Cooking disasters – and one triumph
I’m still stinging a little from Ryan’s reaction to a recent inedible curry, so I thought it was time to remind him of how much better a cook I am than he had any right to expect.
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Even if I still can’t boil an egg…
My family were not much interested in food. The only vegetables we ever ate fresh were potatoes and the occasional carrot – other than that it was always baked beans or tinned peas. Our Sunday lunch was cremated and dry – and made vaguely edible by slices of thick bisto gravy. Fish fingers and sausage rolls were staples, as were tinned tomato soup and crisply fried bacon.
So when I met Ryan, the only meals I had ever cooked were scrambled eggs on toast, which I made for my dad. And Vesta packet meals, which I cooked with my previous boyfriend. Paella, and chicken chow mein with crispy noodles…
So when it was our turn to cook dinner for ten people in our friends’ house in Hope Street – the result left something to be desired.
We flipped through someone’s cookery book and saw a recipe for Nasi Goreng. Everyone liked Chinese fried rice, and this seemed like a spicier version and it sounded straight forward enough. Lots of cooked rice, a bit of chicken, a few prawns, shallots, mushrooms and peas – and a few spices and some soy sauce to serve with it.
There were lots of us, so we got out the two biggest frying pans and set to work. We chopped the vegetables, peeled and deveined the prawns, chopped the chicken, measured out the spices – and then started frying. All went well until we added the rice to the pans. They were very full. Stirring the rice and the other ingredients and letting the rice heat through was terribly difficult – at least if we wanted to avoid spilling food all over the cooker. And according to The Book – which I referred to anxiously every few seconds – this part should only take two or three minutes to heat the rice through.
It just would not brown though. No matter how hot, and how long I kept on tossing it in the pan, the rice stayed purest white. It looked nothing like the picture in The Book, and nothing like the fried rice from the Chinese.
It was several years before I worked out that the rice became brown because of the generous application of soy sauce.
Still, the meal was vaguely edible, is somewhat overcooked. I don’t think we were the only ones who took a walk via the Greek chippy that evening.
I don’t think our effort was quite as bad as the young man who cooked us chili con carne – without boiling the kidney beans for the requisite ten minutes. Everyone was very ill after that, rather than merely hungry. Or there was the time someone made a huge lamb stew with pearl barley to eke it out. The barley wasn’t completely cooked, but it tasted good. Eating a generous portion resulted in severe discomfort later…
There have been many disasters since then. Mostly around sweet things and desserts. I recently made a lime marmalade which Ryan claims is slowly sucking all the light out of the universe. I once made a chocolate cake for a friend’s little boy’s birthday. No one could eat it, it was so solid. he asked for a shop vake the next year 
I still don’t do cakes – even the ones they day are foolproof. And then there was the lime cheesecake that no one would eat – for some reason the grated lime zest I decorated it with looked a little too much like mould 
I did once manage to make boiled eggs for sandwiches that were cooked to perfection. Just the once, and somehow I don’t think it can be repeated. I forgot to set the timer so took them off the boil too early – the opposite problem to usual since I have a strong dislike of runny white. They were so undercooked that I cracked them and scraped them into a glass dish, and popped them in the microwave for a minute with a knob of butter – so they were somewhere between boiled and scrambled.
So when we were first married, Ryan started out doing the cooking. Pork and cabbage three days in succession, and I knew I had to learn to cook out of self defence. I flicked through the book again, picked a recipe that looked tempting. I had no idea it was supposed to be difficult.
Cheese souffle. It was perfect… and souffle is still something I make from time to time, by special request. My special occasion pudding is a lemon curd souffle – recipe courtesy of Delia. And nowadays I make a much better fried rice than one you can get from the takeaway. But still, occasionally, there is a meal that doesn’t quite come up to scratch…
Do you have any cooking disaster stories to share?
About Ann GodridgeAnn Godridge has just completed her first crime novel, The Mermaid's Shroud, and has started work on the sequel. Her story the Tree of Knowledge was shortlisted for the Asham Award. She writes about writing and sometimes about textile arts at her blogStraw into Gold. You can find out more about her here - About Ann G.
View all posts by Ann Godridge →
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“Do you have any cooking disaster stories to share?”
…..How long have you got? !!
Great post Ann – there can't be any BOTB reader who doesn't identify with that, at one time or another in their cooking lives, anyway!
Twitter: SuzeStMWrites
My first cooking disaster also involves rice. I was nearly 20 when I discovered rice, and I was told I wouldn't like it. Kev liked it and as we were living together I felt I must cook something healthy. Like you I found a recipe for fried rice.
I fried the rice, the peas, the spices and it looked a bit weird and the rice was very crunchy but we ate it. It turns out that I was meant to boil the rice first, that is what cooked rice meant, not to cook it in the pan with the other stuff.
In one pub I trained in, I spent 8 months in the kitchen with a former naval chef. Life was a living hell, but every recipe he taught I can still cook to perfection, sadly I cannot afford to eat 'fine' every day, and we would all die of heart attacks…
The naval chef swore by Delia, and so did Chloe Perkins, another 'fine' chef I worked with in my mid twenties, and she rather like Leith as well. I love Delia's recipes. Even I can manage them
and I am rubbish at following instructions 
My first cooking disaster also involves rice. I was nearly 20 when I discovered rice, and I was told I wouldn't like it. Kev liked it and as we were living together I felt I must cook something healthy. Like you I found a recipe for fried rice.
I fried the rice, the peas, the spices and it looked a bit weird and the rice was very crunchy but we ate it. It turns out that I was meant to boil the rice first, that is what cooked rice meant, not to cook it in the pan with the other stuff.
In one pub I trained in, I spent 8 months in the kitchen with a former naval chef. Life was a living hell, but every recipe he taught I can still cook to perfection, sadly I cannot afford to eat 'fine' every day, and we would all die of heart attacks…
The naval chef swore by Delia, and so did Chloe Perkins, another 'fine' chef I worked with in my mid twenties, and she rather like Leith as well. I love Delia's recipes. Even I can manage them
and I am rubbish at following instructions 
Oh dear, I expect that was very crunchy…
I think Nigel Slater is my favourite food writer – his recipes always seem to work for me, but he also writes lovingly about some of the ordinary things I like to eat. I kind of disagree with him about how to make the best chip butty for instance – he recommends white plastic sliced bread while I prefer wholemeal – but I like that he cares.
When I first lived on my own my mother bought me a copy of Delia Smith's “How To Cheat At Cooking” (first published 1971.) I found it incredibly useful and her recipe in there for Moussaka became my dinner party “piece de resistance” … so easy and so effective. I found that little book the other day and despite it having been chewed by one or more of our puppies in the intervening years, it's still readable with just the occasional gap by a tooth mark.
Amazingly you can still buy the book in the UK via some of Amazon's allied sellers … over £50 for the hard cover version and around £30 for the paperback! I was reading some recent reviews for the book and many of them were very critical. However what people forget is that back in 1970 or so when Delia would have written the book, there was far less available in terms of convenience food than what we have today. A new edition of the book would be very different, I suspect, with far less in the way of dried, canned and bottled ingredients now that we can buy their fresh equivalents in almost pre-digested form from the local supermarket.
A classic of its time, in my humble opinion!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-cheat-cooking-Delia…
Twitter: SuzeStMWrites