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What I Like About the Corn Syrup Commercials
@mollykate678
About acai: I was in Brazil last year and my friends there said, "oh we have to stop at an acai stand so you can try some."
I told them how we have acai here and it is lauded as a superfood. The Brazilians said, "But you should only have acia occasionally, as a treat. Everyone here knows if you have too much it will make you fat and ruin your skin."
Do Apples Make You Hungrier?
The opposite! When I'm starved but it's not mealtime, an apple often doesn't seem appealing, but when I do eat one I find it incredibly satisfying, more so than any other fruit.
Addicted to Food?
@ocarol
Baskin Robbins's or Friendly's pink peppermint stick ice cream.
Just yesterday I walked past, tapping my fingertips together, thinking, "soon... soon"
Every year there is at least one day that I eat it, and only it, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is like sweet, Christmassy crack to me.
Pepto pink, with chips of hard peppermint candy that have turned chewy.
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Worst cooking experience ever?
I was pretty serious about cooking when I was a kid. In high school I entered my marinade phase. After successfully trying several marinade recipes and tinkering around, I realized that marinades contain acidic ingredients to tenderize the meat. So why bother with the oil, or wine at all? Thinking myself rather clever, I marinated a roast in... unadulterated vinegar... for hours.
I went ahead and cooked the roast as usual, then served it to my family. It tasted like pure evil, lie the meat of Satan.
What I Like About the Corn Syrup Commercials
@mollykate678
About acai: I was in Brazil last year and my friends there said, "oh we have to stop at an acai stand so you can try some."
I told them how we have acai here and it is lauded as a superfood. The Brazilians said, "But you should only have acia occasionally, as a treat. Everyone here knows if you have too much it will make you fat and ruin your skin."
Do Apples Make You Hungrier?
The opposite! When I'm starved but it's not mealtime, an apple often doesn't seem appealing, but when I do eat one I find it incredibly satisfying, more so than any other fruit.
Addicted to Food?
@ocarol
Baskin Robbins's or Friendly's pink peppermint stick ice cream.
Just yesterday I walked past, tapping my fingertips together, thinking, "soon... soon"
Every year there is at least one day that I eat it, and only it, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is like sweet, Christmassy crack to me.
Pepto pink, with chips of hard peppermint candy that have turned chewy.
Freaky Frozen Food Habits?
Not freaky, but I love frozen banana slices; no chocolate, just plain. They get creamy and delicious. My favorite frozen fruit out of the bag is cherries. I am amazed at the savory things you guys like frozen!
Egg White/Substitue in Quiche?
I've made vegan quiche using silken tofu. That type of tofu is also the basis for vegan custards and puddings. You could combine egg whites and silken tofu if just the whites don't get "custardy" enough.
Another idea is to use egg whites, plus some reduced or non-fat ricotta. Ricotta is especially nice with spinach.
Tombstone Pizza Vending Machine
Reminds me of my favorite vending machine ever: the grilled cheese vending machine that used to be in the Union Square movie theater in Manhattan. It also served fries and burgers, but the grilled cheese was the thing. Managed to combine dryness, and greasiness.
Mayo vs. Miracle Whip
Miracle Whip is on a list of foods I longed for as a kid: Wonder Bread, Yoo-Hoo, Kool-Aid. Stuff my 70s health-nut mom would never buy. She did buy Hellman's.
Not sure I ever tried MW as an adult but it had such mystique on the rare occasion I tasted some at someone else's house back then.
Searching for a mysterious Pizza Bianca recipe
Here's a great one on Smitten Kitchen, adapted from James Bianchi:
http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/04/jim-laheys-pizza-bianca/
Remember your sack lunch?
@Giasbash6260
God, I hear you, and even worse: my mom was an early adopter of smoothies. Except she made them with regular tofu, bananas and pineapple. The texture was horrible. I'd get them for school in a thermos. Once, while trying to conceal my "snack" from the others i first grade, I spilled the contents and was humiliated by a classmate who came upon the teacher and I cleaning it up and asked "did you throw up?"
