Tonight's Accident Waiting to Happen

Note to self: when sifting or mixing dry ingredients, it is not a good idea to leave the mixing bowl in the sink while the faucet is running. I wonder how much water splashed into the bowl, because the batter was awfully sticky. The unfortunate,unintentional addition of liquid occurred before I was supposed to cut the butter into the flour (I was trying to make scones).

I am not sure why I was so absent-minded as to leave the faucet on. I could have been thinking about any number of things... our dishwasher is broken, and the baby didn't want to eat most of his dinner (I wouldn't either, I prepared it!), I'm procrastinating on a bit of freelance copywriting work that I have to do, and I hadn't adequately dried the mixing bowl before beginning this whole ill-fated journey. Ah well.

The directions specifically indicated not to knead the batter very much. They also said that if the batter was much too sticky, to add a little bit of flour, but just a little. I am not quite sure of how much I added, but I don't think it was very much, because the batter was the texture of glue when I dropped it onto the baking sheet.

I was supposed to lightly flour a surface and knead the dough ten times, but I figured I would just try to do it in the mixing bowl.

I just opened the oven door; things do not look promising. Stay tuned.

ETA: It looks like wet, hot, mushy oatmeal, smells like a dog that just came in from the rain, and tastes like pure baking powder! I must have not mixed the dry ingredients very well. Then again, those dry ingredients weren't very dry! Maybe I'll rethink those plans to bake my son a birthday cake.

Tonight's Culinary Disaster

Tonight I found out why a recipe might direct you to flip something over halfway through cooking. This is a piece of roasted tofu. One side is rather edible; the other has the texture and taste of a tree trunk, due to the cook's negligence. I was trying out this roasted tofu recipe, but I guess I got carried away with all of the steps involved in creating the true culinary monstrosity of the evening: dandelion greens.

I do not know what possessed me to make them. They sounded exotic, but they were incredibly, inedibly bitter - no amount of wine, soy sauce, vegetable stock, garlic, and ginger (the ingredients in a recipe from How to Cook Everything - I think I shall write How To Cook Nothing) could mask their unpleasant taste.

(Of course, now that I think about it, the unpleasant taste could have been due to some unknown cooking error?)

So, you're probably wondering now, when are you going to be lucky enough to be invited over for dinner?

Brownie Blues

I was craving brownies. I'm the kind of person who can screw up a brownie mix, so you can imagine the challenge of trying to make brownies from scratch. But a woman on a moms' message board claimed that it was an easy task.

I madly searched the pantry, and the only substance of chocolate origin that I could find was a tin of Jacques Torres hot chocolate mix that had expired in June. It consisted of chocolate nibs, sugar, vanilla and cornstarch - I figured I would try it out.

Googling, I saw that many people were fans of the Ghirardelli recipe for Classic Chocolate Brownies, so I decided to use that as the basis for my experiment, even though I had no baking chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate chips. Since the hot chocolate mix already included vanilla and some sugar, I didn't add any vanilla and added half the sugar. I thought this seemed reasonable. I also omitted the salt since some of my butter was salted (I had three-quarters of a stick of unsalted butter and a quarter of a stick of salted).

I melted the butter with 1/2 cup of nibs. Then I added two eggs. This is where I believe things started to go awry, as I don't think I waited for the mixture to cool before adding the eggs. One of my problems with cooking is that I am too impatient to go through all of the necessary steps. So instead of sifting all the dry ingredients together and then adding them to the wet, I just put each one in separately. Unfortunately, this meant that the baking powder was probably not distributed evenly.

There was definitely something wrong with the batter. I remember from my years of Duncan Hines that the batter is supposed to be creamy; mine was almost leaden in comparison; I hesitate to use this analogy, but it almost looked like a small turd. I wondered if I had any milk. Only half a container of half-and-half. What the hell. I threw it in. At least now I could stir the batter and lick it off the spoon.

I decided to get creative and chopped some walnuts, then threw them into the batter. This was the only good idea I had.

The result was less than appealing. The surface had a granular quality, probably the result of inadequately mixed sugar. And the brownies weren't chocolatey enough; this could be because of the ill-advised addition of half-and-half. They were too cakey yet not risen enough, if this makes any sense. I remembered those Duncan Hines brownies - so chewy, irresistibly fudgy and moist, yet slightly cracked on top - and tried to imagine their flavor, letting the memory erase the present taste.

About Me

I'm a new mom who was catapulted from NYC into the heartland. For the past 15 years, I've done nothing but order in, but now I am forced to learn the most basic kitchen skills. My palate is refined from years of eating well-prepared, delicious food, but my abilities are that of someone who subsists on instant ramen.

The Internet is replete with success stories - Julie/Julia, etc. Here is a story of failure after failure. Why am I starting this blog, you might ask? I guess I'm looking for advice from those more experienced, or maybe my goal is to share a laugh or two.