Monday, June 24, 2024

Improvising in the kitchen... uh oh

 

HALLIE EPHRON: I love to cook. And experiment with whatever I have leftover in the fridge. Sometimes the results are fine. But….

For example, whenever I roast a chicken (or, to tell the truth, buy a roasted chicken from the supermarket) I take the leftover carcass, skin, and whatever… and turn it into a soup.

I sautee onions, carrots, celery, mushrooms. Add the leftover chicken carcass, broken up. Add salt and pepper and any herbs I have kicking around (e.g. parsley). Cover with water. Throw in 3-4 tablespoons of chicken bouillion. Bring to a boil and simmer for a couple of hours.

Cool. Remove the chicken from the soup. Return every scrap of meat to the pot; toss the bones and skin.

Usually I then boil handfuls of flat noodles and add them to the soup.

Voila: dinner for another week, and like eating for free.

But the last time I made the soup I got the bright idea: why not boil the noodles with the finished soup instead separately in its own water.

Why not, indeed.


Turns out the noodles DISSOLVED when I cooked them in the soup. And the resulting “soup” was the consistency of wallpaper paste.

Not yummy.

Do you like the experiment in the kitchen, and have you ever tried something that turned out to be spectacular, or a big mistake?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Ohhhhh I used to make–(and I don’t know why I stopped, they were delicious) double-stuffed tiny tiny new potatoes.

I’d boil the potatoes til done, then when cooled, scoop out the middles with a melon baller, then mix the scooped out potato with sour cream and chives and salt and pepper, then put that mixture back into the potato cups, and top with crumbled bacon and cheddar cheese.

DEEEEELICIOUS.

So once, preparing for a party, I decided that it would be much faster to put all the ingredients into the Cuisinart, and mix them that way instead of with a big spoon and a big bowl.

And, indeed, it was easy.

But it was also a disaster.

The potato mixture turned into TOTAL GLUE.


I cannot begin to describe the texture further, except maybe to say, Play-Doh.

I have since learned that you can’t mash potatoes in a blender thing or food processor, because the speed of the blades tears the starch molecules and releases them, and they mix with the liquid in the potatoes, and the result: a gummy horrible UNFIXABLE glue.

I regrouped, used the oven to make potato chip-like things from the skins, and after they were crisped up, I added sour cream and bacon and cheese and no one knew.

And I learned a big lesson.

JENN McKINLAY: The only thing I cook these days (Hub took over during the pandemic and I said “no give backsies” when he returned to work) is the smoothie that Hub and I have for breakfast every morning.

The extent of my experimenting is putting a fistful of spinach or beet greens in the smoothie, which I tell my husband is kiwi to explain the green color as he is not a vegetable guy. LOL.


RHYS BOWEN: When we were newly married and had to entertain a lot my husband despaired that I always cooked recipes I’d never tried before.

Most worked fine. Some didn’t. My most spectacular failure was a turban of sole, stuffed with shrimp and mushrooms. In the picture it looked fantastic. A real show stopper.

I turned mine out onto the plate and it came out–swoosh–in a heap. A disastrous mess on the plate.


Business guests were sitting in the next room waiting to ooh and ah as I carried it in. Quick thinking required. I made a roux with sherry, added a little ketchup for pinkness, and served it over rice. Nobody knew but me!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: The thing I learned not to experiment with? Holiday meals. One of the first Thanksgivings we had in This Old House, I got carried away and decided to add an authentic Pilgrim pie, which was essentially a vegetable tart.

It was a disaster! Not because I messed up the recipe, but because the Pilgrims’ ate crappy, undercooked veggies in a thick pastry shell that tasted like overcooked bread mixed with sawdust. Now I know why they were such a grim people.

It was a true penance to eat. My father-in-law, God bless him, actually downed a piece and proclaimed it “Interesting!” I chucked the rest out and next year, saved the pie slot for pumpkin and pecan.

HALLIE: So time to 'fess up... what's your most spectacular kitchen improv failure?

77 comments:

  1. Epic failure? Onion Yogurt Bread. Like Julia, I didn't mess up the recipe, but it was so awful even the dogs wouldn't eat it . . . .

