Our Easter menu consisted of scalloped potatoes, roasted butternut squash with apples, raspberry cream pie, and smoked farmer’s ham with a plum glaze.
Since we had to sing in the choir at both services on Sunday, I decided to make the potatoes and the pie on Saturday. I got the pie crust made and the pie assembled, and then started on the scalloped potatoes. I used Julia’s recipe, which she describes as “ambrosia”. It consists of two cups of heavy cream and two cups of half and half, bay leaf, salt and pepper in which you simmer on the stove two pounds of very thinly sliced Yukon Gold potatoes. They simmer for 90 minutes, and then you put them in a gratin dish. They can be made ahead of time to this point, then baked the next day in the oven for 20 minutes after you sprinkle them with grated Gruyere cheese.
I put the simmered potatoes in the 14 × 9 ceramic Le Creuset gratin dish to cool down preparatory to putting them in the fridge for the night. Husband was looking for ingredients for a cucumber salad in the cupboard just above the gratin dish when he accidentally knocked a bottle of avocado oil off the shelf. It landed in on the potatoes, and the gratin dish shattered into about eight pieces.
The pieces seemed pretty intact, and after we had scraped all the potatoes into another gratin dish we reassembled the busted dish in the sink to see if we could salvage the potatoes and serve them on Sunday. We were able to account for all but a quarter inch piece of ceramics.
I was really torn about what to do. Should we serve the potatoes and warn our guest about the possibility of a ceramic fragment? Should I throw it out and make it again on Sunday? I decided to decide in the morning.
The chance of our guest breaking a tooth or swallowing a sharp glass fragment was too great for me to deal with, so I tossed the potatoes and made more after church. They were ambrosial. I remembered a conversation I once had with the wife of one of our ND psychiatrists. She admitted that when her husband was in his residency in Texas she invited several people over for dinner. She really wanted to impress, and wanted to serve liver pate. They were quite poor at the time, so she bought a can of liver cat food and served it with crackers. No one was any the wiser, and her guests liked the “pate”. Well, we certainly could afford more cream and potatoes, and I am glad I threw the first batch of potatoes away.
What kitchen disasters have you had? Ever served a dish that you knew had something wrong with it?
Trail Baboon 
I know there’s been something like what you described with the broken crockery, but it’s lost in the mists of time…
The last time I tried my grandma’s Scalloped Corn recipe, I substituted some not-gluten crackers for the regular saltines. It was dry and gummy and not worthy of the potluck we were going to. I think I ended up taking some tangerines.
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I’ve thought of my own cooking as “disaster cooking.” I’ve made some okay things, but only really just okay. I’m always in a hurry, spilling things, measuring incorrectly – you name it, I’ve probably done it. I did break a dish once a few years ago (not Le Creuset, mind you – just a glass dish), and I threw the whole thing out and sat down in grumpy failure. I ended up making something else for that gathering.
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There was a minor disaster yesterday in the parking lot at FiftyNorth. When I arrived there I noticed police cars surrounding a Waste Management truck. As I slowly approached the scene and drove around it into the parking area, I saw what had happened. The Waste Management truck’s front end was sitting on top of the front ends of two parked cars! Both cars were crushed. The word inside was that the driver of the truck had had “some kind of episode” and was taken by ambulance.
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That sounds ominous.
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He either had a seizure or a stroke. 😕
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Rise and Shine, Baboons,
Over the years of cooking there have been many disasters. I think it is the nature of cooking given the elements involved–heat, glass, people, food. As a kid there was a regular disaster. We did a lot of baking-cookies, cakes, pies, etc. Mom would store pans of baked stuff in the oven, and not tell anyone. I would be responsible to make something for a meal, start the oven, then smell something burning. Inevitably it was whatever she had stashed in the oven. The worst was when she covered the item with a towel, so the towel would be on fire. So then the mess had to be cleaned up before I could use the oven again. I became pretty good at remembering to check for something in there, but every now and then in a hurry, this would happen.
