Tales From the Dark Side...of My Kitchen!

It’s no secret I love to cook, but I’m the last one to say that I’m a perfect cook!In fact, I probably make more than my share of boo-boo’s in the kitchen, sometimes really ugly, extremely distasteful ones too!

In part, this may be because I’m allergic to following a recipe...exactly. I like to think of recipes as ‘suggestions’, and the more I respect the cook who wrote them, the more closely I may follow them. I am comforted by the knowledge that even those folks have screwed up royally more than once. Ina Garten, aka The Barefoot Contessa, is one of my favorites. She knows her way around a recipe and generally, I have good fortune following her guidelines. But Ina is on the record that she never serves a new recipe to unsuspecting diners until she’s made it at least three or four times herself.

Now, Ina lives in the Hamptons, so I’m assuming she can afford that luxury, but me, well, I can’t buy four or five times the necessary ingredients just so I can perfect the dish first, not to mention practicing for three days to make one meal! I’ve got other stuff to do...like pay my utility bills! So you might say I make my mistakes ‘in real time’.

Therefore, if I’m going to offer up my recipe tips, I feel it’s only fair I come clean about a few of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way, so I’m going to include the occasional tale from the dark side of my kitchen.

I can cover a lot of ground just by telling you that for years I couldn’t make cookies without burning at least one sheet of them. This is nobody’s fault but my own. The recipes pretty clear on not overcooking, and common sense tells me I can’t leave cookies in the oven forever without dire consequences...usually involving the smoke alarm.

But truly, the reason this happened over and over is because I had a tendency to wander. Maybe I’ve got a bit of ADHD. The last sheet was in the oven, mixing bowl was washed, cookies tucked into a baggie or jar (not to mention some I might have consumed...) and well, the garden needed weeding or a column needed writing or work was calling. I’d only be a minute, just gonna get this little thing done--BEEP! Smoke alarm and burned cookies. It took years, and I still fail occasionally, but I learned the hard way that you aren’t done till you’re done. I still wander, but usually not as far.

I’ve learned that you can save yourself a lot of grief by reading ahead in a recipe. Case in point, an apple torte that appeared lovely on the cover of Bon Appetite but was a test to make and tasted even worse (Honestly, I hold a particular ingredient in the recipe, 'dry white wine', in this case chardonnay, responsible for what ended up being a hideous aftertaste, so really, do you blame me for messing with recipes?).

Anyway, piece of cake!...or torte, I thought. Until I got to the point where I’d peeled the stuffing out of the inside of two large loaves of French bread yielding over 8 cups of moist bread crumbs. I dumped them on a cookie sheet and stuffed them into the oven to dry out , ground up some hazelnuts, peeled the 2 pounds of apples called for in the recipe (well, really three, you know, I like more apples in a tart) and then came up short when I read the crust directions.

They called for THREE cups of breadcrumbs.What that-- Didn’t I just disgorge EIGHT cups from two loaves of French bread? Nowhere did it call for the remaining five cups. Why on earth did they have me do that? I reread the recipe; no clue. I checked the recipe online; no different. I was so frustrated (and frankly, the rest of the recipe wasn’t going too well either) that I wrote a pointed letter to the recipe editor at Bon Appetite asking what was up with this recipe. Geez!

Finally, I returned to the kitchen where I took at closer look at my drying bread crumbs. Funny, they didn’t look the same. They looked like...less. Duh! Drying breadcrumbs shrink. I had about three and a half cups, just over what the recipe called for. Darned if those professionals didn’t know what they were talking about. Of course, it would have been nice if they’d given a girl a clue, but I guess they figured that would be insulting my culinary intelligence, such as it was. Probably why they also never answered my letter.