Family Cooking Disasters

Most of my relatives on my mom’s side of the family belong to a Yahoo! Group so we can share updates and stories. The most recent conversation has been about cooking disasters, and it’s been quite entertaining. I thought I would share a few of my favorites. (Don’t miss the recipe at the bottom of the post)

From my Aunt Maria:
Last week Nick was coming to dinner and I set out to make his favorite: Chicken Pot Pie. In the morning, I lovingly baked some boneless, skinless chicken breasts, wrapped them in foil, and refrigerated them. About 5 pm I set out to make that CHICKEN Pot Pie.

I chopped up celery, carrots, broccoli florets, onions, etc; made the sauce, combined it all. Then I rolled out the pie crust. As I filled up the pie crust in the pie plate, I noticed that it seemed the 12-inch pie plate was too big for the job; the filling ingredients just did not fill up the crust like it should. Oh, well, I was in a hurry, and I went on and rolled out the top pie crust, lovingly placed it over the ingredients, fluted the edges. Beautiful.

An hour later or so later, the cooked CHICKEN pot pie sat on the counter about 10 minutes to cool a bit. We finished slurping our cups of homemade asparagus soup and I got up to slice the CHICKEN Pot pie.

As I sliced it, I looked at Nick who was looking at me as I sliced, and I must have had a stupid, duh! look on my face as I had a grim realization. He said, "What?"

"I forgot to put the (expletive deleted) chicken in this." (Unbelievable!!!)

Oh, that was okay with him; "We can have a vegetable pot pie."

Unwilling to do that I made a quick recovery. I yanked the foil-wrapped chicken from the fridge, unwrapped one & sliced it at warp speed, lifted up the top crust on the slices, and tucked some chopped chicken in. The filling was still very hot and everything was ok. Very yummy, CHICKEN pot pie, indeed.

From my Uncle Jim:
I had decided that instead of cooking the traditional turkey for dinner, I would barbeque a duck. I of course considered myself to be pretty good at this sort of thing. I put the duck, a big fat one, on the rotisserie, basted it with orange sauce, and started cooking. When I went to check on it, not knowing it was overloaded with grease, the thing had caught on fire, blown the glass out of the barbeque and pretty well destroyed the whole thing. The duck came into the house burned to a crisp. It was totally black from one end to the other.

From yours truly:
All the cooking disasters I've been privy to recently had to do with spice mix-ups - mostly because I'm not very good about labeling spices. A few months ago my mom volunteered to make curry for dinner. She accidentally put paprika in the dish instead of turmeric. When we realized what happened we added a little turmeric and it was just as good as usual.

Then I made paprika chicken at Chris's house and ran out of paprika. No problem, he said, he had more in the cupboard. We realized later that he'd given me cayenne pepper instead of paprika. Luckily it was edible but it was REALLY spicy! (the recipe for this – sans all the cayenne – is below)

The worst, though, was when I put a tablespoon of dried mint in lasagna instead of parsley. We ate it that night but I threw the rest of it away. Chris tried to make me feel better by saying, "Hey, usually when you eat lasagna you smell like garlic. With this one your breath is minty fresh!"

Chicken Paprikash
Makes 8 servings
3 T. flour
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs, cut into 1/2" strips
1 T. olive oil
1/2 onion, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 stalk celery, chopped
6 mushrooms, sliced
1¼ c. chicken stock
2 T. Hungarian sweet paprika
Pinch cayenne pepper
1 t. salt
1 t. pepper
1 c. sour cream
Cooked egg noodles for serving

Toss chicken in flour. Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Brown chicken in oil, about 4 minutes. Add onion, red pepper, green pepper, garlic, celery and mushrooms and cook about 4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until vegetables begin to soften. Add chicken stock, paprika, pepper, salt and pepper (make sure stock mostly covers chicken; if it doesn’t, add a little water). Bring to a boil, lower heat, cover, and let simmer for one hour or until chicken is very tender. Stir in sour cream and heat through (do not boil). Serve over cooked egg noodles.