Rotisserie chicken, or raw chicken! We got a new barbecue grill with a motorized rotisserie spit. I put two chickens on, as per directions, plugged it in, and an hour and a half later went back to find beautiful, golden skinned, great smelling chickens! Queen of the Barbecue!
When I took the chickens off the spit I noticed the inside looked suspiciously pink, and when I started to carve, I was surprised they didn't squawk! Next time, one chicken, all day, and I'll finish it off in the oven!

Fun thread barb_roselover_in! I'd suggest you try non-fat greek yogurt instead of the FF sour cream, let us know how that works out.

Me: I CAN'T FRY. Latkes, Sol's zucchini pancakes - fail.

I don't think I'll EVER live down the time I forgot the sugar in a Pumpkin Pie.
Now I'm always asked if I remembered the sugar when I serve a Pumpkin Pie.

Sheesh! You'd think they might remember the 50 or so 'good' pies I've made, but NO!, only the mistake!!
LOL Thankfully, it's all in good humor!

Deanna

Deanna, my aunt and I were just talking about that the other night....the year that my friends were in town and called and invited us out for a cocktail the night before Thanksgiving...we were making pumpkin pies and decided we could finish mixing up the filling later...well after a few cocktails - we forgot which step we were on. Thank goodness we had a little extra pastry and made some little "tarts".

Those were the most beautiful pies and tarts and we couldn't resist trying the tarts. EWWWW! We skipped the sugar step!

There were no Mrs. Smith's left in the stores by then, so we scooped out all the filling - mixed with sugar and whipped cream - scooped back into the crusts and invented whipped pumpkin pie. We just told everyone we wanted to try something different - LOL!

This year as I was making chocolate Madeleine Turtles, I ran out of pecans (should have bought them at TJs) and decided to finish off the rest of the caramel and melted chocolate with toasted hazelnuts. By this time, I guess some more of the moisture from the caramel had evaporated, and the resulting caramel center was very hard and very chewy. I should have chopped the hazelnuts because they also made the candy a bit difficult to eat, and the flavor is off from the pecans, and so I'm only giving those to people I don't like. They are edible if you cut them with a knife into small pieces, but the flavor of pecans is so much better than the filberts. I should have tried thinning the caramel with a bit of Frangelico, but I thought about this too late, and I don't know whether it would have worked anyway. I need to adjust my recipe to include more pecans - like about twice as many! Normally I have many surplus pecans from my parents, but they have sent me any in two years.

I still have a bit of leftover caramel, and it is stiff enough to hold its shape at room temp. I gave some of that to a co-worker who likes plain caramel.

Lesson learned: hazelnuts are not a good substitute for pecans.

Lars

The list is long, here! I cannot make pie crust, have yet to master yeast breads, among many others.

As for downright stupidity...when I was a young, new wife, I was going to roast a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I stuffed it, put it in the oven and got the rest of the meal ready. When it was time to take the turkey out, I noticed the skin on the breast near the neck was practically burnt! Turns out I had not taken the little bag of giblets out beforehand! Who knew they stuffed the bag of giblets inside the darn turkey???
LOL

Linda

Oooh, I've done the plastic bag in the turkey thing too. No one ever told me!

I know I'm not the only one to have done this, but once after making a huge pot of chicken broth, I drained the pot into a colander in the sink, pouring all the soup down the drain and saving the boiled up chicken and veggies. I screamed about halfway though upon realization, and set the hot pot down on the counter, burning a ring into the counter top.

Live and learn.

AM

I'm another one who forgot the sugar. I made about 6 pies with homemade pumpkin filling - I carved and cooked the pumpkin myself. We had a trial pie and - no sugar!!! Did you know, if you add the sugar on top hoping it will soak through and add some sweetness it will turn your pie slightly green?
Anyways, I have too many flops to mention, most involve forgetting an ingredient (so yes my baking generally sucks). I made a cake (from mix as it was requested) for a fundraiser and realized two days later that I forgot to add liquid to it. I don't use mixes very often but thought it was pretty thick. Oh well, I'm sure the person understood it was about raising money. Oh, and it looked very cute.

Probably the worst was when the oven switched onto self-clean when roasting a turkey and we didn't figure it out until a couple hours later.

My most recent mishap happened when i got my new range. A couple of my friends came over to help me move it in in return for the oven's maiden meal. 5 minutes after putting the deer tenderloin in, it starts to error out and I learnt that the control panel had a short so I had no working oven. I ended up attempting to bake everything in my toaster oven. The bread turned out okay, but I couldn't get it high enough to get the deer properly cooked. Luckily my friends had no issues with blue steak.

