Talking about the flops

In my very limited exposure to various social media [disclaimer: I do not have an account with any of the major platforms], I notice that people spend lots of time and space talking about what goes well for them but very little time/space for the things that don't work out.  A study published in The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2018 showed a causal relationship between use of social media and increased depression.  Researchers describe "when you look at other people's lives, particularly on Instagram, it's easy to conclude that everyone else's life is cooler or better than yours."  A song aptly titled "The Internet" by singer Jon Bellion speaks to this phenomenon:

Life became dangerous the day we all became famous
No one cares if you're happy, just as long as you claim it,
How can we change this? The day we all became famous
No one cares if you have it, just as long they think you do

(Give me a second, I need to get off my horse; it's a bit high.  Whew!)

So today, I decided to write about the things that happen to us all, the kitchen disasters we may cry about at the time but laugh about later.  The carrot mushroom loaves, gnocchi casseroles...the things we taste, toss out, and immediately call for a pizza or look to see if there is a yogurt in the fridge that we can eat for dinner.  All the following items were prepared, by me, in the past week.

Glazed corned beef

When I was in college in the Midwest, the family with whom I lived made a delicious glazed corned beef.  It was a nice savory-sweet combination that I wanted to replicate, and thought it would be a great dish to serve over Rosh Hashana.  I bought a lovely 2nd cut brisket, and pickled it using Alton Brown's recipe.  Day by day, I checked my brisket, turning it dilligently.  After a week, I prepared the glaze of dijon mustard, brown sugar, currant jam, and a little bourbon (not part of Alton Brown's recipe) and baked the corned beef. Even though Alton's recipe calls for boiling the meat after it is pickled, my thought was that I'd be cooking it sufficiently when I cooked it with the glaze.  What I failed to recognize, however, was that the boiling gets much of the saltiness out of the meat so it is palatable.  This oversight let to the saltiest piece of beef I've ever had.  Compound this with the fact that I left the meat in the oven way too long on the day I served it, so not only was it salty, but it was dry as well.  Lessons learned:  boil the beef (maybe even change the water to get out even more salt from the meat), and don't reheat too far in advance.

Pizza dough cinnamon buns

This is, apparently, a real thing.  I had never heard about using pizza dough for making cinnamon buns until I saw a video online (can't remember where) that suggested it.  I had bought a cinnamon bun spread at Trader Joe's recently, so I thought I'd try the two together.  Not my brightest culinary idea.  Pizza dough is much chewier than cinnamon bun dough (because pizza dough has little to no added sugar or fat, which cinnamon bun dough has plenty of), so the finished product had the dense and chewy texture of pizza dough.  The filling had all the flavor of a cinnamon bun, but with ingredients such as honey, tapioca syrup and cornstarch, had a consistency that was a cross between canned pie filling (minus the fruit) and corn syrup.  Perhaps this product would be best enjoyed spread on a slice of already baked bread, rather than rolled up in raw dough.  Alas, I had a mini meyer lemon biscotti with my coffee instead.  Lesson learned: pizza dough does not substitute well for pastry dough.

Apple kugel

My mother doesn't make kugel very often, but when she does, she makes it very well.  I can honestly say that her potato kugel is some of the best I've had, and her Yerushalmi kugel is tops.  There is an apple kugel she used to make in the fall that I remembered fondly, so I found the recipe.  It's different from others in that you slice the apples, then spread apricot preserves on them before topping it all with batter and baking it.  It's simple, and quite tasty.  The recipe calls for a small jar of preserves, and inadvertently, I bought a 33% larger jar and put the whole thing in the kugel.  The thing is, that added quite a bit of extra sugar which is hygroscopic [definition: something that attracts and holds water molecules from the surrounding environment], so it took a lot longer to bake and never seemed to quite dry out.  When I reheated it (at the same time as the corned beef, mind you), it turned to apple kugel soup.  Lesson learned:  read the label on the jar (or other packaging) twice.

Apple chips

I was really excited to try this roasted parsnip and apple soup, but I was even more excited to try making the suggested apple chip garnish.  My son loves apple chips, but I had never tried making them myself.  I was under the impression that you needed a dehydrator to get the apples really crispy, so I had just bought the apple chips he takes in his lunch.  I should have been suspicious from the start, as the recipe doesn't give an exact temperature to cook the apples; it simply says "turn oven to lowest setting".  What temperature is "lowest setting"?  My oven can go to 180 degrees, but also has a "warm" setting that is a little lower than 180.  The recipe also says to cook the apple chips for at least 2 hours.  However, after 4 hours at 180 degrees, the apple chips were still soft.  I was pretty disappointed and bought a back-up package of freeze-dried apple chips, which garnished the soup quite nicely.  Lessons learned:  don't try to make dried fruit chips without a dehydrator; don't bother getting a dehydrator because you can get good quality freeze-dried fruit chips nearly everywhere; don't try recipes that tell you to set your oven to the "lowest setting".

There you have it.  Even those of us who do lots of cooking have some pretty big flops; sometimes we even have 4 in the same week.  But that is what cooking is about--making mistakes and learning from them so you can apply that knowledge toward other dishes you make in the future.  There is some skill to cooking, but so much of it is seeing how one thing works while another doesn't, constantly pulling from that information to create wonderful dishes.  

Whether you cook or not, don't judge yourself for your mistakes.  They happen to us all; it's called being human.  I strongly believe if people were more open about the things in our lives that don't go as we would have liked, we would be more confident that we are not so different from the next person.