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Everyone has a Cooking Fail

Everyone Has A Kitchen Fail

Yes, we are a culinary center. Our chefs, instructors, and even folks in The Kitchen Shop and office, LOVE to cook. It is part of what drew us to this place. Food is our passion. We love to cook. We love to eat. And we love to hang around with other foodies.  But that doesn’t mean we’re infallible and have never messed up a dish. No sir… we have all experienced some ‘Cooking Fails’ just like everyone else who has stepped foot into a kitchen.
The thing about Cooking Fails is that they’re icky and usually embarrassing when they happen, but they’re almost always funny, once the proper amount of time has passed. They make for a good story, that’s for sure.
In the spirit of growth and learning from experience, many of our CCKC family are sharing their stories here. We hope you’ll comment on the post and share your ‘fails’, as well…
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Chef Dana Holland / Culinary Instructor
Chef Dana Holland“I had been cooking about four years, all very high end. French food. Worked in Switzerland. Traveled around Europe. I was very full of myself.   Then, at my first chef job (acquired by default) on the East coast near Chesapeake Bay, I’m showing off to a very attractive young woman who wanted to work in the kitchen. I’m making Zabaglione. She was Italian but had never had it. I think, “I’m a shoo in, right?”  I’m whipping the crap out of it, and it’s going nowhere. I pronounce it finished and we taste. Yikes. I used salt instead of sugar.  (In the end, she married my friend, and I moved to California.)”
 
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“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”    – Henry Ford

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Libby Hawkins / Class & Event Facilitator and Kitchen Shop Gadget Guru
Libby“My parents came to visit me in my first apartment in Houston, where I was finishing school.  I wanted to fix a really special dinner. I made Beef Stroganoff, which turned out to be the consistency of concrete.  “Wow, this sure is filling,” said my mother, who was a fabulous cook.   

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“Success is not a good teacher. Failure makes you humble”    – Shah Rukh Khan

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Kim Stewart / Class Facilitator (and CCKC Pro Series graduate)
Cooking Fails“There have been a few!  There was a granulated vs confectioners sugar mix-up, a hilarious search of a friend’s kitchen cupboards looking for the “Omit Soda” mentioned in a Betty Crocker cookbook, a vague recollection of very crunchy broccoli, and a more vivid memory of confusion between a clove and a head of garlic.”

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“Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes, and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you’ve got something to share.”  – Steve Harvey

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Annette Elliott / Bean Counter
 No Fail“
I bake every Christmas to give gifts to friends and family. And I used to make fudge every year >> No Fail Fudge, it’s called in the recipe. But one year, I failed with that fudge THREE times. To this day I have no idea why it failed, but there was no fudge on the cookie plates from then on…. I still resent that the No-Fail Fudge failed me!”

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“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”  – Colin Powell

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Paul McCool / Culinary Instructor and Breadmaker Extraordinaire
“I have two, actually, although I had help with the second one.
Paul McCoolMom was out of town for a couple of days, so it was Dad, me, my two younger brothers, and my preschool sister holding down the fort.  Being the oldest (all of 14 or 15), I “won” cooking duty.  Things actually went fairly well.  Feeling rather confident, I decided a dessert would be nice with dinner one evening.  But what to make?  Hmm, gingerbread seemed fairly easy and I knew we all liked it.  So, ingredients were brought out, the oven was preheated, the pan prepared, and the batter mixed.  Everything went into the oven without a hitch and the timer was set for the recommended time. When the timer sounded, I pulled the gingerbread out of the oven.  Oddly, it didn’t appear to have gotten any bigger while it baked.  As a matter of fact, it looked quite flat.  Not knowing what else to do, I left it to cool.  Dinner went well, and everyone was looking forward to having gingerbread, having smelled the molasses and spices while it baked.  I began to slice it.  More accurately, I attempted to slice it.  It had a strange rubbery texture that made it hard to penetrate with the knife blade.  I persevered.  After extracting the first piece and depositing it on a plate, we all stared at it.  It was a thin slab of gingerbread leather.  There were no bubbles to be seen anywhere in it, just a uniform dark mass.  Apparently I had left out the soda.  After one or two attempts at chewing a bite, we decided that we could get along just fine without gingerbread for dessert that evening.  
My second fail involved an accomplice: my wife.  It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday.  Several families were coming for dinner after church on Sunday, so we were making preparations.  My contribution for Easter dinner was to be egg braids; challah for all practical purposes.  I mixed and kneaded the dough. Since it was cool in the kitchen, the dough needed a warm place to rise.  No problem; I switched on the oven for a few minutes, then turned it back off.  The dough safe in its stainless steel mixing bowl and covered to prevent drying, was gently placed in the warm oven and the door closed.  It needed about an hour to rise.  Taking advantage of the opportunity, I went outdoors to mow the lawn.  When I was about 2/3 of the way through mowing, my wife flagged me down.  â€œI started preheating the oven and realized a few minutes later that I was beginning to smell bread baking.  Do you think we can save it?”   I hustled inside, opened the oven, and looked at the bread.  It was still in the mixing bowl and the outer half-inch or so was already set.  â€œWell”, I said, “the best we can do now is finish baking it and see how it turns out.”   At the end of the bake, we took the bread out of the oven.  The top was domed and the bottom was the exact profile of the bowl it was baked in.  Picture a round loaf, maybe 14-16 inches in diameter and about 8 inches from top to bottom.  We called it Tomb Bread, because of its resemblance to the stone that was rolled away from the tomb.  It made quite the conversation piece sitting in the center of the table.  We had to quarter it before slicing so that the slices were a reasonable size.  I’ve made lots of challah since then but never any Tomb Bread.”  
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“Never, never, never give up.”  – Winston Churchill

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Marti Palmer / Brand Evangelist, Director of Marketing
 Cocoa / CoconutMy sister, Linda, and I were making brownies when we were kids. Mom had given us the okey-doke to do it without her. We were probably in 4th & 5th grade, I think.  Let’s just say that the cooking tip I took away from that brownie-making was this….  Cocoa is NOT, in fact, an abbreviation for COCONUT, so you can’t just replace it with that in the recipe.  Yep, those white brownies were a big ‘ol FAIL. But a cooking lesson was learned. So, it’s all good.”

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If you’re reading this blog from The Culinary Center, odds are good that you like to cook, right?  And most of us consider ourselves pretty darn good at it.  But come on, admit it. There was that time you messed up, and I mean BIG TIME. It might have been long ago, but you still remember it. I know you do. Those colossal cooking fails are not only great learning experiences, but they also make for a good story, and we would love if you would share yours with us…

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