Easter is, for most of us anyway, a time of family gatherings. One of those days that bring people together—you know, those to whom we’re bound by blood. If we’re especially blessed, we’re surrounded by people we’d choose to spend time with regardless of our shared DNA.
It’s also a time for cooking and baking. This particular holiday brought to mind a number of cooking memories, all of which were disasters (otherwise they probably would’ve been forgotten). Does your family have any tales of cooking disasters? Mine has plenty.
For example, this past weekend I spent a couple of hours making a family favorite: Italian cookies. My daughter’s birthday is actually tomorrow, and making these cookies is a tradition for her. I’ve made them too many times to remember: every birthday (she’s 25 this year), every Christmas, and several special occasions in between. I even featured the recipe in my Christmas Newsletter last year. Everyone loves them.
Well, unless I leave something out.
Normally I assemble all of the ingredients on the kitchen counter before I start mixing. I never realized how important this little step is, because for some reason this time I began mixing after taking out the first couple of ingredients. This is an especially silly thing to do for someone with as many distractions as I have in my kitchen.
I must also mention I use an especially large cookie sheet, especially for this recipe. Each cookie has to be individually molded, shaped into an S. And since this takes some time, I usually don’t turn on the oven until I have at least half a baking sheet ready to go in.
Everything looked so normal—until baking that first batch. I noticed they weren’t puffing up the way they usually do. Odd, I thought, as I finished shaping the rest of the dough. It wasn’t until I was ready to put the final sheet into the oven, wondering if I might have done something wrong, that I realized I forgot to put in the baking powder. The finished cookies were as un-puffed as before baking—and tasted rather flat, too. No baking powder to give them a flaky taste.
But I’m in good company in my family. My sister, who is a wonderful cook, baked a traditional lamb cake whose face didn’t turn out because the batter never reached that section of the mold because she put it in upside down. One year a long time ago, my mother mistook cornstarch for powdered sugar and the same lamb recipe came out hard as a rock. We could have saved that lamb for subsequent years (although we didn’t) and it would probably still be lovely today.
My sister-in-law, who’d never made canned tomato soup with milk (her family made it the classic way, with water) thought the color looked odd and so before serving such anemic soup to my brother added red food coloring to make it look more tomato-ey.
Of course no memory of cooking disasters can go without retelling my meatloaf story from a few years ago, before we moved into this house. We were renting an apartment where we learned the hard way that the brand new oven had a faulty temperature gauge. Even though I’d set the oven to 350 degrees—the temperature I always use for meatloaf—this oven went full-blast to broil. After it had been baking a little while, I opened the door for a peek and the meat burst into flames. I turned off the oven, then, having nothing to fight the fire with, I shooed my daughter out of the apartment and called the fire department. My husband had been out with the boys that day, reaching our neighborhood just in time to follow the fire trucks home. What a thrill that was for him! Actually, by the time the fire department came the fire had burned itself out. Everything but the teapot sitting on that oven survived the fire. The fireman who checked things out said that meatloaf sure smelled good. So, since they hadn’t had to spray any fire retardant on it, we followed his advice and tasted it anyway. It was the best meatloaf I’d ever made—before, or since.
Who knew cooking could be so much fun! (And doesn’t this post make you wish I could invite you to dinner sometime? Or maybe not…)
Join Me!