I've had countless cooking disasters. So have most people I know - in fact some of the best stories from my mum and other friends are about when cooking went terribly, horribly wrong.
Funny thing is, all those lovely cookbooks and foodie mags we read seem to describe some weird alternate cooking universe where eggs turn smoothly into custard, oil never catches fire in the frying pan and chocolate never freezes solid when it's supposed to melt. Cooking shows are a bit the same, although I admit Masterchef does have a few recipes for disaster (see what I did there?)
Plus, I had a couple of really weird moments recently when friends of mine told me they were thinking of cooking something sweet but they thought it 'wouldn't be good enough to show me'. I hate the idea that blogging about my cooking experiments might actually discourage people from trying things.
So this is a post dedicated to cooking failures, disaster stories, and tips and tricks for beginners at cooking sweets.
Failure No. 1 - Serving raw meat by accident
When Mum was first going out with Dad, she decided to impress him with her fine cooking skills at a dinner party. She decided to do a Beef Wellington which was big in the 1960s. It's a long piece of eye fillet steak wrapped in pastry and baked in a hot oven, so that the pastry browns perfectly and the meat inside cooks to a perfect rareness - pink to red inside.
Problem was that Mum got a little confused and purchased Scotch fillet instead of eye fillet. Any difference? Well, yes, because Scotch fillet is about double the size of eye fillet. So instead of a beautiful rare piece of juicy steak, Mum carved at the table, for everyone to see, a massive raw hunk of meat encased in pastry. She was forever grateful to Dad for setting a polite example and manfully chewing his way through raw scotch fillet. Neither of them ever really got over this incident.
Failure No. 2 - Setting yourself on fire in front of the whole family
It was Auntie Petra's turn to host the family Christmas dinner. She had made a traditional plum pudding of which she was rightly proud. Finally the big moment came to flame the pudding. Carefully she heated the brandy and poured a generous quantity over the pudding, where it pooled deeply in the bottom of the dish. Then, with dining room lights turned off, she lit the brandy and began walking quickly in from the kitchen. Too quickly. With the speed of her gait, the flaming brandy slopped all over her hands, then her arms. She shot into the darkened dining room shrieking, with arms, hands and pudding aflame. Luckily, brandy flames at a low temperature, so she wasn't seriously injured, but the rest of the family will never forget Petra and The Pudding.
Failure No. 3 - Setting the kitchen on fire
I was sixteen and home alone at Dad's flat while he was working late. I decided to make some eggs and bacon for dinner, as you do when you're sixteen, and I got the frying pan onto the heat and poured some oil in it to prepare to cook. Meanwhile, an interesting program on the telly caught my attention, and I strolled into the lounge to check it out.
A few minutes later I became aware of an odd orange light emanating from the bar that linked the kitchen to the lounge. I slouched across, in a teenagery way, to investigate and discovered that the entire wall of the kitchen was covered in flames. The plastic exhaust fan was melting into the frying pan, all the wood cupboards were blackening and starting to catch. I was strongly tempted by the option of running, screaming, for the front door and leaving it to burn, but I did feel a bit guilty at the thought of burning Dad's house down. So I bravely dumped a full box of flour on the source of the fire and batted the other flames with a wet teatowel. I caught it just in time. The smell of charcoal, burnt flour and melted plastic was truly awful. I retired to Mum's house and left a note on Dad's door with the immortal words, "Hi Dad. It's not as bad as it looks. Love Astrid.'
Failure No. 4 - The cat sat on it
It was Dad's 50th birthday and Mum was fired up to make a meringue and buttercream layer cake, with the meringue layers piped into the letters '5' and '0'. Everything was going swimmingly. The delicate meringue layers formed the numbers perfectly, and Mum stacked them in between sheets of baking paper in a stack on our kitchen table.
We popped out to get the final decorative touches before the cake was assembled. By the time we returned, Lord Henry Wootton, in his inscrutable feline way, had discovered the meringue stack. The combination of softness and crinkly paper proved irrestistable and he created a nest for himself by crushing all the meringue to fit perfectly around his plump form. Ww found him there dozing peacefully when we returned. The meringue was ruined.
