Welcome to Kitchen Disasters, which is currently empty because either I’ve been having a really good run lately or I’ve been suppressing the evidence. (Reader, it’s not the first one.)
I cook a lot. I cook ambitious things. I cook unfamiliar things. I cook things that require equipment I do not own and substitute with equipment I do, with varying degrees of success. I also cook the same fifteen recipes I’ve made since 1998, and even those go sideways sometimes. Twenty-eight years of cooking has not made me immune to forgetting the butter, dropping the eggs, or walking away from a reduction “just for a second.”
This section is for the times it doesn’t work.
Not because I want to wallow in failure. Because the lesson is in the failure. Because every food blog out there shows you the perfect version, and that’s a lie of omission. Because if I show you the bread that didn’t rise, the roux that broke, the dough that wept oil through the parchment paper and pooled onto the oven floor (and I will), then maybe the next time it happens to you in your kitchen, you’ll know it’s not just you.
Coming to this section eventually
Working list, subject to expansion as I continue being myself in a kitchen:
- The Time I Almost Burned the House Down Roasting Chiles
- The Roux That Broke and What I Learned About Heat
- The Pie That Wept Oil Onto the Oven Floor
- The Bread Dough I Forgot in the Fridge for Four Days
- The Time I Tried to Make Caramel Without a Thermometer Because How Hard Could It Be
- The Sous Vide Bag That Came Open at Hour 36
- The Soufflé That Fell So Hard I Heard It in the Living Room
- The Cake I Decorated While Tired and Ended Up Looking Like a Lovecraftian Wedding
- The Hatch Chile Roasting Year I Forgot to Wear Gloves
- The Marinade I Confidently Diagnosed As “Probably Still Good” and Was Wrong About
That’s the rough pipeline. The list will grow because, again, I am who I am.
Coming back later
If you landed on this page looking for actual content, I’m sorry, there isn’t any yet. Try one of these instead:
- Recipes for the things that worked
- Garden for the things that grew
- Friday Roundup for what I’ve been reading, watching, and eating
- Home for everything
Come back. There will be disasters. There are always disasters.
P.S. If you have your own kitchen disaster you want to share, you can. Comments are open. Misery loves company.
P.P.S. The Hatch chile glove incident burned for three days. I share this so you understand the editorial calibration of this section.