i'm generally a pretty good cook, but i've screwed up steak pretty good a few times. not a big deal, as i'm not a huge fan of steak. i also tried to make low fat chocolate chip cookies one time with a margarine substitute. they came out looking like cupcakes. since then, i've gotten better at baking. sometimes you have to screw up the recipe before getting it right.
I would have thought low-cal-chocolate-cookies-cupcakes would be cool.
I tried fried rice once not thinking to cook the egg portion separate so the "fried rice" came out looking like an omelet and in to the trash it went.
thanksgiving 1984
married less than six months
the first dinner with both sets of parents
traditional menu; i was going to smoke the turkey with the brand new smoker that i had just bought and never used
just like cooking on my Father-in-law's grill or my Dad's hibachi pot (they are now known as big green eggs). that was my frame of reference. and was my frame of reference ever wrong
had i begun smoking that bird the night before it might have been ready in time for our afternoon meal
so, while we are waiting on turkey that is cooking very s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y both Dads are getting **** faced, having a grand time getting to know one another
meanwhile, our mothers are competing to see who could be the biggest bitch. the hungrier they became the ornerier they got. my Mom wondered - out loud, of course - how my wife could allow dinner to take this long to cook ... didn't matter that i was the one in charge of getting the meal prepared. my mother-in-law gave as good as she got and reminded my Mom that i was the one who had no idea how to cook a turkey. it only got worse from there
finally realized i could separate my Mom from her combatant if i would pull her into the kitchen to show me how to cook a turkey in the oven
by the time the bird was finally done, out fathers were too smashed to eat, our mothers too pissed to eat, and my wife and i were too exhausted to eat ... so, i cannot actually recall how the food turned out
no surprise, we never shared another meal with both moms and dads in the same house
i tried one of them, but it lacked the fluffiness of a cupcake or the condensed richness of a cookie. it tasted more like a "i want to be a chocolate chip cookie, but you ****ed up" puffball. and thus malformed by their creator, into the trash went the batch.
I tried fried rice once not thinking to cook the egg portion separate so the "fried rice" came out looking like an omelet and in to the trash it went.