But my mother won in the end (shakes fist). I eat ezekiel bread all the time! And if I ever do have kids, it will be hard for me to weigh nutritional knowledge against cool food.
Sounds gross in theory, is actually good in practice...
So many involving peanut butter. Me too: peanut butter, bacon, cayenne pepper, red onion and lemon juice, on buttered rye toast.
Are Soul Food Restaurants Dying All Over the Country? A Serious Eats Poll
They've dwindling in Brooklyn since I've lived here it seems. My current favorite in Mitchell's on Vanderbilt. Their fried chicken makes me crazy: I crave it fortnightly!
Can't sleep... what do you consume?
Last night at 3am it was those rough, crisp Ryvta crackers, with butter and horseradish. Obviously, my cupboard was almost bare, but the snack was so good, I'd actually serve it to people in the furture (fancied up a bit). I also drank some cherry seltzer.
Dinner Tonight: Blue Smoke’s Iceberg Wedges with Roquefort Dressing
The iceburg wedge salad is not a new thing; it's just making a comeback. It was popular in the 50s and again in the 70s. Boscompb, your dad may have had it when he was a kid. It was considered quite sophisticated in its heyday.
We often had iceburg salads (chopped, not wedged) when I was a kid. My mother made blue cheese dressing, but my favorite salad of this kind came from a Greenwich, CT steak house we used to go to on special occasions. The name escapes me, but I think it is still there. Chopped iceburg, in red wine vinagrette, which tons of roquefort.
I usually make salads with baby greens, or romaine, but now I'm really craving a retro salad.
How was your school's hot lunch?
Hello. I finally registered so I could join this thread.
My sister and I both remain obsessed with the grilled cheese that our school district served. It came wrapped in foil, obviously reheated, on dry white bread, with sharp tasting cheese. It seemed oddly grease-less. We have tried to reproduce the sandwich... we even tried freezing sandwiches in foil and then reheating them in the oven...
I remember a lot of kids at my high school making "sandwiches" out of a buttered roll and "cool ranch" Doritos in the cafeteria. Horrible, I know. Just a regional thing?
How was your school's hot lunch?
@tvilov, perhaps you would be better off not knowing.
How was your school's hot lunch?
I attended Oakland High School in Oakland California in the late '50's. The lunches in the school cafateria were not really that bad. In particular I liked the hamburgers, they had a very distinct taste, a taste that I have not found in any hamburger I have eaten since. Something was added to the hamburger meat during preparation to give it the distinct taste, I suspect that it was a condiment but to this day I have been unable to recreate the taste. I have been looking for information on a cookbook that the Alameda County public schools may have been using at the time, perhaps it would have the recipe for the hamburgers.
Worst cooking experience ever?
@blackwdw - HAMALANCHE?!?!?!?!?!, hahahaha, best story ever!
Worst cooking experience ever?
I recently started cooking vegetarian meals for other people than myself (my boyfriend suddenly was interested yay!) anyway...
I tried making a creamy pasta dish with lots of vegetables. First time in my life trying to make cream out of tofu...turns out I didn't buy the right kind of tofu, so when trying to get the right consistency, the tofu creamed only so much, leaving little parts and bits in the cream... My vegetables were a little undercooked and turns out the curry I used was WAY too strong for the recipe. My boyfriend, always willing to please, ate it all but even I couldn't! We ended up ordering pizza.
Another one was when I tried making sautéed vegetables over an old oven my dad had gotten from a friend. I think it was older than both my parents together. In any case I pour some oil in the pan and start sautéing my vegetables just like my dad told me to...and then... some oil got in the burner I think...MAJOR flames, my vegetables catch fire as well as the pan so I chuck the pan in the snow outside, pour some flour on the burner and look at the charred mess and the heavy smoke. My little brother was staring at me with the phone in his hand: Do I have to call the firemen?
My parents still have a hard time letting me near the oven, even if after 4 years of this happening, I've been a very good cook!
Worst cooking experience ever?