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    1. That's a low bar... it sure sounds like it would be good.

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  2. Once a year, I invite five of my former high school English pupils for dinner. I've been doing this for a long time, and they are now interesting women of around 45. (One of the great things about Bern is that no one ever moves away!) One year, I decided to make a classic Swiss dessert called "Burned Cream" (in Swiss-German dialect, Brönnti Creme) that I'd never made before; it's somewhat like caramel pudding. I boiled the sugar and water to produce caramel and then, following the recipe carefully, I added milk, sugar, cornstarch, and eggs and stirred like mad. The ingredients did not blend together but instead stayed separated. So I threw the whole thing away, walked ten minutes each way to the grocery store to get more eggs, and tried again. Same result. I was furious with myself, and time was running out. My solution was to boil up the whole mess (the second one) with cornmeal, doctor it with molasses and maple syrup, bake it, and call it Indian Pudding. I presented it as a special American dessert. Believe me, it didn't look or taste much like a classic New England Indian Pudding, but since my Swiss "girls" had never heard of the dessert, much less eaten it, they accepted it as the real thing. I don't think anyone asked for seconds, though.

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    1. That's an epic! fail... so much work. (I love Indian pudding - clever of you to think of it) I do think anything with caramel is tricky.

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  3. This probably happened the year Irwin and I met. I still have my mother's Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook from the 1940's. I had fresh trout in the freezer and knew Irwin liked trout. I found a recipe in that cookbook. So, using that recipe, I poached the trout in milk. He still laughs about it.

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  4. Do you remember when we were all baking bread at home and there was a YEAST SHORTAGE during the first pandemic lockdown? Well, I found a beer quick loaf bread recipe online.
    It was an inedible hard brick. Threw it out after eating 1 slice.

    Tried making my own sourdough starter...those sourdough bread were delish!

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    1. I tried that beer bread, too. Blech. So impressed that you were successful with sourdough. Seems like our Edith has talked about sourdough.

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    2. I am tempted to start baking my own sourdough bread again. While I love the bread from our artisan bakeries, the price of a loaf of bread has skyrocketed from $4.50 in 2020 to $9-11 in 2024!

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    3. There are so many Internet recipes that are duds.

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  5. Those are quite the stories, Reds - and some clever pivoting.

    I was in my twenties and still learning to bake whole grain bread. I'd found some rye flour and thought that would make a yummy loaf. Except I used all rye - which doesn't contain gluten - and baked a literal brick.

    And since Grace brought up the pandemic baking thing - before 2020, I could make a quite nice sourdough loaf. After that? Everybody (including my older son) stole my sourdough mojo! I completely lost my touch and baked too many bricks. I've stopped trying and now go to a local bakery or my son's home if I want to eat sourdough bread.

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    1. My challenge was keeping my sourdough starter alive! I had to redo my starter from scratch three times. Each bread I eventually baked was tasty but I was missing some key step in maintaining my starter.

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    2. Part of the problem is the climate and your water sources. Super easy to create sourdough starter in the Bay! Area. No it isn’t the fog, it is mostly our water sources.

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    3. Edith, I made two great loaves from the sourdough starter you gave me, but then the starter "died" and I was never able to recreate it.

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    4. I always wondered why sour dough bread is SO MUCH BETER in the Bay area... Thanks, Anon.

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  6. I'm blessed with a husband who will truly eat ANYTHING (as long it doesn't contain beets or olives), so even my kitchen mishaps rarely get thrown away. My biggest catastrophe that even he couldn't eat was largely his fault. Yes, Grace, I remember the yeast shortage. I sent Hubby to the Amish bulk food store down the road for yeast and we were both excited when he found some. I wondered why it looked funny as I tossed it into the bread machine. Mid-way through the kneading cycle I took a closer look at the label of the newly purchased yeast and discovered it was nutritional yeast! I pointed this out to Hubby, who said, "I figured that meant it was healthier." Needless to say, the resulting "bread" went into the trash.

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    1. Oh no. But I did chuckle at your hubby's reasoning for buying nutritional yeast!

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    2. Yeast was really hard to find for awhile. I ordered a pound of it during the pandemic, then never even opened it. It found a home, though, with Edith Maxwell!

