cooking mistakes i have made
i’ve been reading food writing lately, to figure out how to do it, & i’ve noticed that food writers really like to bring up cooking mistakes they have made, in order to charm & disarm you, & generally make you feel like, “hey, she1 made these dumb mistakes & now she has a hit book about cooking….maybe i shouldn’t be too discouraged by my own mistakes!”
for efficiency’s sake, instead of sprinkling my cooking mistake stories into other cooking posts, i have decided to gather some together here, for readers to refer to as necessary, whenever they feel that my cooking posts call for a mistake story. & when i think of more cooking mistakes i have made i will post more of them
saag paneer
so, never having made any indian food before, i decided to make saag paneer from scratch, paneer & all. this was my first cheesemaking experience. i like had to buy cheesecloth for it. making the paneer was a little fussy & unintuitive but very satisfyingly tactile. especially the part where you kind of twist the cheesecloth around the mass of curds & squeeze out as much whey as you can.
when i, to my own surprise, succeeded in making paneer that looked felt & tasted like paneer, i was so satisfied (& it was so late) that i got kind of overconfident about the saag part. i was trying to follow parts of one recipe & other parts of another & i didn’t have fenugreek & didn’t know what i was doing & long story short, my saag came out watery & tasteless…..but i didn’t taste it…so i didn’t find out until i had already mixed in all of my hard-won paneer……..
fish with apricots
i know i keep hyping the flavor bible but i have to warn you…..those paper wings can enable you to fly too close to the sun
early on when i got the book, i had a lot of fun & success using it to alter the flavor profiles of dishes i already knew to how to cook. but then my hubris prompted me to generate a dish with nothng but the connections in the flavor bible to guide me. what i came up with somehow was like swordfish with white wine, dried apricots, honey, & parsley…. sweet fish. awful.
yogurt
for a while i was making yogurt with a culture that was very fancy & impressive to me because it came from bulgaria, but was also finicky & often just did not turn the milk into yogurt. i was just so attached to the bulgarian thing that i really didn’t want the culture to be the problem. eventually i just tried other starters & found one that didn’t leave me in fear of checking my yogurt.
ice cream maker
not sure this really counts as a cooking mistake per se. more of a life mistake or, actually, a character flaw. there’s this lady who owns a secondhand kitchen supply store….i think she’s so cool that i’m kind of scared of her……i bought an ice cream maker from her. but i didn’t use it for many months. because ice cream is a little fussy, what with the making a custard and everything. & she is the kind of person who remembers what you bought from her & asks how you enjoyed it. i really didn’t want to go into her shop & have to tell her i fucked up the ice cream, so i didn’t even try.
fortunately i bought the ice cream machine in the winter so for a couple of visits i could just tell her it was too cold for ice cream. but through the summer this became less & less tenable. i felt like i couldn’t visit & there was something i really wanted to buy from her—i don’t even remember what now. so i made this very easy 3-ingredient frozen yogurt just to be able to tell her i had used the fucking ice cream maker. & then it was the best frozen yogurt i had ever had & when i told her about it (she did remember and ask me!) someone else in the store overheard & bought an ice cream maker as well, she was like “i don’t want to make ice cream, it’s too hard, but this sounds like something i can do with my toddler!” is there a moral to this story?
i use she advisedly. although michael pollan does this too. like at the beginning of cooked he was like “when i started this book i didn’t know anything about cooking” & as a reader you can’t help being like “are you sure? isn’t this like your fourth food book? i seem to remember you cooking in the other ones too”