Cooking Failures

Tag: dinner

  • Tacos

    There is one food that I make successfully now. I make tacos at least once a week. Sometimes even two times. It is the one meal that my family eats. Almost always. I have perfected it down to science, but it was not easy getting here. Tacos always scared me. Why are there so many different kinds? Why are there so many things you can put in them and why do they always break? Who invented a food that literally falls apart at the first bite? Couldn’t they have done better? And how did a broken food become so popular? I just stayed away from tacos because, first, I didn’t know how to make them, and second, they seem like a lot of work. I know people say tacos are easy to make, but it just seems like I was setting myself up for failure if I tried. There were plenty other failures to be had that required fewer ingredients.

    One day, while on vacation, my family and I were passing through the Shenandoah Valley, so we stopped at my friend Lee’s house for dinner. She made tacos and I couldn’t believe it, but my kid ate nine tacos! Nine tacos! How can anyone eat nine tacos? Especially a skinny little seven-year-old? I’ve never seen my kid eat that much. I was literally in shock. I kept looking under the table to see if maybe he was hiding them in his shoes just to be polite and trying to boost her taco-making ego.

    How in the world did she do that? Magic? She taught me how to make tacos and gave me taco seasoning that she orders online to take home with me. Easy enough. I went home all enthusiastic feeling like I would probably be able to open my own Mexican restaurant in the next week or so. I was already thinking of names. Loca Brita Tacos? Brita’s Brilliant Tacos? Best Brita Tacos? I will figure out the name later.

    First attempt, I didn’t drain the meat. Who knew you must drain the meat? I didn’t read that anywhere. (except years later I noticed that it’s written on the back of the taco seasoning packet but, in my defense, at that time, I was using spices in a Ziploc bag that Lee gave me).

    Second attempt, I burned the meat. Who knew you have to mix it so frequently? Give me a break, taco meat. Can’t you just sit there and tan a little bit without burning? Who knew taco meat was so clingy and demanding of attention? I shouldn’t judge, maybe the poor little taco meat had a rough upbringing.

    Third attempt was a bit of a success. I did use the boil in the bag rice because making rice also scares me. How do you know when it’s done? How do you not burn the bottom? Why are there so many different consistencies of rice? Not to mention about 50 different kinds of rice. Jasmine? Basmati?? Long grain??? What is the difference? The rice aisle at the grocery store overwhelms me. Boil in the bag rice was the way to go.

    My friend Lee came to visit me a few years later and taught me how to make rice. I had no idea it could be so easy. Now I’m an expert at making rice. It might be one of the things I do best. My sister was impressed. The last time she came to visit, I made tacos. You know how to make rice, she asked? Yes, I replied proudly, I know how to make rice, like it was the biggest accomplishment of my life.

    Another tip Lee taught me was baking the taco shells. Who knew you had to bake taco shells? I just pulled them out of the box and plopped them on the plate. Then a few years later, I read the box of the taco shells and on the back of it says to bake it at 350 for about 5 minutes. Huh! I’m not sure how I missed that. Who reads the back of the box? People who can’t cook probably do. Or should.

    My friend said that I should have a blog post about all the recipes that are successful and the recipes that I can actually make. I said, one thing? Tacos? That is the only recipe I consistently make that my family eats. That would be a very short blog post because all it would say was, I follow the directions on the back of the packet.

    I ran out of Lee’s taco seasoning and just started buying store brand. It took me a few tries at tacos to realize that normal taco seasoning is too spicy for my kid, and I need to buy the mild. But look at me now! I know how to make rice, toast the taco shells, and follow the directions on the back of the taco seasoning packet. Everyone needs a success story. Everyone needs a win now and then. Mine is tacos.

  • Chick-fil-A Chicken Nuggets

    I was complaining to a friend the other day about all of my cooking failures. She told me that I should have a little grace and not be so hard on myself because I actually had a pretty tough audience. It’s true. She’s right. My kids are such picky eaters. They always have been. If I had a kid like my brother, he would have eaten everything I cooked and I would not be writing this blog. I would be falsely led to believe that I’m an excellent cook. I guess it’s all relative.

    In addition to being picky eaters in the first place, something happened last year to add to the perfect storm that exasperated my cooking failures. My youngest son was diagnosed with celiac disease. It’s not the end of the world, you might be thinking. Yeah right! Maybe for someone who eats meat and potatoes and vegetables but my kid’s favorite foods were Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets and Panera  mac & cheese. Everything this kid liked had gluten in it. He was devastated. I was devastated. I spent a small fortune buying anything gluten-free from every store in Wilmington in the hopes that we would find something he liked. Nothing.

