Cooking Mishaps
Cooking Mishaps.
I’ve had my fair share of them. We’ve all had them. I’ve burned the nuts under an oven broiler, scorched the bottom of a pot sitting on the stove burner while scrolling on my phone, grabbed the scalding handle of a saucepan without thinking. I’ve added cayenne pepper into a dish thinking it was paprika, and even forgotten to add the liquid (or baking powder) to a cake recipe.
If you cook for a family, which I believe many of you do, eventually you will experience similar cooking calamities or, as I like to think of them, learning experiences.
And that’s okay. It’s all a part of the cooking process, and the only thing you can do when it happens to you is laugh, carry on, and never apologise. It’s how we learn.
If you’re leaning a new skill, like knitting, and your project doesn’t turn out the way you expected, I doubt you would apologise. So why apologise if your meal doesn’t look anything like the picture in the cookbook? If it doesn’t turn out, don’t blame yourself – blame the recipe!
Sometimes I feel like it’s easy to shame the home cook. The TV cooking shows, the cookbooks, and even the online food websites set the bar too high for us everyday cooks to reach. We should, in fact, set our own bar, based on our skill level, our customs, our cooking utensils, our food choices – heck, even our mood!
My worst cooking mishap was a Thanksgiving dinner which I hosted for the whole family: all 17 aunts, uncles, and cousins. The turkey, in typical turkey fashion, was taking its sweet time to cook. It was only until a nephew asked me for the third time when dinner was going to be ready that I realized the bottom oven burner wasn’t working and was stone cold. Ouch!
We still managed to produce a tasty thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings thanks to the help of a toaster oven, the broiler (which still worked) and the microwave...and we didn’t apologise. The meal wasn’t what I expected, but it was good enough and we have a great memory to look back on, too.
Another embarrassing mishap was when I was a “new cook” hosting friends over for dinner. I served veggie pasta alfredo. It wasn’t until all the guests had left that I found the bowl of roasted veggies waiting to go into the veggie alfredo pasta dish, sitting on top of the fridge in our little kitchen. Oops.
In my humble opinion, if you take the time to make a meal and serve it to your family, then that’s good enough, and you are a rock star in the kitchen, no matter what.
Have fun cooking!
I’ve had my fair share of them. We’ve all had them. I’ve burned the nuts under an oven broiler, scorched the bottom of a pot sitting on the stove burner while scrolling on my phone, grabbed the scalding handle of a saucepan without thinking. I’ve added cayenne pepper into a dish thinking it was paprika, and even forgotten to add the liquid (or baking powder) to a cake recipe.
If you cook for a family, which I believe many of you do, eventually you will experience similar cooking calamities or, as I like to think of them, learning experiences.
And that’s okay. It’s all a part of the cooking process, and the only thing you can do when it happens to you is laugh, carry on, and never apologise. It’s how we learn.
If you’re leaning a new skill, like knitting, and your project doesn’t turn out the way you expected, I doubt you would apologise. So why apologise if your meal doesn’t look anything like the picture in the cookbook? If it doesn’t turn out, don’t blame yourself – blame the recipe!
Sometimes I feel like it’s easy to shame the home cook. The TV cooking shows, the cookbooks, and even the online food websites set the bar too high for us everyday cooks to reach. We should, in fact, set our own bar, based on our skill level, our customs, our cooking utensils, our food choices – heck, even our mood!
My worst cooking mishap was a Thanksgiving dinner which I hosted for the whole family: all 17 aunts, uncles, and cousins. The turkey, in typical turkey fashion, was taking its sweet time to cook. It was only until a nephew asked me for the third time when dinner was going to be ready that I realized the bottom oven burner wasn’t working and was stone cold. Ouch!
We still managed to produce a tasty thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings thanks to the help of a toaster oven, the broiler (which still worked) and the microwave...and we didn’t apologise. The meal wasn’t what I expected, but it was good enough and we have a great memory to look back on, too.
Another embarrassing mishap was when I was a “new cook” hosting friends over for dinner. I served veggie pasta alfredo. It wasn’t until all the guests had left that I found the bowl of roasted veggies waiting to go into the veggie alfredo pasta dish, sitting on top of the fridge in our little kitchen. Oops.
In my humble opinion, if you take the time to make a meal and serve it to your family, then that’s good enough, and you are a rock star in the kitchen, no matter what.
Have fun cooking!