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    3. Each of my sons got a jar of Karen's yeast, too. Even though it ostensibly expired years ago, it rises bread just fine!

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    4. I have enough yeast and gluten to last a lifetime thanks to "stocking up" during the pandemic.

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    5. I thought I was the only one with a stockpile of unused yeast...

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  7. When we were first married, my wife was a hit-or-miss cook (She soon became much better, which was a good thing because my idea of cooking is to add great quantities of salsa and/or A1 Sauce to everything.) One of her first efforts was meatloaf. I was working for a construction company then, putting an addition onto a banquet facility. Packed in my lunch was a meatloaf sandwich -- the meatloaf was somewhere between the bread, buried in a congealed mass of grease and smothered with ketchup which had leaked through the bread. The sandwich was quickly deposited into the cement wall of the addition we were building. To this day -- more than fifty years later -- that part of the wall remains the strongest part of the building.

    Although Kitty turned out to be a great cook, the only things she truly enjoyed cooking were peppermint brownies and a to-die-for carrot cake, both of which were in heavy demand for church suppers over the years.

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    1. Buried in the wall!!! I love that story, Jerry. Thanks for sharing.

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  8. I once got carried away with cayenne when making deviled eggs for a work potluck. The result was, shall we say, unfortunate. Someone actually called them "gunpowder eggs." It took quite a while to live down that culinary error.

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  9. My most recent failure, but eat it anyway, was a borscht made with pickled beets. Every thing was going well until I decided carrots would be a good addition to add sweetness. Then thought, why not use an immersion blender? You don't blend carrots and beets unless you want thick ugly brown soup.

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    1. Amy & I decided we could eat it blind folded, or during a power blackout.

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    2. So sad. Because borscht with beets is a wonderful thing. But I make itwith freh beets. Canning or pickling/canned lose that essential beetiness.

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  10. Someone gave me a "nutritional" children's cookbook and I followed the recipe for banana muffins, using whole wheat flour and wheat germ. I popped them out of the muffin tin, hard as rocks. My son used them for hockey pucks. I later "improved" the recipe with white flour and raisins.

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  11. Such funny stories! I've had many disasters, but the only one I can remember at the moment is when I accidentally doubled the sugar in the chocolate chip cookie recipe....very flat and very crisp (and sweet) cookies were the result.

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  12. Years ago I decided to make my husband a birthday cake from scratch which I had never done in my life. With him gone on a business trip and me at home with an infant I had not had time or energy to go to the store. I put our infant son to bed and went to work. Got the cake baked and found I did not have enough powdered sugar to make frosting. Decided a glaze would work instead. That cake was hard as a rock! To this day I think of it as my Ellie Mae Clampett cake and I swear by Betty Crocker mixes.
    https://www.google.com/search?q=ellie+mae+clampett+cooking&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4c283fe8,vid:E-SBAYfySuE,st:0.

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  13. As I have previously mentioned – rhubarb custard tart/pie. No recipe seems to work. (I still have lots of rhubarb!) Saturday, I made rhubarb/strawberry compot over a lemon cake – said to be delicious. We are eating the rhubarb/strawberry and cream – sort of like a fool. Chickens are having lemon cake for dessert – I was expecting pound cake-like and just got tasteless fluff. Bin for that recipe.
    Now the rice pudding. Harrumper claims to love it. My mother made minute rice to which she added raisins, and then we added brown sugar and whipping cream – that was rice pudding. He wants some gluey, milky thing that gets cooked in the oven, and to which apparently no brown sugar or cream is added. I have tried them all. I even tried cooking the rice, and stirring it in to a rich custard – I liked that one, as I will go anywhere for custard, except apparently rhubarb pie. Nope – “not the same as my mother made”. Good thing she was dead before we married – or maybe not – just a ghost to live up to. Of course he could learn to make it himself. So far, the best is Joan’s recipe – that sometimes passes muster.

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    1. I love the *idea* of rice pudding but it never tastes good enough to be worth the trouble.