    I stayed up late at night researching recipes and finally, I found it. I found a gluten-free copycat Chick-fil-A chicken nugget recipe this was perfect! I read it 10 times. It didn’t even look that hard. The recipe promised that it would taste just like Chick-fil-A nuggets. The woman who wrote it said her kids actually like these better than Chick-fil-A nuggets. This was going to be great! I couldn’t sleep that whole night because I was so excited about making this recipe and presenting it to my son and having him gobble up every single last nugget and proclaim, “Who needs Chick-fil-A when I’ve got a mom who cooks like you?” He’d have a big adoring smile on his face and I would walk out of the room literally patting my own back and high fiving my brother. I’m sure you can imagine where this is going.


    I waited for my brother to come home from work because he’s my cooking partner. Except that one time with the grill when I almost burned the house down. That time I was going to cook by myself and have it ready to surprise him when he came home from work with a delicious grilled chicken dinner. Instead he came home to black chicken on the grill, smoke still in the air, me in tears and the siding melting off the house. Well, I learned my lesson. My brother now helps with every single cooking failure so I could have someone else to share the blame. Not really. It’s so I could have someone to dial 911 when I set the house on fire.

    We both read the recipe through multiple times. We had all the ingredients on the counter, and we got to work with big, excited smiles on our faces. We probably even danced around a little as we mixed the little gluten-free bread crumbs with the gluten-free flour and prepared the little bowl for the eggs. We did all the dipping stuff and rolling stuff and shaking stuff. Then chicken nuggets looked perfect! Before they were cooked. Perfectly adorable raw Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets made by my brother and I. It was going smoothly so far.

    Neither one of us had ever made anything before where you actually have to fry something. I am talking about dunk it all the way in oil as opposed to just fry it up in the frying pan in a little bit of oil. But that seems simple enough, right? IT WASN’T!

    The oil has to be a certain temperature? There’s a certain device to measure the temperature of the oil? I can’t use my trusted plain old meat thermometer for that? “We can just wing it,” I said confidently to my brother. “Let’s just watch the oil until it looks hot enough.” My brother nods in agreement because I’m sure hot oil looks different than warm oil? So we watch the oil until it looks hot enough, and then we start dunking some chicken nuggets in. Just a few at a time like the recipe says. Oil is splattering all over us and we are jumping back covering our bodies with our hands but then putting on brave faces and moving back in to check on those nuggets. We set the timer for the exact time the recipe said to and we pull those nuggets out carefully with our cute little metal slotted spoon perfect for frying. BLACK!  Not just a little burned but black.

    “Hmmm… the oil is probably too hot. Let’s turn it down just a little bit and then just try again,” I said, undeterred.  But this time the nuggets burned even faster, so I thought maybe the oil was too hot and we just needed to dump the oil and try again. My brother takes the big pot of oil out the back door and dumps it into some brush area we have behind our house. He comes back in, and we try again.

    Can we use canola oil? Can we mix it with olive oil? Why not? Isn’t oil just oil? I didn’t really buy extra vegetable oil, but I had some old containers of oil I was just pulling out of the cabinet.  My brother and I poured new oil in, watched it until it looked hot enough and once again dropped  a few chicken nuggets in. The first batch looked a little funny. My brother said they tasted bad. The second batch was too burned, the third batch didn’t seem to be done quite enough, the oil looked really dirty, my brother ran outside to dump the oil so we could start again. I pulled out every bottle of oil and just sort of poured stuff in to experiment and see what would happen. Batch after batch came out worse than the time before.  We adjusted the time, we adjusted the oil, but nothing worked.

    In the end, five pots of oil had been dumped in the brush, (my brother got his exercise that day) multiple bottles of random oils, eight chicken breasts, my kitchen ended up smelling like a McDonald’s, my brother and I covered in grease splatter and burns, we were left with ONE, yes, ONE, edible homemade gluten-free chicken nugget. (edible is relative in this sentence)

    I put it on a plate and present it to my son. “Here it is! Here is a gluten-free Chick-fil-A nugget. It will taste just like Chick-fil-A! You will be in heaven.”

    “I hope you weren’t very hungry, though,” and I smile and shrug.