@dhorst, I know how hard it is to get cornmeal out of carpet. I once made a plate of cornbread for a friend and left it on the kitchen counter while I ran to the store. I came back and the plate was upside down on the kitchen floor, the plasitc wrap about 4 feet away. I immediately began searching for the dog. I found her, (a 30 pound beagle), lying in the corner of the living room like a beached whale. I also found 3 piles of cornbread barf. It's not easy to get out of carpet.
That dog also ate - on separate occasions - my graduation cap, a 1-lb box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, and a jar of vaseline. And of course, several pairs of shoes, countless newspapers and magazines, and at least three copies of the book 1984. She was part goat.
Worst cooking experience ever?
A long, long time ago, I had a thing for microwave pancakes. I'd make one or maybe two at a time for breakfast. Instead of setting the microwave for 30 seconds, I set it for 3 minutes. Started doing other things and when I got back to the microwave and stuck a fork in the middle of the cake, it was solid. I thought it was still frozen. So I went for another 3 minutes and got distracted again. Same result. Another 3 minutes. This time I'm sure it can't still be frozen.
Oddly, it didn't burn or scorch, it just got hard and rubbery. Like a flat brown hockey puck.
Worst cooking experience ever?
I knocked over an open container of cornmeal onto the floor. Our pup got excited and started rolling in it. It got tracked throughout the house. I vacuumed and swept and mopped, over and over, but I swear it was weeks before I could go barefoot and not feel cornmeal grit. I haven't bought any corn meal since then.
Worst cooking experience ever?
I threw a large-ish party a few years ago for family and friends. I made a ham, and carefully (painstakingly) sliced it up and put it in a very large Tupperware container, intending to serve it cold. Unfortunately, I hadn't sealed the container completely. As I took the first step down the stairs to put it in the basement fridge, the container slipped from my hands and went bouncing down the stairs, ham EVERYWHERE. It was an avalanche of ham. It is now referred to in my family as the hamalanche. I cried and laughed in turns--and then went and bought a deli platter.
For the person who was having bean cooking problems, I have the same problem and the issue for me is hard water. I have to use a pinch of baking soda to offset it.
Worst cooking experience ever?
Damn, good call, lillibet. I guess I read that "fact" years ago and just believed it!
Worst cooking experience ever?
I have to say latteaday's "ham bomb" story is fantastic. What a great thread.
Worst cooking experience ever?
First let me just say that I've spent the last 10 minutes reading this thread and laughing SO hard that I've been crying and also come very close to peeing once or twice.
My story has to do with a flaming cheesecake as well...although not due to a 900 degree oven. My oven was perfectly fine...turns out it was operator error.
As the ambitious middle schooler that I was, I thought I would make a cheesecake for an after dinner dessert on one of our days off from school. My little brother (4th grader at the time) and I were home alone for the day. I started out with a recipe from one of my mom's cookbooks and went to town in the kitchen. I mixed everything together, made the cheesecake batter and the graham cracker crust, and put it all together in the spring form pan. I had preheated the oven to the said temperature in the cookbook, and proceeded to place the cheesecake in the oven four about an hour to cook. Let me just preface the next part of the story by saying that my mom's stove was old...and the writing on the oven knobs was starting to fade away. 10 minutes after the cheesecake had been in the oven, my brother makes a comment about the burning smell. I said "it can't be burning, it's only been in the oven for ten minutes". So I proceed to leave it in the oven thinking that the smell must be coming from somewhere else. Another 10 minutes later, I decide that I should probably check on the cake because the smell is only getting worse. I open the oven and low and behold...the cheesecake has three inch flames engulfing the surface of the cake. I pulled the rack out of the oven and stood there screaming for my brother (yes, the 4th grader) as the cake remains flaming. He runs from the bathroom to find the flaming cake and proceeds to start hitting it with the kitchen towel. Apparently I had put the oven to broil instead of bake. Needless to say, the 4th grader put the flames out and I scraped the charred substance from the top of the cake and put it back in the oven to cook for the remaining time (on bake this time) and we ate it that night for dessert. And it was horrible...an absolute charred mess. Like many of you here, I have yet to live this story down.