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  14. I'm a horrible cook and have had many disasters, but the worst was my first year of marriage. My husband loved cherry pie. Being a new wife I thought I would make one for him as a surprise when he got home from work. It actually turned out beautifully -- even had a latticework top. However, when he took his first bite he spit out the entire mouthful. Seems I had bought canned cherries that were NOT pitted. But you knew that was coming, didn't you? And let's not forget the birthday cake with no middle frosting. I think I must dissociate when I cook -- sounds like a good plot -- poison anyone?

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    1. I did *not* see that coming! I gave my son in law a cherry pitter for Xmas. LOVE cherries but there are so many different kinds it's easy to go awry.

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  15. My most recent 'worse' were hamburgers. What could go wrong? Cast iron skillet to temp, nice 1/2 inch-thick burgers thawed and seasoned. A few minutes each side, right? I used the minutes before flipping the burgers to get the corn on the cob going. Back to the stove--the burgers were now paper thin and, shall we say, extremely well done. Turns out most of that thickness was water. And to add insult to injury, the buns had spoiled overnight. :-( The corn, however, was excellent!

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  16. Nothing dramatic but I've had my share of recipes that just didn't taste good.
    Dear hubby loves tapioca pudding. I have tried to make it from scratch and from a box mix but nothing ever turns out right. Does anybody have any good fool proof recipe for tapioca?

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    1. I've always made the Jell-O pudding mix tapioca pudding, but not in a lot of years.

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  17. Two disasters that I couldn't make right at the time come to mind. The first was not really a disaster, except that I misunderstood how to use my first (big) batch of basil pesto. I used the entire bowl with two servings of pasta. Well, duh, yes, it was strong! A tablespoon would have done for each of us. Took a while to try again, and of course it's now a family favorite.

    The other was an ambitious idea to make homemade tiramisu for a family Easter dinner. The sauce broke, right in front of my eyes, and I couldn't fix it. Dumped it out and started over. Same thing happened. Decided heck with it, and served it anyway. It tasted okay, but it looked like a dog's breakfast, instead of the elegant dessert I'd fantasized about.

    Hallie, a friend once gave me a tip about making broth with a chicken carcass: add a tablespoon of cider vinegar. It draws the calcium out of the bones.

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    1. Thx for the tip! I DO add vinegar. at the end for seasoning. But I did not know that about drawing calcium. Sounds like magical thinking...

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  18. Eggplant casserole. Not being a heavy salt fan I decided it was best to omit the salting and blotting part. Let me say, eggplant soup cooked in a casserole dish has little to recommend it!

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    1. So important to salt and let the liquid come out of the eggplant before cooking! I leraned that the hard way, too.

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  19. From Diana: Once tried to bake a pie with gingerbread crust. In my attempt to make the gingerbread crust, I used the leftover gingerbread dough for cookies to make the pie crust.

    Bad idea. Turned out that the dough had baking soda and when you make a pie 🥧 crust, you use Baking POWDER not baking soda.

    Live and learn, right?

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    1. Hmmm. Still I love the *idea* of ginger flavored pie crust. Especiall with a lemon pie.

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    2. From Diana: Yes, Hallie and I was thinking of a pumpkin pie. I love pumpkin pie!

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  20. We do host Thanksgiving and one year I made marshmallow stuffed sweet potato balls...they exploded! Tasty but very, very messy. My oven never recovered.

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  21. I also had a marshmallow disaster like Jenn. I was going to make Rice Krispie treats for a Christmas get-together and realized I hadn't bought enough mini marshmallows. Surely, this bag of large marshmallows, that I had bought for summer S'mores - four years ago - would do?

    And that's how I discovered 1) marshmallows have an expiration date and 2) you might as well just throw the pot away, because you're never getting that stuff out.

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  22. A long time ago, a friend gave me a recipe for pecan pie. It came out really soupy so I put it back in the oven for a while longer. It eventually baked properly. I’ve made it a few times since then, but trial and error taught me that there were serious typos in her recipe in regard to oven temperature and baking time!

    DebRo

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    1. I've made that soupy pecan pie too, DebRo. Unfortunately it was for a church event, buy a slice of pie. Didn't know it was soup until the first slice.

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    2. I’ve also made a soupy pecan pie. But add it to vanilla ice cream and you have the makings of a new flavor for Ben & Jerry.