Failure No. 5 - Chili can burn your lips off (part 1)
Mum and her half indian boyfriend (pre-Dad) went to an Indian restaurant. They liked spicy food and prided themselves on being able to handling chili better than most. The waiter encouraged them to go for a medium hot curry, but they declared, perhaps a little dramatically, that they could cope with any and all chili. The resulting meal (which they had to eat, to save face) left blisters around Mum's lips. Ouch.
Failure No. 6 - Chili can burn your lips off (part 2)
When staying with a friend overseas I offered to cook a delicious szechuan bean curd dish for my host and his friend. I had cooked it many times and knew the recipe backwards. I went shopping and bought my critical ingredients - hoisin, bean and chili bean sauces. Confident in my recipe, I also failed to taste the dish before I served it.
My pleasure at doing a good deed for my host turned to fascinated horror as I saw his face change into a grimace of pure pain and he rushed from the room after one mouthful. I had assumed that the sauces I used in Australia were exactly equivalent in chili levels as they were in Hawaii. Turns out I couldn't have been more wrong, and I'd put enough chili in my recipe to kill people.
Failure No. 7 - Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Many people say that when you are using eggs for cooking, you should break them one by one into a little bowl, then add them to your main mixing bowl, in case by chance you get a bad egg. After doing this for years and never getting a bad egg, I dispensed with this unnecessary step and just broke all my eggs straight into the main bowl.
Shortly afterwards I was making a cake which required five eggs. I had six in the fridge - excellent. I cracked the first four in the bowl - no problems. When I cracked the fifth, a hideous smell permeated the entire kitchen and a black slimy egg slopped into my mixture. I had to (a) dispose of the now stinking mixture and (b) go out to get more eggs.
Failure No. 8 - Trying to poison your friends more than once
I had a dear friend in my student days who was the easiest-going guy on the planet. He was a muso and looked like a Viking God and was also incredibly nice. One small thing, he was allergic to seafood. Not a big deal, because who eats seafood all the time when you're a poor student?
I often had people round for dinner. Bizarrely, whenever Adam came, I served seafood. It happened at least four times. My memory is fine. I am a considerate person. I knew about his allergy. I still can't understand why I consistently nearly poisoned one of my best friends. If you're reading this, Adam - sorry, man.
Failure No. 9 - Flying across the kitchen (in a bad way)
Another awesome story of Mum's and far less likely to happen these days, because gas stoves have a different kind of gas in them than they did in the 1960s which was when this tale occurred. Mum tried to turn on and heat up the oven, but the flame went out. The gas, of course, did not - it kept hissing into the oven like billy-o. Mum tries valiantly to light the oven again, and was just a little delayed by the match failing to strike... finally a lit match was thrust into the oven... and BOOM! Mum was blown across the kitchen by the blast and lost her eyebrows and eyelashes. She was otherwise uninjured apart from a heavy blow to her chef's pride.
Failure No. 10 - Drinking and cooking do not mix
This reflects quite badly on me but I'll tell it anyway. I had my new boyfriend over for dinner for the very first time. I didn't want to go too formal, and I wanted something that would resemble 'man food' without going to the lengths of cooking a big steak, which I'm not really that crash hot at, having been vegetarian for six years or so. So I settled on the perfect first-date-dinner, an easy-cook, man-food special: BEEF TACOS.
Now, tacos in a packet from the supermarket are ridiculously easy to cook, indeed, I would have said they were pretty much impossible to screw up. I fried off some beef mince with onions and added the spice mix; I prepared, in advance, the shredded lettuce, grated cheese, sour cream, salsa with fresh tomatoes chopped through it. The beef mince was keeping warm in a pan on the stove and everything else was in attractive little bowls, ready to dip into for some last-minute, easy taco assemblage. Nothing could go wrong.
New boyfriend arrives, and I'd already had a stiff drink or two because I was a bit nervous. Everything was going swimmingly, except that I ended up having another drink... then another.. then another until by the time I came to actually serve up the tacos, I was pretty well sozzled. All I had to do was heat up the taco shells in the oven. Which I did... using the whole lot at once, and drunkenly setting the oven at 220C (nuclear explosion temperature) and then forgetting, until a burning smell became apparent, that I'd even put them in. I BURNT THE TACO SHELLS. Yes, you too can become an idiot when the appropriate amount of alcohol is involved.
The only positive thing about this incident was the priceless text message the new boyfriend received the next morning which he still snickers about : "I burnt the tacos and passed out on the couch, are you sure you want to see me again?"
