Food failures, food successes
And the food words I imagined incorrectly for years
Whenever I cook something new or invented (see: The Meals With No Names) and there is risk that whatever I make will be inedible because of some cock up, there is security in the knowledge that there other leftovers we could eat instead, or bread for toast, or failing all of that, we can order a pizza. Happily and luckily, I had not needed to use these backup foods (not because everything I cook is mindblowingly delicious but because most things I cook are either yummy or good enough). Until I did. A couple of weeks ago I cooked something that was enough of a cock up that the entire dish had to be thrown into the bin. And to make matters worse, it was followed by another food fail the next morning, and a second entire batch of ingredients that had to be chucked out. Disappointment upon disappointment. It’s a wonder I didn’t just hang up my apron and quit (kidding; I don’t wear aprons).
Food failure 1: Baked tofu
Baked tofu is a dish I’ve been cooking for years, and it’s something that all four of us love. I first used this recipe and modified it as time went on to make it even easier. You get a couple of blocks of extra firm tofu, cut them into rectangular sticks (one block of tofu gets 16 sticks the way I cut them). Dab dry with a tea towel/kitchen towel, and pop them all into a medium mixing bowl. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle over with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and smoked paprika. Gently mix with a spoon. Place each piece onto a baking tray, then bake at 400F (fan forced) for about 40 minutes, turning halfway.
These are the things I do differently from the original recipe:
I stopped pressing the tofu. I did press it for years and years but I read an article saying you didn’t have to press the tofu. Tried not pressing and the world didn’t end, so I continued not pressing. Saves me a bunch of paper towels and time! Win.
Don’t use cornstarch. We always eat it immediately so we didn’t need it — it’s crunchy straight out of the oven without it. Another step eliminated!
I don’t marinate. I have in the past! It was good. But then I discovered the mixture of olive oil, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper and it was just as good. And faster (are you seeing a theme here?).
I don’t cut the tofu into cubes but rectangular sticks. The cubes are smaller so you end up with more of them which is fine BUT it takes double the time when it comes to laying them on the baking tray and turning them at the halfway point (yes, the theme is how quickly can I make this dish and where can I shave off minutes of time?)
A couple of weeks ago, I was making this for dinner. The kids wanted to help. I usually let them help with the seasoning and mixing. The salt I use for this is sea salt that’s in a grinder, like this. I don’t measure the salt and usually just twist the grinder a few times.
The grinder works very well for adult-sized hands, presumably because it was designed for adults to use. Stick it in the hands of a six-year-old, and it becomes a little bit more awkward, a little bit trickier. Maybe the six-year-old doesn’t know precisely what part to hold and have a firm grip on, and what part needs to be twisted. When that is the case, what can happen is that the entire lid can get twisted off, and the entire (mostly full) thing of salt falls into the bowl and covers all of the tofu.
We watched in silence and mild shock as the salt fell from the container and covered the tofu. It was one of the moments where you can see a mistake happening in real time but are powerless to stop it. I tried to salvage it by picking out the tofu from the bowl of salt and brushing off each piece — they were large chunky bits of sea salt so I thought if I picked it all off then it might be okay. I took off as much salt as I could, proceeded as normal, and hoped for the best. I was also cooking rice and roast veg, and we had beans in the fridge, so even if the tofu failed, we’d still have dinner.
At the halfway turning point, it looked fine. I tasted a little bit (there are always little bits of tofu ‘crumbs’ when you mix the tofu, so I like to gather all the little bits into one large clump and I end up with a delicious crispy clump) and had to spit it out. The first second it was in my mouth was fine, and I thought that maybe it would be okay. Then came another second and another and it felt like eating the ocean. I still left the tofu in the oven for the second half of its cooking time — the little chunk was super salty but maybe the bigger pieces would be okay? Well, that was just wishful thinking. I pulled out the tray after the full cooking time, and while it looked delicious and like baked tofu always does, the tofu was inedible. I guess even after you painstakingly pick off 13oz of sea salt, the time it took was enough for a lot of it to absorb into the tofu. They were like little bits of the sea disguised to look like tofu. They went into the bin.
Food failure 2: Homemade yoghurt
On the same day as the tofu failure, I had started a batch of yoghurt in the slow cooker. This is something I’ve been doing since about March, and it’s pretty easy. You pour a carton (half gallon, which is about 1.9L) of milk into the slow cooker, turn it to high for two hours and 45 minutes (or however long it takes for the milk to reach 180 Fahrenheit). Then turn it off to let it cool, and after three hours stir in half a cup of yoghurt. Put the lid back on, cover with a couple of towels so it’s dark. Leave for twelve hours and if all goes well, you will have yoghurt! Strain using a strainer and cheesecloth and after another 24 hours you get something the consistency of Greek yoghurt and it’s delicious.
I’d been following this recipe for months, but at some point I started stirring in a quarter of a cup of yoghurt instead of a half cup, and that worked perfectly well — I’d save enough of my yoghurt so I’d have a quarter cup to mix into the next batch, so it was like having never-ending yoghurt.