    He tasted it and was polite, but he didn’t like it.  And it absolutely did NOT taste like a Chick Fil A chicken nugget. (not that I tasted it because I am vegetarian) The recipe lied. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Don’t believe recipes. Definitely not prep times.

    We ended up just ordering a gluten-free Domino’s Pizza for him, but I’m not giving up on that Chick-fil-A chicken nugget recipe. I think we’ll try it again another day. Once we recover. And once I do a little research on what exactly went wrong.

    And I know, I know, I know, that you should not dump oil out in their environment like that. It can cause all sorts of damage to the environment, and trust me, I love the environment. I recycle and pick up trash and dream of having an electric car. I still feel bad about all the oil I dumped. Sometimes it even keeps me up in the middle of the night to this day.

    I was panicking and I just had to get rid of that oil because of course, the oil was the problem, and the next batch was going to work out perfectly. Besides, I couldn’t use my normal black bean can for all that oil. I need a really large, sealable, non-breakable container big enough to store all that oil safely. I’m actually hopping on Amazon right now to find one for my next chicken nugget attempt. Let me know if you have this problem also and I will send you the link to the one I find.

  • Cooking Failures

    The road to my cooking failures.  Where did it begin?  Did my mom teach me how to cook? Not really.  Do I remember my mom cooking?  I remember cous cous.  Some stew we ate in Mauritania with our hands that became a staple growing up.  It was delicious.  Some sort of tomato-based sauce with potatoes and other vegetables.  The cous cous would soak into the sauce.  It was delicious.  I remember pork chops and apple sauce.  I remember spaghetti but mostly because my little sister had a spaghetti shirt she had to wear every time we ate spaghetti. She was a bit of a slob.

    Well, it’s not fair to blame my mother.  Plenty of people grow up without their mom “teaching them how to cook” and still become successful at cooking.  No, I am special.  Not a regular failure.  Not a sometimes failure.  I am an unbelievable cooking failure.  And this is my story.

    I always dreamed of being the perfect housewife and mother.  Ever since I was eight years old playing with my bald cabbage patch kid, Benedict Arnold.  Yes, that was really the name he came with.  Sure, I wanted a job like being a teacher probably but mostly I just wanted to be a mom and a housewife.  To clean the house while skipping around singing Christmas carols making wonderful organic meals for my children.  They would clean their plates with smiles on their cute little faces.  My husband would come home to a delicious home cooked meal. My mom used to tell me that when her dad ate her mom’s cooking, he would mmmm mmmm mmmm with pleasure because the food was so good.  That is what I pictured my husband doing while eating my home cooked meals. Never happened.  Not once. Not even close.

    Of course, my kids would love veggies and almonds and probably even tofu. Fast forward to 2008 where I would peel off the outside of McDonald’s chicken nuggets and chase my one year old kid around the house shoving bites of the insides into his mouth every few minutes. Yes yes, I know about choking and how your kid should only eat sitting in a chair.  I really tried.  I swear I did.

    Did my husband ever come home to a delicious home cooked meal?  Well, there was one crock pot recipe I got from Real Simple that my husband liked.

    But most nights…. My son liked to “cook dinner for daddy” so when daddy got home from work, he’d have dinner.  Before he went to bed, Dylan would make his daddy dinner.  In a big bowl he would mix anything. Cereal, mayonnaise, salad dressing, ketchup, fruit snacks, milk.  He thought he was a great three-year-old chef.  He would leave it out for daddy.  And that is what my husband came home to.  He would look at it, dump it, and every morning tell Dylan it was delicious.  No wonder we are divorced. Ok, there might be a few reasons other than my cooking but that is up there.

    Meat scared me.  I’ve been vegetarian since 1993.  I remember putting meat in the pan and trying to psych the meat out.  I would literally talk to the meat in the pan out loud and say, “I’m not scared of you!! You will not intimidate me, beef!!” But the meat always intimidated me.  It felt good though to try to be brave in front of meat. Fake meat bravery.  The meat never believed it.

    My mom always said that anyone could cook if they could read a recipe.  Well, this ONE time (and only this one time) my mom was wrong.  Very very wrong.  Because I could read a recipe no problem.  I’m actually great at reading.  I read all the time.  English was my favorite subject.  But still, reading did not help in the cooking department.

    I will say my brother Lucas loves my cooking and my dogs too.  So it can’t be that bad, you are thinking.  Yes yes it can.  They are not good judges. Do not trust brothers or dogs.  Trust kids.  Who never like a single thing I cook. Not a single thing.