Worst cooking experience ever?
latteaday--that is a hysterical story. I don't believe I've ever seen the phrase 'extracting the ham-bomb' before. Out of context it almost sounds dirty. LOL.
Worst cooking experience ever?
I can only come up with two: putrefy and stupefy -- both of which could relate to food and cooking. What is the other one?
Worst cooking experience ever?
@Emsev333- Thank you for spelling "liquefied" correctly. Made my day. There are only 4 words in the English language that end in "efy." Name the others.
Worst cooking experience ever?
Wow, these are great stories. I have to share a cooking story that is now an official part of our family lore. It's my mother's cooking disaster -- not mine, and it involves the Easter ham -- a CANNED ham (ick). After it had been in the oven for 90 minutes or so, she mused to my father "I wonder how we are supposed to when the ham is done if it's in a can." He went into full-on FBI bomb squad mode, marching the family out to the snowy front lawn, extracting the ham-bomb from the oven and flinging it into the backyard. No one remembers if we ate the ham -- just the day my mother became an accidental terrorist.
Worst cooking experience ever?
Almost all my mishaps involve burning. For example, the first time I tried to use a charcoal grill, I used way too much lighter fluid, resulting in a fireball and the loss of all hair on the lower half of my forearm.
Or perhaps the time the oven pad slipped when I was removing something from a 450 degree oven, resulting in an awesomely huge blister on my thumb.
Or maybe the time I made vegan tomato soup from scratch to humor my sister, who is "vegetarian." The blender exploded on me TWICE, spraying me with hot tomato soup, and my sister wound up not eating the soup because she didn't like it.
Worst cooking experience ever?
1. Made an Alton Brown concoction of clams which required putting hot clams and broth in blender. Didn't hold the lid on. Hot liquefied clams shot all over the kitchen, dining room, and living room.
2. Newly married trying to work and make dinners, I was searching for some easy things to make for my husband. Saw a "lemon chicken" recipe in Kraft magazine that called for lemon jello. It sounded terrible, but I thought it was so weird that it was intriguing and deserved at least a try. Not even our dogs would eat it.
3. Caught a microwave on fire while reheating cashew chicken. When I ran out the back door with it to get the smokey mass out of the house, little cashew fireballs rained down on the lawn.
4. Forgot that I was boiling hard boiled eggs and ended up burning them to the bottom of the pot. Smelled like the worst fart you've ever smelled.
Worst cooking experience ever?
@smokey07: i had a similar experience to, except i had been eating and my lips had started to burn. i wiped them with a napkin and succeeded to spread the oil further along. then, instead of stopping, i went to the bathroom and proceeded to wash my whole face with water, spreading the oils all across my face. my eyes started burning terribly, and lips were still on fire, i freaked out and took a wet paper towel and rubbed it all over my face again to attempt to cool it down.... sigh.
and this other time, i wanted to try out a new pasta dish, lemon fettuccine by Paula Deen, and i was pretty confident in my pasta skills, invited my uncle over. by the time i finished, the pasta was way too dry and the cream was congealing up because i had been so frustrated with getting the seasoning right. it turned out way too lemony, we had to microwave the pasta to warm it up more, which congealed it more, and my uncle doesn't even like sour things. dinner was quiet and my uncle always asks about who's cooking and if it's me, he says sorry, he has other things to do.
Worst cooking experience ever?
man, these are so bad. I can deal with a failed experiment much better than I can with messes. when I was working in food service, I was carrying a gallon of applesauce with wet hands, turned around too fast to put it in the fridge, and literally threw it across the kitchen. I actually cried, it was so much of a mess.
my husband will never let me live down my failed scone experience. I don't use butter much, so I had a couple sticks that had been in my fridge for....awhile. They smelled a little funny, but they had been in the cheese drawer next to a hunk of bleu cheese, so I figured they had just picked up a little bit of the smell. Bottom line - if your butter smells like cheese, DO NOT EAT IT. I spent the next 24 hrs throwing up everything i had ever eaten.
