none of us can cook...

*I* can cook, damn y'all, and I haven't made such culinary "experiments" since I was 16 and bored. Geez. Its not that hard to whip up a tuna pasta or a beef casserole by sticking to the basics!

i mean how could you seriously think that egg nog would be an acceptable substitute

are you retarded?!

no offense!!!!

I know rite. Its sweet!

i mean if you were fucked up, mayyyyybe

Mind you this reminds me of the time I was going thru the fridge when living at parents and saw a jug of liquid and, being a juice jug, I thought "oh nice, pinapple juice!"

And I took a big slug, only to find out it was some kind of horrible fat runoff from cooking :/ BLEUGH.

egg nog is bad, making a sauce for fish from a box of chocolates + a wheel of cheese is just taking it to a whole other level imo

you know, that's not even abt 'dont you know how to cook?' that's like 'have you ever eaten food in yr life?'

once missed the fact that the rice vinegar was supposed to be diluted, so I added it straight to the rice, resulting in the vinegar-iest sushi rice ever. the first bite was good--ooh, flavorful!-- but each additional bite made you progressively queasier.

this thread is A+ hilarious

i haven't had any chocolate-and-cheese-on-fish culinary disasters lately (fuck, EVER), but i did recently make rice pudding out of the following ingredients:

leftover rice
cardamom seeds
milk
2 sugar packets
2 international delight vanilla creamers
7-8 crumbled ginger cookies
raisins

and it was pretty good.

(this was at a rental house i was sharing with friends and we didn't have vanilla extract, but for some reason there were those gross creamers.)

sometime last year i made chicken broth from a chicken i had roasted and eaten and then i accidentally left it (the broth) out on the counter to cool for too long.

then i thought, oh why not use it? i made chicken soup for my tired husband and we wound up with food poisoning. oops.

My mum's freezer died so she made a veg 'rage' curry that we had to eat for about 3 weeks.

All the frozen veg from the plot, in a curry, whether it worked or not.

And the slightest complaint was met with a steely look.

When I was a kid (like 13 or so) I made Kraft mac & cheese but somehow missed the instruction on the box to drain the noodles after boiling them so I dumped the cheese powder in with all the water and noodles and ended up with macaroni and cheese soup.

One Christmas a relative cooked a Christmas pudding in the microwave for 20 minutes on full power. The result looked like a lump of tar.

Apparently I haven't yet mentioned the time I didn't wash the spinach properly. :-(

super hungry last night. rushing. less than 30 mins to cook and eat. don't want crap, trying to eat well. okay. grill salmon/veg 10 mins. super quick dressing. done. hmm, packet of cous cous, what could be easier? it's been sitting here for months. right, boil water, add to cous cous and wait 5 mins. easy.

boil water, boil water, boil water. argh. so frustrating that i can't seem to use a kettle. occasionally this happens with cups of tea/coffee too. heated the cous cous in the microwave and it came out as some sort of rancid gloopy mess.

what went uncommented in this thread is that louis's "good recipes" that he linked to sound, and i say this with love, totally bizarre as well.

xp dude what is this issue you are having re: boiling water?

http://cache3.vuze.com/assets/042/14684240/60069/3JSG7VJESP54O6CAXKJ2P4OHYHSRIQMM_3.jpg

forgetting to turn the kettle on when i'm in a rush/mornings. xpost

^ louis cooking for his family obv

i just looked at louis's other recipes - prawns in sauerkraut?

i cater for weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate events

here's my card - it's edible

the prawns in sauerkraut were garnish for a lamb liver

really having trouble wrapping my head around that tbh

xxpost I need fiber, not paper

wow, coffee and smoked mackerel xxxpost

it is a tart and playful matting of paper, cumin and steamed cauliflower, i insist you have a nibble xp

It wasn't a disaster, but a recent corn + potato chowder was just depressing. It started with about 3 dozen ears from the last of my dad's corn patch -- they were already more starchy than sweet, and I didn't get around to them for 3 days or so, so they just weren't very good. We had creamed corn for one meal, then I tried to jazz it up by making a chowder, and it was just starch on top of starch. Bleh. But there's nothing like the first few ears of the summer.

xpost -- LJ should try to wring a "Saw"-type screenplay out of all this bullcrap he tries. Instead of having to cut off his own hand to escape, the hero has to eat some ghastly thing concocted by the creepy be-lipsticked villain in drag.

"ha ha! the key to the padlock securing you to the table is inside this roast chicken that has been stuffed with sprouts, doused in brandy, set alight, and then covered in a radish and dandelion sauce!"

that sounds fairly tame as my recipes go tbh

one time I got drunk and poured whiskey in everything

My mom tried to deep fry a pot roast once. It only cooked the outer shell, and when it was sliced open, it was a Shining-style curtain of hot bloody water. This would not have been so bad had she not volunteered to feed missionaries that night.

