ottawa foodies

Kitchen disaster

What is your most memorable cooking mistake?

Let me tell you about mine..

We have been planning a pulled pork BBQ for both of our family for several weeks. I left G. my "better half" in charge of buying the pork. I was in charge of the appetizers and side dishes. I made Chef Obi's spicy Thai salad that would have been good with pulled pork in my opinion. (note, would HAVE been)..
So G. got up at 3am to start the smoker and put 2 big pork shoulders on. Everybody enjoyed the appetizers and drinks and by 6:30pm the pork temp was 180. Perfect! So G. brings it in, tents it with foil. I let it rest for about 20 min, too hot at this point to start pulling. I then put on the latex glove and pull up the "crust" and notice that the meat is pink! I start to panic that he did not cook it enough and by now it's 7pm, people are hungry.

THEN, I start pulling and only then I realize; This is not pulled pork. It's HAM!!! He bought 2 smoked picnic shoulders instead of pork shoulders. Good thing he has 9 lives. I ended serving sliced ham on a bun for dinner... I just wanted to crawl under a rock.

BTW. Because the pork was purchased smoked already and then re-smoked for another 14hrs, it was extremely salty and the smell.... Ugh

LOL... nice one! I guess you could have tried telling your guests that it was a special Scandinavian recipe called dooble-smorky porky borky. That way, if they didn't like the taste, they would have just blamed their own lack of culinary adventurousness. ;-)

My cooking mistakes have traditionally involved too much heat or too much salt. It's notoriously difficult to undo either kind of mistake. I can't think of any examples as entertaining as yours though.

Good one FF. Next time I will use that!
FYI: No husbands were hurt/killed in this story. We actually laugh about it now :-)

I have a good story from my mom. She was having my fathers boss, coworkers and families over for a dessert eve. She made a meringue, and because it was quite hot and the air conditioning wasn't working - she put it in the freezer for fear of it falling. Apparently meringue will turn into a hard chewy mess when frozen. She couldn't cut the pie (I've heard the saw came out but it could be hear-say). Apparently the kids all loved it and asked there mom's if they could make the same type of dessert :) My mom was mortified. But its a good family story.

Mine was probably when I first met my wife I make an absolutely wonderful batch of cream of broccoli soup that I had sent to her in a taxi when she was sick. She lived way out of town and I had no car. She was living with her parents still at the time, and it became a big joke in the family because she REALLY hates cream of broccoli soup :-) But she ate it anyway.

Poutine - I'll have to think about my own... (too many to count, LOL).

But right away when I read this topic, "the family" one came rushing back... My Mom had the Pressure Cooker explode when I was a kid... she was preparing to make pickled beets (lol, around this time of year) and the beets went everywhere (white kitchen) hard to forget.

Probably why there is no way in H3LL there will ever be a Pressure Cooker in my kitchen.

I remember in university when I first lived out of residence and it was my turn to cook dinner (my roommates and I decided we would take turns cooking). I decided on spaghetti but I didn't know that you're supposed to boil the water *before* putting in the pasta. It took ages for the water to come to a boil and the spaghetti was one big gloopy mass when it did eventually heat. I'm sure my roommates figured it was going to be a long semester ahead, but I did eventually learn to cook spaghetti and more. Shows how much I paid attention to my Mom.

I spent an entire evening failing to make mushroom risotto. I'm not sure if it was because I somehow had medium-grain rice instead of arborio/carnaroli, or because my stock was never hot enough, or because I didn't toast the rice enough beforehand, or what.

All I know is that it ended up being a hard, gloopy, mushroomy mess that not even a pressure-cooking could adequately fix.

That was two years ago, and I still haven't tried my hand at risotto since. Maybe next week!

It was the type of rice, not you :-) Only buy good quality arborio rice. Check my recipe, it has worked for years without fail, you can always change the ingredients to suit your taste.
thedogthecatandeverythinginbetween.blogspot.com