What could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday I made a toad-in-the-hole, however the Yorkshire pudding (or Yorkshture pudding as my son calls it!) part was sadly flat and unrisen, although it tasted ok.  I have never been very consistent with Yorkshire pudding, I think it is all to do with the size of tin versus the quantity of mixture, sometimes it's a triumph and sometimes, like yesterday, it's frankly rubbish.  This got me thinking about what could go wrong in the kitchen, and as I usually only share successes with the community at large I thought it might be confession time!

As far as my husband and I can remember, I have never cooked anything that has actually been inedible.  Interestingly the very first new recipe after I made my resolution (see "Welcome post") has been the only one ever to score only one star out of the possible five. It was a Nigella recipe for smoked cod with cannellini beans and included some peppercorns in the sauce.  I accidentally put too many in, and you were meant to remove them before serving , but as there were so many it would have taken forever and the food would have been cold so I just intructed the husband to leave them on the side of the plate.  This did not work.  They were too disguised by the sauce and every now and then you would crunch on one, flooding your mouth with pepperiness. Several years later I made another fish dish with chinese Sichuan peppercorns, crushed in the pestle and mortar, and these were really rather nice, not quite as peppery as the normal ones; but after the smoked cod disaster I didn't risk it on the husband and had it by myself while he was away.

There have also been recipes that have just been plain boring and tasteless.  It can be quite disappointing when you're looking forward to something new and then you have to put sweet chilli sauce on it to make it taste of anything at all.  For example tagliatelle with pancetta, lemon, broccoli and walnuts.  Sounds quite flavoursome. It wasn't. I've had similar experiences with quiches and curries.  You never know with chillies either, they can be bland as anything or fearsomly hot. Sometimes the flavour doesn't live up to the smell either which is worse. Even in a recipe taken from a magazine, the flavours just may not work, like haddock, prawn and cheese bake.  I never put cheese in a fish risotto so I was dubious about this one, and rightly so.

Desserts and cakes have lots of potential for problems.  In particular things that need to be set, with gelatine or agar.  There was the time I made a mars bar cheesecake, which I had made a few times before and was very popular.  I thought I knew what I was doing and decided to have a few cans of cider while making it.  Mistake.  I didn't dissolve the gelatine properly and as you consumed the cheesecake lumps of gluey, bogey-like gelatine got left in your mouth.  Most people politely left them on the side of the plate.  Then there was the strawberry mousse cake which didn't have enough gelatine in it.  When removed from the tin it looked fab but after a few minutes began to collapse and go a bit free-form.  I made another one a few weeks later with more gelatine and much better results. A similar thing happened with my limoncello cheesecake which used vegetarian gel powder, you have to use it differently to gelatine and I didn't... but rescued it with an hour in the freezer.  I've made cakes that weren't cooked in the middle and had to be turned into a ring cake with fruit piled up in the middle. I haven't ever tried to bake something with the oven on grill setting, but I know people that have, I'm lucky enough to have a separate grill.

 Strawberry mousse cake take one: oo-er!

 Take two: much better.

I've made naan bread that was more biscuit than bread, burnt things and set fire to things, made a coconut delight that was anything but delightful; and made hokey pokey that just tasted of bicarbonate of soda and made you foam at the mouth a bit! 

Then there are simple accidents, such as collapsing fridge shelves (I caught the just-setting trifle successfully) and the time I was up until midnight making jubilee cupcakes for school with triple coloured piped icing and they looked beautiful until I tried to move the cooling rack then... plop plop plop! they fell upside down, splatting their icing onto the table. I swore so loudly I woke the husband up, and he was upstairs!

The trouble is, I've shot myself in the foot with all this new recipe malarkey. The family now have such high standards it's quite difficult to serve up something run-of-the-mill, even on a weeknight.  I do have to go to work four days a week, I'm not home until 6.15pm and so I've had to become an expert on meals that are not only interesting but quick too, or we get hungry, and when we get hungry in our family, we tend to get short-tempered too.  And vegtarian on a Sunday didn't go down too well, in fact it was "unacceptable" a few years ago, but I'm working on that one...

Generally though, things do turn out remarkably well!

Thank you for reading, Caroline x