I learned qwhen you have company, stick to something you've tried before.

Please tell us that it was sliced open at the table in front of the guests...

Yes it was!!! :D

my latest minor "disasters" have been, umm relatively minor, ever since the time I accidentally put twice as much water as should have been in the cake mix and made Weird Cake:

- tossed potato wedges with garlic, rosemary, onion, and oil, but then accidentally left the oven set on a high broil and, after the flames were dealt with, had roughly edible potatoes covered with the ashy corpses of the other items

- shredded big fresh brussel sprouts into a slaw and cooked with ginger, to serve under fish; I think this was sound in concept, except that I always, always greatly misjudge the power of fresh grated ginger

- if trying to make a lemon + cream sauce, use some sort of already-tangy dairy like sour cream or something, or you might make something more like a "curdle sauce"

- I don't even know how to start going into what went wrong with the cornmeal-breaded fried chicken

Weird Cake

Would that be like a cake soup?
First time cooking sponge cake in the microwave, the resultant mass turned out like packing foam.

Weird Cake actually looked and felt like dense cornbread, except sweet and cake-tasting -- would have been edible and tasty and non-weird to anyone who had never had either cornbread or cake

I did the ginger thing again on Sunday, btw. Possibly my problem is that a whole big-ass chunk of ginger somehow grates down to like one teaspoon of "you will not be able to taste anything else you put me in"

Tried making tacos the way my mom makes them one day. Sauteed the vegetables to put in the meat and got some lightly fried tortillas going, but I guess the ground beef I used was a little old. As soon as the meat hit the saucepan, my roommates knew something was wrong because the steam that rose had a terrible, unrecognizable stench to it. My roommate described it as the smell of ground beef cooking if the ground beef came from zombies. I always use unfrozen meats the day I buy them now.

worst thing i've done lately is put way too much mint in a frittata but that still ended up pretty good. mint + sriracha = pleasant lip-numby-burny sensation

nabs, to make a lemon cream sauce you should probably mix the citrus with wine or pan drippings or something first, then add the cream SLOWLY while stirring.

totally makes sense -- thanks!

can i just

if you never poured homemade luxury chocolate and camembert cheese over tilapia, you probably don't belong itt

thread now locked to all but one person in the entire history of the planet then

the phrase "luxury chocolate" is killing me.

How else can you describe chocolates filled with with low-grade rum and brandy? Especially those with chocolate sprinkles on top?

maybe LJ should write The Ween Cookbook, complete with this fabulous "Chocolate and Cheese" repice

We're trying to bring this thread back to "the culinary disasters of normal human beings" rather than "LJ does fusion and by fusion we mean fusion atom bomb".

ginger somehow grates down to like one teaspoon

Key point is, fresh ginger is about a billion times stronger than the dried powder. Actually I use this Julian Graves' Chinese Stem Ginger in syrup, which is pretty good, hot but not bleeeeeeeeeeurrAAAAARRGGH.

there's nothing wrong with chocolate and cheese by itself -- a cup of hot chocolate is often served with cheese for a snack. pretty typical south american thing iirc.

but melting it all and pouring over a heavily seasoned piece of whitefish? dear god.

The fish is the real problem here.

if using tequila & limes to marinate chicken prior to grilling, please remember to use the tequila sparingly, unless you enjoy eating hot booze

adding cooked rice to canned tomato soup is a fine idea; cooking the rice in the tomato soup is not

what happens? tomato gruel?

or a dry red lump?

(xxpost) use Malibu rum in trifles sparingly...

i'm guessing undercooked rice and overcooked soup

roasted potatoes -- if a lot of rock salt makes them taste amazing, a WHOLE lot of rock salt doesn't make them taste more amazing.

it was a gummy glutinous burned tomato mess xxp

Not my personal disaster, but one I had to eat: chicken noodle soup is not an acceptable substitute for cream of chicken soup in a casserole.

Wasabi-lemon-olive oil dipping sauce was a sadly tasteless fail this past weekend. Wasabi powder really tasted of not much of anything, maybe it has to sit around to develop spiciness or something.

my experiences with powdered wasabi have all been underwhelming, jaq

yeah I'm sorry LJ, but your stuff is an offence to food. a heinous offence.

LJ - you should have been made to sit and eat all that food for wasting the fuck out of it. in fact I should report whoever was there who didn't make you to social services for neglect of duty.