Worst cooking experience ever?
The worst for me was when I made a totally-from-scratch apple pie using Maine apple season apples. (if you haven't tried a fresh, right-off-the-tree Macoun, you are missing out, not for baking though, I used Northern Spy and Cortland mix...) Anyways, I spent a lot of time making the pie, around 3 hours, the crust was perfect and decorated with "crust leaves" and there was a nice cinnamon/sugar sprinkle on top of the egg wash and the filling tasted great...Until it cooled and I tried to slice it. A bit thick doesn't capture it. It was like the paste we had in kindergarten with that gross brush inside. Instead of putting in 1 T. of corn starch I put in like a 1/2 cup! Apparently, I read the wrong measurement from the recipe...The worst was that I made the pie for my mom's dinner thing she had. My uncle, sweetest guy ever, knew how disappointed I was (did I mention I was 15 at the time, ah memories...) and ate a full slice anyways...It wasn't until later that night my mom got a call from my aunt saying that my uncle threw up from it...
Note: if your food makes people throw up, it's okay to cry ;)
Worst cooking experience ever?
I can't believe no one has mentioned my "worst" as their own yet: fried chicken. I was fresh out of college and just starting to get away from processed foods and really wanted some good fried chicken (there is none to be found where I live) like my Mom used to make. I knew what my mom used for spices as I had made that up before for her, so I bought the chicken, floured/spiced it and set about to cooking it.
I don't know about you guys, but in my 20s I was not big on investing in any kind of decent pans, and I didn't even think about the fact that my Mom used to fry her chick in a big, heavy cast iron skillet, so I threw it into my cheap Teflon, on high. Result? Very, very burned chicken on the outside, extremely raw on the inside. I just had no clue. Honest to God, to this day I haven't attempted homemade fried chicken since then and it's been over 20 years (though at least now we have a Popeye's, better than nothing).
Worst cooking experience ever?
I have a bad habit of forgetting to include crucial ingredients: forgot to put flour in chocolate chip cookies, forgot to put sugar in cheesecake.
I try to make things all the time using the excuse, "I read it online, it looks so good!" My BF is starting (hah) to think I'm crazy. I tried to make gnudi (supposed to be like ravioli without the pasta or something) while we were on vacation, it was horrid. Ordered pizza that night.
I tried to make cheddar broccoli soup once using a recipe that called fo gruyere instead of cheddar, but whatever, it's cheese. Tasted eh, added some more cheese and it tasted better but still wasn't quite there. So we decided to add A LOT more cheese. The cheese and the bits of broccoli congealed together on the bottom of the pot. It was disgusting. BF said he liked it while he was suffering through eating it, I ordered a pizza.
@lo82070-- I have also put the lid of the fry daddy on while it was way too hot = tons of melted plastic, yum!
Worst cooking experience ever?
Well I suppose I could try and give beans one last try, but I am NOT going to invite anyone over for dinner till their done so they won't think I am trying to poison them.
Oh another thing that screwed up was the first time I was in Austria visiting the relatives (I was about 9) my mother took a day trip with her sisters and I choose to stay where I was, with other relatives. We got around to talking food, American food and none of them ever tried a good old fashioned American apple pie. So I said I would make one for them. I watched my mother make them but i never ever made one. We went shopping for the crap I needed, and everything was going good, made the dough, spiced up the apples, yadda yadda, got it into the oven, no problem, smelled wonderful, came out golden brown, perfecto.....Until we tried it, the crust was hard as a rock, I forgot to put butter in the pie crust.
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I was pretty serious about cooking when I was a kid. In high school I entered my marinade phase. After successfully trying several marinade recipes and tinkering around, I realized that marinades contain acidic ingredients to tenderize the meat. So why bother with the oil, or wine at all? Thinking myself rather clever, I marinated a roast in... unadulterated vinegar... for hours.
I went ahead and cooked the roast as usual, then served it to my family. It tasted like pure evil, lie the meat of Satan.