Flops

[Foodgeek]

Yep. We all have them from time to time. I'll start.

Tonight was a "cleaning the fridge" night, as I had been reading the thread on eGullet about not shopping for a week and seeing what you could make out of what's on-hand. Thing is, we don't have a lot on-hand, aside from cheese, cheese and more cheese, so it gets a little dicey.

I made "nachos," sneer quotes indicating what I felt about them. I had some flatbreads that I wanted to use up before they got moldy, some Cincinnatti chili that I made from a mix that we got in a grab bag from my brother-in-law's wedding, an onion, a tomato, a jalapeno and a mix of several cheeses, so I cut the flatbread into wedges and toasted them, topped them and heated in the oven.

And the rest is regrettable history. Well, it wasn't inedible, actually. I ate some of it and The Scientist ate a good bit more than I did, but I'm not proud of this one. At all.

It was better than my lunch today, which came from some crappy Chino takeout that's not even worth mentioning, except to say "avoid."

So, what's your worst or most recent flop?

[AndyBoy]

New Year's Eve I made a bouillabaisse and caesar salad. The salad was good, the soup was pretty awful. I started it by making a stock from lobster shells that was pretty good but forgot to add tomatoes to it and a few other mishaps so it turned out sort of okay but not really. For all the work and time I invested, not to mention the expensive ingredients, it should have been much better. Like they say though, people that don't make mistakes, don't make anything.   

[Marmite Loving Euniculus]

Fried polenta with a tangy lemon sauce. Let's just not go there.

[Loundry]

Steve had memories of his mother cooking a roast all day in tomato sauce to make some kind of tomato-meat sauce to go on spaghetti.  He figured that recreating this dish in the slow cooker would be a good idea.  I was skeptical, given how strongly I dislike "gray meat", and this sounded like a great way to make a large quantity of gray meat.  But I didn't make any negative comments about his idea.  He started the slow cooker and I eventually went off to run errands.

I had finished my outside-the-house tasks and come back around 4PM to see Steve emptying something from the food processor into a large bowl.  The something in question looked exactly like fecal matter with a smooth consistency.  "What's that?" I asked perkily.  Steve explained that the roast was dry as a bone by the time it was "done" and tasted like dull, overcooked meat.  He knew I wasn't going to like it (either), so he figured he had to do something and decided that pureeing it might rehydrate it somehow.  I decided to help in the pureeing and by the time we were done it was hilarious.  We had successfully produced a substantial pile of warm, brown sludge.  We looked at our handiwork and could only immediately conclude that we made a big, steaming pile o' crap!

It didn't taste as bad as it looked, but that isn't saying much at all.  Imagine pureeing the dryest, dullest piece of gray meat you've ever tasted.  That's exactly what it tasted like.  F.  Of course, the tasting required the diner to short-circuit the visual circuit to his brain in order to successfully deliver the "sauce" to his mouth.  We had fun offering it to our 9-year-old to try.  I should have snapped a video of the priceless look on his face when we asked him to taste it.

[Loundry]

Another memory: not quite a flop, but more of a disaster.

We were cooking dinner for fifty people coming to our home, and I made about two gallons of black beans.  It was four hours before guests started to arrive, and I was transferring the finished beans from one pot to another (because we needed the bigger pot for something).  I was using a 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup to bail the beans from one pot to the other.  The beans were still very hot, and by the third scoop, I heard a *TINK* and I noticed that a shard of the pyrex measuring cup had shattered and split off ... falling somewhere into the beans.  The heat from the beans moving unevenly into the pyrex had caused this to happen.  We had to dispose of the entire batch of beans and restart the recipe from scratch, effectively increasing our stress level from three to five.  We still pulled it off though, and no one was any the wiser.

[chefmoss]

Along long time ago I can still remember-

Under some sort of influence I'm sure, I was making Chinese food for the wife and a friend.  Instead of grabbing the yellow box of corn starch for thickening, I grabbed the similar looking box of baking powder.  It did not thicken but I ingnored that and sat down to dinner.  Needless to say, when we sat down to eat we had a bitter mess.  It took a few minutes to figure out what had gone wrong.  Instead of a nice chicken with almonds and edamame, we had a pile of bitter trash!

That the only time I have ever had to chuck dinner.

[Mike GadgetGeek Stock]

"note to self,  40 minutes is too long to cook black eyed peas in the pressure cooker".


Now what to do with BEP paste?    

.

[Foodgeek]

"note to self,  40 minutes is too long to cook black eyed peas in the pressure cooker".


Now what to do with BEP paste?    

Can you make hummus?

[jpellett251]

I've had some flops with mushrooms.  I guess I could look them up before I cook them, but it's hard to know with a new mushroom if it's one that will get soft, or like Kevin's experience on Top Chef, stay tough and rubbery.

I've had quite a few flops with fried Asian noodles, fresh and dry.  I think I I've only been successful once.

[tansu]

This past Thanksgiving nuking a turkey I brought with me to tokyo because of convection oven in celsius. They never had whole turkey before so I said it was suppose to taste like shoe leather.