I once put a bunch of salt and cayenne on popcorn. I can generally handle cayenne. the heat doesn't bother me. but for some reason after the first few kernels I started coughing violently and couldn't stop for like 5 minutes and almost vomited at a few points.

I had a similar popcorn failure last weekend actually!

I often like to add things to microwave popcorn once its done, just a little paprika or whatever, but this time I thought "hey I'll add some of this vegetable stock powder, thatll be great!"

It was queerly unpleasant. I think the fake butter clashed with it somehow.

my roommate a few nights ago topped her popcorn with the following:
-hot sauce, lime juice, tequila

she was surprise when it turned into a soggy mess!!

i like to put curry powder on popcorn btw.

housemate with a flair for 'improvising' decided that while making a thai curry one evening, that evaporated milk was a fine substitute for coconut milk. I could only politely eat a mouthful before begging off. Ugh. The texture...the taste...ARG it was all so bloody WRONG

the recipe I used for my first ever pumpkin pie said that cooking the pie on the floor of the oven was the best way to go for a crispy crust and evenly cooked pie. the pie looked a treat when it came out of the oven. Thanksgiving Day, in front of my husband's family I cut the pie and as I placed a segment on a plate, I notice the bottom half, including some of the filling was BLACK. the crust felt like burned wood, the thing was charred to within in an inch of its life. Luckily the top half was still in tact, so I told everyone to grab a spoon and scoop up some filling...recommending that they not dig too deep.

housemate with a flair for 'improvising' decided that while making a thai curry one evening, that evaporated milk was a fine substitute for coconut milk.

Thats interesting cos Carnation do make a coconut-flavoured evaporated milk thats meant to be some kind of lo-cal substitute for coconut milk. I imagine it'd be hideous.

it's the consistency of DeWitts. Chalky, nasty.

i like to put curry powder on popcorn btw.

― ian, Wednesday, July 15, 2009 7:36 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

A+++++++++

Love the story about using Schlitz to mask alfredo eggnog pasta; classic example of punching yourself in the stomach when you have a headache!

adding cooked rice to canned tomato soup is a fine idea; cooking the rice in the tomato soup is not

Can't speak to this but I routinely cook quinoa and couscous in tomato soup and it's just fine -- did it tonight in fact.

http://photos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs132.snc1/5654_121922482089_596287089_3122791_3579048_n.jpg

no luxury chocolate & camembert sauce = A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Microwaved Kraft singles and Texas Pete quesadilla did not work out.

how could you screw that up

No results found for "shall i make weird dinner".

THE PAST IS A GROTESQUE ANIMAL

lol we did well there

props to Stevie D for the inspiration

yes. also funny to see other acclaimed lyricsmiths pass through, unable to add to the glory

would anyone like to know what 'weird dinner' putatively consists of

This is not my disaster, nor anyone's here, but it is a level of disaster to which we should all not-aspire:

Anyway, the story Pattinson tells to preface what he is about to do is roughly this:

Last year, he says, he had a business idea. What if, he said to himself, “pasta really had the same kind of fast-food credentials as burgers and pizzas? I was trying to figure out how to capitalize in this area of the market, and I was trying to think: How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?”

He says he went so far as to design a prototype that involved the use of a panini press, and then, he says, he went even further, setting up a meeting with Los Angeles restaurant royalty Lele Massimini, the cofounder of Sugarfish and proprietor of the Santa Monica pasta restaurant Uovo. “And I told him my business plan,” Pattinson recalls, “and his facial expression didn’t even change afterwards. Let alone acknowledge what my plan was. There was absolutely no sign of anything from him, literally. And so it kind of put me off a little bit.” (Massimini says: “It’s 100 percent true, everything he told you.”)

Nevertheless, Pattinson says, he conceived of a brand name for his product, a soft little moniker that kind of summed up what he thought his pasta creation looked like: Piccolini Cuscino. Little Pillow. He thought he’d give the product another go, with me now: “Maybe if I say it in GQ, maybe, like, a partner will just come along.”

So he now takes hold of the bag that he’s brought from the corner store, out of which he produces the following:

One (1) giant, filthy, dust-covered box of cornflakes. (“I went to the shop, and they didn’t sell breadcrumbs. I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck it! I’m just getting cornflakes. That’s basically the same shit.’ ”)

One (1) incredibly large novelty lighter. (“I always liked the idea of doing a little flambé, like the brand name, with kind of burnt ends at the top.”)

Nine (9) packs of presliced cheese. (“I got, like, nine packs of presliced cheese.”)

Sauce. (Like a tomato sauce? “Just any sauce.”)

