Happy Day to you, awesome readers!
With all my kitchen fails, my friend Goeff can’t understand why my kids don’t suffer from mal-nutrition.
“I cook,” I tell him (often). “I just don’t cook WELL.”
And so I suppose it should come as no surprise when yesterday I tried to bake a banana bread and ended up with . . . something else.
It was actually a learning experience for me because I got to discover that burnt AND raw at the same time is a thing. Who knew?
(For the record, I tried to channel Julia Child to help me transform yesterday’s kitchen fail into something gooey and flambé but apparently she’s ignoring me.)
So in my defence of yesterday’s disaster, I’ve decided to represent myself in this case:
I present you with . . .
*Drum roll, please*
The recipe I downloaded from the internet
Let’s start with Exhibit “A”, shall we?
“Simply” would insinuate “simple” or “dummy-proof” or better yet “fail-proof”.
This is a lie.
Exhibit “B”
In my family we’ve always put butter ON our banana bread so putting it IN the recipe doesn’t make sense to me. This is why I replaced the butter with milk.
Apparently, that wasn’t such a good idea. But you get my logic, right?
Exhibit “C”
I bake almost never so baking soda is not something you’re likely to find in my kitchen – unless if it’s stashed in a corner of a cupboard somewhere. In which case it’s probably been there for five or six years. I don’t even know what baking soda does and saw no harm in skipping this ingredient.
Apparently, that wasn’t such a good idea either. In my defence, baking soda is something people clean their teeth with so why would I put it in a food recipe?
Exhibit “D”
Why cook something at 350 degrees for an hour when you can cook that same something at 450 degrees for 40 minutes?
Apparently, this also wasn’t such a good idea.
PS. A few of you have contacted me with thoughtful messages about really good and EASY banana bread recipes. Please feel free to forward them to me so that I can get my daughter to make us real banana bread. And by “real” I mean edible.
Oh, this is cracking me up! I love the exhibits – especially the butter/milk substitution and the thoughts on oven temp and time!!!
What good is my disability if I can’t make fun of it, right? 🙂
I love to cook, but I have had some epic kitchen fails. I slow cooked ribs for hours with the absorbent meat pad underneath them. I baked a frozen pizza on the cardboard and once mistakenly used vanilla yogurt instead of plain in squash soup. I ended up laughing about it, but it was disappointing at the time. 🙂
The ability to laugh at yourself is one of the keys. Although I get the disappointing thing 🙂
YOU SLAY ME! LMAO! I totally get exhibit B!
Thanks, Kyla. PS. You just introduced me to a new (for me) expression: You slay me. Love it!!!
Oh, Mona.. lol..
Have you ever seen Alton Brown’s cooking show “Good Eats”? I don’t even know if it’s on anymore, but it was awesome… it was all about the science and history of cooking – things like why you need butter instead of milk, or what baking soda does. But one lesson I’ve learned from all my own mistakes in the kitchen: unless you know what you’re doing? NO SUBSTITUTIONS! 🙂
Hope your next loaf turns out delicious. 😉
Thanks, Jessica! And no, I’ve never heard of Alton Brown’s cooking show; although it sounds like something I could learn from 🙂
You think you have kitchen fails, you have to think again, I have flunked hummus, burnt cake, made extra watery soup… this space cannot hold them all. I love to cook but I have had my fails too.
I love the way you share this and the internet has really helped my cooking.
Happy SITS day, have fun!
Well, you’re a step ahead of me because I probably wouldn’t have even attempted the recipe! Baking soda? It’s in my toothpaste. Could be in the cabinet, but I can’t reach where we put all the baking-related items. Because we don’t bake! My oven is so old that it naturally burns the outside of baked goods while keeping the middle raw. Lovely.
Happy SITS Day!
Your logic seems reasonable to me! 🙂 Happy SITS day!
You’ll appreciate the time I was about 10 or 11 and wanted to make some cookies. The recipe said 11/4 cups of butter. I did the math and discovered that eleven fourths of a cup of butter was the same as 2 and 3/4 cups. Needless to say, I never really got a batter and the cookies leaked all over the cookie pan!!
But there are other things you do really well, so let others take care of the baking. Plus, if your daughter is good at it, this can be your way of affirming her. And getting someone else to do the work. Win-win I say.
This is so funny! love Exhibit D.
http://www.laramealor.com/romancing-microbiome-2/
Hi Mona, visiting you from The SIITS Girls. All of us have had kitchen experiences that were a total bomb. Your sense of humor in the face of culinary failure is remarkable, lol!
LOVE THIS POST!!! Hilarious:)
I am with you on all the logical substitutions, sadly in baking it’s a science and you can’t sidestep much. But I try to, all the time. On a serious note, definitely keep baking soda in the house, it’s almost always used in a lot of baking recipes but also great for cleaning.
Baking is NOT my forte. I cook with a little of this, a little of that, and that does not work with baking. I have tons of fails! The kids groan if they see me making cookies. For the most part I stick to cooking!
Hillarious post. I had great fun reading it! People usually blog about super successful dishes with magazine like pictures attached. Better luck next time, I am sure practice will make perfect 🙂