When we went to Australia, I didn’t save any of my old yoghurt, so when we came back I bought yoghurt from the shop. When that got down to having just a bit left, I made yoghurt — stirring in only a quarter cup, as I had been doing. Well I guess that’s where I went wrong. It was a different store-bought yoghurt to what I had been buying, and I didn’t use the same amount as when I first made it with a store-bought starter. The next morning, when I took the towels and lid off the slow cooker, I didn’t have yoghurt. I had warm milk. So in a less than 24-hour period, that was another lot of ingredients that had to be thrown out. It was a bit gut-wrenching given how much I hate food waste, but I suppose there’s a reason they say there’s no use crying over spilt milk. I’ve since made yoghurt twice, successfully, so all's right with the world (kitchen) again.
Food success 1: Chicken shawarma
I wrote back in March about the best meal I had ever cooked, chicken shawarma with flatbread and yoghurt sauce. I wondered then if it was a fluke that everyone loved it. There are dishes that I cook that the kids love but then they’ll be a bit ‘meh’ about it the next time, or they’ll change their minds and suddenly they don’t like spaghetti or risotto anymore. That’s the cliche about feeding kids, isn’t it? They’re mercurial, unpredictable, and you never know if a previously enjoyed food will be akin to poison the next time you serve it.
So I wondered: will chicken shawarma continue to be a hit? So far, all signs point to yes. I’ve made it a few times since that first time, most recently a few days ago. The kids respond with excitement when I tell them what’s for dinner, and when it’s on their plates, they eat it all without any prompting or cajoling. And then they ask for seconds. In the greatest sign that they genuinely still love this meal, they eat the leftover chicken just as enthusiastically (usually leftovers are eaten but not with much enthusiasm). May this continue to be a beloved meal because it is truly delicious. Highly recommend it.
Food success 2: Burgers and chips
A few nights ago, my husband and I watched an Epicurious video that reminded me that burgers exist: The Best Hamburger You’ll Ever Make. We’ve made burgers before but it’s been ages, and it’s not something that has been featured in our meal plans of late. After watching that video, we decided we should try them again, so that was our dinner last night. Our burger components:
Burger buns were made using the King Arthur Beautiful Burger Buns recipe, with King Arthur flour
The beef patties were made with my last two pounds of ground beef from Perennial Pastures, seasoned with a bit of salt and pepper
Cheese was a block of Tillamook extra sharp cheddar that I sliced
Onions (that I turned into caramlised onions), lettuce, and cherry tomatoes were from either our CSA box or the farmers’ market
Potatoes that I cut and baked and turned into chips were a mix of CSA potatoes and supermarket potatoes
This was another meal that everyone ate happily, without complaint or reluctance. I think I’ll judge whether this meal beats out chicken shawarma as the best meal ever based on their response to the leftovers.
Food words I imagined wrong for years
Although English is the main language spoken in both Australia and America, there are a lot of differences between Australian and American English. There is one word in American English that I had read before in Baby-Sitters Club books that I didn’t understand but just invented its meaning: broil. That wasn’t a word I had come across as a child when I first read the book, and I never bothered looking it up. It was used in the context of cooking (in one book Mallory described how to make English muffin pizzas and she ‘broiled’ them), and it looked like the word ‘boil’ so I just decided it was a weird kind of boiling, the food Mallory was making made no sense, and carried on. Weirdly boiled meals had no bearing on the rest of the story so it didn’t matter.
For years, I just imagined broiling to be weird boiling, and it made absolutely no difference to my life. It also didn’t come up very much because of the whole living in Australia thing where we don’t use that word. Then in 2014, I visited the US. I stayed in an Airbnb, and on the first day, my host wasn’t there to meet me (I’d eventually meet her on my third and last day of my stay) but she left me a note about breakfast provisions. The note said I could broil the bread for toast. If I used any bit of logic or common sense, I might have thought that maybe broiling is like grilling, or something else in an oven or toaster oven — if I really thought about it, how would Mallory cook English muffin pizzas and how would Americans make toast? Not by submerging in water heated to 100 degrees Celsius. But I didn’t use any logic or common sense, and I was still stuck on my old weird and wrong idea that ‘broiling’ was basically the same as ‘boiling’ and thought my host meant for me to weirdly boil bread to make toast. I didn’t eat toast on that trip.
The second food word I imagined wrong for years I can’t blame on differences between American and Australian English. This one is just because I’m an idiot and sometimes imagining things that must be wrong amuses me. The word here is turkey baster. What I imagined when I heard the term was some kind of old-fashioned egg beater, like this. For the longest time, that was my mental image for a turkey baster. It made the jokes about using a turkey baster to get pregnant very, very confusing.
Then I started roasting chickens using Nagi’s recipe, which involves basting the chicken in its juices three times in the process. She says to use a spoon, but that if you have a turkey baster it will be easier. So I finally looked up what a turkey baster was and suddenly all the jokes about getting pregnant made sense. I’ve even known what basting is for awhile, and it never occurred to me that in no point while basting something that an egg beater would come in handy. But it wasn’t something that came up often, and I continued to think that they both start with a ‘b’, with two syllables and a few other common letters… Basically the same, right? (Yeah, I have no excuse.)