He puts on latex gloves. He pulls out some sugar and some aluminum foil and makes a bed, a kind of hollowed-out sphere, with the foil. He holds up a box of penne pasta that he had in the house. “All right,” Pattinson says. “So obviously, first things first, you gotta microwave the pasta.”

I watch as he pours dry penne into a cereal bowl, covers it with water, and places it in the microwave for eight minutes. He says using penne is already new territory for him. Usually he uses…well… “Do you know the pasta that’s, like, a little, it’s like a blob, a sort of squiggly blob?”

“Gnocchi?”

“No, no, no, no, it looks like—what would you even call it? It looks like a sort of messy…like, the hair bun on a girl.”

“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.

“There was one type of pasta that worked. It definitely wasn’t penne.”

Nevertheless, penne and water in the microwave for eight minutes. In the meantime, he takes the foil and he begins dumping sugar on top of it. “I found after a lot of experimentation that you really need to congeal everything in an enormous amount of sugar and cheese.” So after the sugar, he opens his first package of cheese and begins layering slice after slice onto the sugar-foil. Then more sugar: “It really needs a sugar crust.”

Then he realizes that he’s forgotten the outer layer, which is supposed to be breadcrumbs but today will be crushed-up cornflakes, and so he lifts the pile of cheese and sugar and crumbles some cornflakes onto the aluminum foil before placing the sugar-cheese back on top of it. Then he adds sauce, which is red. The microwave dings, and Pattinson promptly burns himself on the bowl of pasta. He sighs, heavily, looking at it. “No idea if it’s cooked or not.” He dumps the pasta in anyway. At this point, his spirits have visibly begun to flag. “I mean, there’s absolutely no chance this is gonna work. Absolutely none.”

The little pillow now mostly built, he pours more sugar on top of it and then produces the top half of a bun, which he hollows out, places it on top of the rest of whatever the hell this thing is, and…begins burning the top of the bun with the giant novelty lighter. “I’m just gonna do the initials.…”

“You look like you’re cooking meth,” I say, because he does.

“I’m really trying to sell this company. I’m doing this for my brand.”

At this point, he accidentally ignites one of his latex gloves, which promptly melts onto his palm. He yells in pain. Then he gingerly holds up the finished product: some approximation of a P, followed by a C, for Piccolini Cuscino, burned into the top of a hamburger bun.

He starts wrapping the whole thing up with more aluminum foil, and then compacts it, and then wraps it some more, and then squeezes it again. Suddenly he stops: “Can you actually put foil in an oven?”

I say yes, you can, but what you absolutely cannot do is put foil in a microwave. And he says cool, cool, and then he goes looking for his oven, which he’s never used before, and this is a nice house, so there are multiple options, and the one he settles on, well: It looks like another microwave to me. He assures me it is not.

“I reckon probably…10 minutes?”

He puts the aluminum sphere, the little pillow, into what he thinks is an oven and I think is a microwave. He attempts to turn it on. “I actually knew how to do this before,” he tells me. “I literally did this yesterday. And now it’s just impossible. It’s going to look like I can’t cook at all.”

He fumbles at some more buttons. “Oh, oh, oh,” he says, excitedly now. “A thousand watts, there you go.”

Proudly he is walking back toward the counter that his phone is on when, behind him, a lightning bolt erupts from the oven/microwave, and Pattinson ducks like someone outside has opened fire. He’s giggling and crouching as the oven throws off stray flickers of light and sound.

“The fucking electricity…oh, my God,” he says, still on the floor. And then, with a loud, final bang, the oven/microwave goes dark.

In the silence, Pattinson and I both stare at the mysterious piece of machinery built into the wall behind him.

“Yeah, I think I have to leave that alone,” he says, sighing again, picking himself off the floor. “But that is a Piccolini Cuscino.”

thats good content

Oh my god.

It’s like, dirtbag Mr Bean or something. But better. So good.

<3

He’s giggling and crouching...

Hmmm. This sounds like a man with time on his hands and money to burn.

the problem was the fact i drizzled everything

everything

with a sauce

this sauce was made by

oh god

it was made by putting an entire box of thornton's luxury chocolates into a saucepan

yes

into a saucepan

and adding

shit

adding an entire wheel of camembert

pungent, ripe camembert

and then melting the lot over a low heat

adding quite a lot of cognac in the process

and yes

the fish and the seafood

was coated

in this unspeakable concoction

― leigh exodus (country matters), Saturday, March 21, 2009 3:58 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/05/12/chocolate-milk-simmered-chicken-dont-knock-it-until-you-try-it/?itid=hp_rhp__hp-top-table-low_life-2%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

Could Leigh have been onto something? (Or just...on something?)