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  23. My boyfriend had a birthday coming up and I decided to make a pound cake and ship it to him. He was in Vietnam. I got up early Saturday morning, mixed it, and baked it. It came out of the oven like a ten pound cake. So I quickly started over and made a new one. I had a deadline as the post office closed early on Saturday. Pound cake #2 was perfect. I wrapped it up, put it in a box full of popped corn, threw in a can of frosting and several packages of Funny Face drink mix and ran it to the P.O.
    Timing was perfect. The box was waiting for him when they returned from the field for stand down. He and his friends ate the cake with frosting, ate the stale popcorn, and had no ill effects. I don't remember what I did with pound cake #1. I guess my family ate it anyway.

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  24. I once tried out a recipe for cookies with an espresso flavor. Unfortunately, I used instant espresso rather than powdered. Made for crunchy cookies which we ate anyway. I've also made rolls that became ammunition and lemon pie filling that became lemon soup. Live and maybe learn.

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    1. I've made brownie soup and cheese cake soup. Just eat it blindfolded and it's lovely.

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  25. My only failure was not an improvisation but a planned recipe, just not my recipe. I volunteered to make dinner rolls for Christmas. Instead of using the nice egg bread recipe I wanted to use, Mom found a recipe that had the dough raising overnight. I produced hockey pucks that the family reminded me about for years. I did finally get a chance to redeem myself, some twenty years later.

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    1. I admire anyone who messes with yeast before a holiday dinner.

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  26. It's so reassuring to read these, I have to say!

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  27. From Celia: well I had a witness to my epic fail not to forget you all! But I do remember curdling a pot of hollandaise made for a dinner party (don’t those words DP sound antique), I don’t think I knew how to fix the sauce so I gave it an extra beating and served it. My guests, a charming gay couple, ate it up and were polite too. I’m sure I had others but time has blocked them.

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    1. It's pretty easy to screw up hollandaise... especially if you're trying to get other stuff served at the same time.

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  28. Some of these are hilarious.

    I spent the early years of marriage cooking everything with a boxed or jarred sauce. Anybody remember Chicken Tonight? Then I branched out. The Hubby would encourage me to "be creative," but I rarely deviated. I'm sure there were epic fails, but the one that sticks in my mind was the night The Hubby decided to "spice up" some boxed Kraft Mac and Cheese by added cubed ham and generous amounts of cumin.

    I tried to eat it, I really did. I swear.

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    1. I understand the concept... too bad it didn't work.

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  29. About 50 years ago, I invited 2 friends over for dinner and decided to make it healthy. Baked chicken with dried herbs. I don’t remember fresh herbs being available in the grocery stores then. But if they were, there were probably prohibitively expensive for someone just out of school. Back to the healthy dinner. Large tossed salad. And what was planned as the crowning glory of the meal: a low calorie cheesecake. It was worse than tasteless. It actually tasted bad. Twenty-first century hindsight makes me think it was the taste of whatever artificial sweetener I used at the time.

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    1. Artificial sweetener! Me: running screaming from the room.

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  30. It counts! And that was so sweet of you.

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  31. Matzo balls are a kind of traditional Jewish fluffy dumpling served in soup. The first time I made them - I was 24 and could read a recipe and was making a holiday meal for a boyfriend - they came out fine...but where was the soup I cooked them in? Completely absorbed! My mother explained on the phone that you cook the dumplings separately, in water or extra broth, and add to chicken soup when serving!

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  32. I went to the trouble to make gnocchi and dropped them in boiling water. Ended up with the dreaded wallpaste as well. Live and learn.

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  33. I had a recipe for Cornish hens basted with a sweet-sour soy-based sauce. Directions said baste the hens repeatedly in the last 10 minutes of cooking. Figuring I'd be busy finishing other dishes then, I sauced the hens right away. The sauce burnt to a crisp and the hens looked like black bats. Never again.

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  34. This was basically just a disappointment for my husband and me, but one time when I made my beloved strawberry cake, I ruined the icing/frosting. I didn't puree the strawberries for the icing in the food processor, and it ruined the consistency and appearance. The taste wasn't as good either.

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