This Thanksgiving as we were getting the feast to the table, and I was making the gravy, my glass 2 cup measure fell off its shelf onto the counter, shattering into endless tiny shards of glass the scattered everywhere. It did not get in the food because most of it was on the island, not the counter.. However, before we could proceed we had to clear the countertop, the stovetop, and the floor of the shards. I had a lot of help cleaning it up so then we moved on to the feast.
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My mom used to hide/stash things in the oven, too. A couple of times it ended with melted plastic utensils.
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Not a disaster but a bit of a mystery. I was making a pizza this week and used the same crust recipe I have used in the past. The dough handled beautifully but when the crust came out of the oven it was thicker and breadier than usual and the proportion of topping to crust was less satisfactory. It’s probable I let the dough proof longer than usual and we have an electric oven now rather than a gas one but I am at a bit of a loss as to what caused the difference. I am going to have to experiment with alternative crust recipes to try and master our ideal crust.
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Is your kitchen remodel complete, Bill?
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Finally!
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Apparently the Baboons are all out making dishes that shouldn’t be served… or they don’t want to admit to it!
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I know there are a number of times I’ve burned things, esp. before I got to know this oven when we moved in 10 years ago (almost 11!). I now know to set it 25 degrees less than the recipe asks, and to cut the time by 5 minutes or so.
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Many broken dishes over years of cooking, but one that stands out (and still hurts) is breaking our Emile Henry gratin dish. And there was a hand-thrown bowl that I loved a lot that got broken in a move. Irreplaceable.
In the early years of our marriage, I decided to make sauerbraten for Husband, a dish he loves. It calls for marinating the meat overnight. As a relatively inexperienced cook, I made the mistake of marinating it in a metal container. It looked weird, but I served it. Husband ate quite a bit and became very sick. There was no internet to consult back then, so I called my grandfather (a retired chef) long distance and shared my woes. He confirmed that I shouldn’t have used metal, but was happy that I’d followed his tip and crumbled gingersnaps into the gravy.
I’ve had other things that didn’t turn out as I expected, but that was the only time I made someone sick with my cooking.
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Oh DEAR!
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When I was younger we were visiting my aunt and uncles for some holiday. Waiting for food and I noticed the plate said “unbreakable” on the bottom. So I dropped it on the floor.
It broke. Aunt Judy was rather upset, not to mention mom and dad.
Well, it said unbreakable!
I always felt like Judy never liked me after that.
But we got to be pretty good friends 20 or 30 years later…
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Snort!
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Squash was not something I grew up eating so when Wasband #1 and I were trying a pumpkin vegetable hot dish from Enchanted Broccoli Forest (this was when we had been married only a few months), neither of us knew how to cook pumpkin. Joy of Cooking gave two ways: bake it/scrap it and boil it. This is true. If you’ve ever cut pumpkin into cubes and boiled it, you can imagine how bad the hot dish was. It was simple inedible. Wasband #1 gave “frugal” a bad name so he put the hot dish into a colander and proceeded to squish the pumpkin out. He actually ate this dish for four nights running, unwilling to toss it all out. I had cheese sandwiches those nights.
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I wish I knew how Precious Ramotswe cooks her pumpkin…
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I hope she doesn’t boil it, because then I’ll think less of her. I already think less of Irma Rombeck because of this.
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It occurs to me that over the years I should have had more disasters than the water-logged pumpkin because I cook by smell. Even though it’s worked for me for 50 years, I always think it’s a riskier method.
I also try out new dishes on folks all the time. Knock on wood, it’s always worked out!
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I haven’t had any real ones, but I imagine disasters regularly, especially when baking. Making a pumpkin pie involves pouring liquid filling into a ceramic pieshell and then transporting it very gingerly to the oven, inching it onto the rack. When it is safely inside with the door closed, I breathe a sign of relief, because in my mind the vision of the pieplate sliding out of my grasp and smashing all over the floor is so vivid.
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Pie shell into the oven first-then pour the filling in. Old bakery trick!
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I bake my pies in a toaster oven. You can’t get the bowl into the toaster oven to pour.
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