    I get recipes from great cooks.  I have friends who could probably win cooking contests.  They give me recipes and try to teach me to cook.  A for effort. I joke that when they are on their deathbed their one dying regret will be that they could not teach Brita to cook.  We joke but it’s a very likely possibility.  Poor friends.

    Also, I was going to have that perfect textbook baby who not only ate anything I put in front of him, but also did all those things babies were supposed to do.  Like nap, go to bed, not climb up walls, play with their cute little baby toys in an age appropriate manner, sit on the kitchen floor looking all sweet and playing happily with their toys while I cooked and slaved in the kitchen.  You know, the kind of kid that you could leave in the next room for a minute to get other things done.  The kind that would sit happily in the front of the grocery cart chewing a cracker with an adorable smile on his face while you leisurely strolled around the grocery store picking organic items and carefully planning elaborate meals. I didn’t get that baby.  I had the one that I could not take my eyes off for a second.  A SECOND.  I know what you are thinking but honestly, it didn’t matter how baby proofed my house was.  My house was practically a preschool classroom.  Didn’t matter.

    So that didn’t leave a lot of time for my cooking dream but once again, it’s not fair to blame my kid.  Plenty of parents have difficult… umm.  I mean different children and they still manage to cook delicious and mouth-watering meals for their hard working husbands. 

    You know how in the movies, the husband comes home late from work and the wife is waiting, looking radiant, probably wearing a dress and heels, pearls too, (I don’t think I own heels. Or pearls) the baby is sleeping soundly in his crib (looking angelic while snuggling his lovey) the house is spotless, and a warm dinner is waiting on the table.  There are probably candles lit and jazz music or some shit like that.  I wanted that.  I pictured that.  I would be perfect at that. 

    But it was nothing like that.  First, my kid didn’t go to bed.  I’m not sure he slept the first five years of his life at all.  Not just he stays up a little late (hee hee- cute innocent laughs by perfect housewives who say this because their kid stayed up until 8:15) EYE ROLL!! He NEVER slept.  You think I’m exaggerating.  I’m not.

    But still, I had to feed my kid, right?  Oh, I pictured him liking everything I gave him.  I imagined cutting up avocados and cauliflower and putting it on his little highchair tray while he gobbled in up happily.  Not too quickly though because I had taught him about chewing carefully and not choking. And never throwing food on the floor because that is a waste.  And we didn’t have a dog then. 

    I imagined myself making my own baby food of course.  Doesn’t everyone?  It’s the sign of a good mother.  In my imagination I would be slaving for hours in the kitchen while my baby sat on the kitchen floor happily playing with his toys.  We would sing songs and nursery rhymes.  I would talk through how I was making the baby food and how delicious it would be.  I know the importance of talking to your baby.  Just talk and talk about anything.  Just so he could hear your voice and develop amazing language skills. I’d label all the jars of baby food with a freaking label maker.

    Well first of all, my baby didn’t like anything.  Except cheese (I’m proud of this because cheese is my favorite food.  He must have inherited that from me), goldfish, saltines, maybe something else.  But nothing he was supposed to eat.

    I’d try cereal or a banana for breakfast.  They would end up on the floor.  No dog as I mentioned before.  I’d try to feed him in the highchair, but this kid could only be contained for 7.8 seconds if I was lucky.  Just enough time to throw it all on the floor and scream to be free.

    I soon realized in addition to being contained, the other problem was this kid could not sit still.  I bought one of those cute little tables where you see kids sitting all happily and eating their food.  Usually gazing out a window or something.  Well, my kid would not sit for longer than 30 seconds.  I even tried TV for distraction.  I know, I know, TV is bad for babies that young.  It didn’t work.

    So instead of feeding him chicken cordon bleu off a tiny Donald duck fork while he happily sat in his booster chair up at the table while we talked about our fun adventures of the day, his dinner consisted of turkey lunch meat, cut up cheese sticks, frozen peas (yes, I didn’t even bother to cook them) and apples.  All cut up in those cute little plates with all the different departments. And I fed it to him while shoving pieces in his mouth with my fingers as he was running by or standing on his train table.  My dinner consisted of whatever was leftover on his cute little plate.  Except not the meat since I have been vegetarian for over 30 years.  So, when my husband got home after his long day at work, I was still chasing the kid around, (hours after his bedtime) and hubby had to fend for himself for dinner. As you see, I had the best intentions.  It was all going to work out perfectly.  Like a dream come true.