I've been cooking since I was 12, but my most memorable mistake was decades ago when I was using Julia Child's mousse recipe from "Mastering- #1" (yes, I still have my original, well-stained copies of both volumes). The orange mousse was fabulous so I tried a banana mousse next. That was even better, like the very best banana ice cream you could ever imagine.

Exultant, the next time I tried pineapple mousse! Only...I used a beautiful fresh pineapple, and forgot that the papain enzyme has to be cooked away, or the gelatin won't hold. It came out pineapple soup instead!

We had a good laugh and ate a bag of cookies after the dinner.

Many, too many to count!

Worse one was probably not turning on the oven one Christmas. Well actually I did but somehow had set the auto oven so it didn't come on. My Mom walked in an hour or two before dinner was suppose to be ready and wanted to know why my house didn't smell like Christmas....

Then there was a brunch I had for my GF's son's baptism. I made what should have been a gorgeous sausage pinwheel wrapped in puff pastry. Didn't know then that you need to keep puff pastry cold until baking.....just a glob of gooey yucky stuff. So we ate salads!

More recently I made a pasta dish for Janet (Chancesmom) that was absolutely awful. No idea what it was with the garlic but it was so bitter you couldn't choke it down....Janet, graciously, never told! LOL

Oh gosh, too many to mention! But my worst was when I was a teen making my very first pie for a new boyfriend, I didnt' know you had to pre-bake the crust! Such a nice guy, he choked it down anyway! LOL

Then there was the time that I made a mud pie with a hershey bar layer. As a chocoholic, I know that if one candy bar is good, two must be better...WRONG! That layer of frozen chocolate had to be cut with a chef's knife! Luckily it was a meal with good friends and fellow chocolate lovers and we all laughed!

Gravy is always a disaster and sometimes I can't get a good recipe to turn out the same way twice! I'm pretty inconsistent.

The pumpkin scones I made for Thanksgiving were a flopped muffin recipe. I used pumpkin puree instead of persimmon for a recipe I had for cookies/mini-muffins. The recipe using persimmons is delicious.

The recipe when I subbed pumpkin wasn't so great. They were dense, dry and not as pumpkin-y as I thought they would be. So, since they were so dense, they were actually like a scone. I made a bunch of maple icing that I drizzled on them, and then they were fine! My friends just thought they were good pumpkin mini scones!

Flops! I have plenty of them. My biggest flops probably were my gluten free breads. So many loaves had gone into the garbage. We can eat wheat breads just fine but my curiosity was what drove me through these attempts. Hubby was a good sport and he never said one word about it. My other big flops would be cooking with chocolate. I can never seem to do right. Dipping chocolate is all right but anything else, not so good. They burn, they ball up, don't melt or they don't set. Chocolate definitely is not my best friend when it comes to cooking. That's why I only cook with chocolate once a year, that's Christmas time. Al

I've had a few recoverable flops this year. Both my chocolate crinkle cookies & my black forest cookies never flattened out when baking. They both retained ball form. They both still tasted fine. So the chocolate crinkles were dusted in powdered sugar and labeled "chocolate snowflakes." The black forest cookies are now "black forest jumbles." I think I left both doughs in the frig too long. I also should have chopped & soaked the dried cherries for the black forest cookies.

I also made sugar cookie snowflakes. I like soft cookies, but these were crispy & spread out a lot. I think I need to add less butter and mix the butter in more thoroughly. I still had enough acceptable cookies out of the batches made.

You name it, I've probably done it. These are just my flops that are "in time" for Christmas!

Who knew there were so many of us who forget to put sugar in the pumpkin pie!!!!!

As a fairly young bride, I made a beautiful frozen strawberry pie....a layer of pastry cream sort of stuff...fresh strawberries and then heaped with sweetened whipped cream with strawberries folded in.
You froze it and then let it sit out to soften a bit before cutting...
But frozen whole strawberries take a long time to "soften"....
I can't imagine why I didn't slice them.
Then there was the case of the forgotten rolls....for 3 weeks...
I can't access my Photobucket account or I would post the pic...
Linda C

Ah, but I have an aunt who once burned the jello.

Linda

I did a cherry pie with no sugar (just revently as a matter of fact) an apple pie with no sugar and a peach pie with no sugar. Of course they are pies that turn out the most beautiful. The ugly pies taste good, the pretty pies I screw up, LOL.
the really dumbest thing I did was this: I was going to make pizza on my pizza stone. I like to preheat for an hour so it gets really hot. After an hour, DH and I made the pizza, opened the oven door to put it on the stone, and I had preheated the top oven instead of the bottom oven where the stone was. But it gets dumber. So, then I turned on the other oven. However, DH knew it made more sense to move the stone to an already hot oven, so he moved the stone to the hot oven, while I turned the other oven on and turned off the hot oven. Double duh. So, 45 minutes later, we still had a cold pizza stone. We finally got it right, but ended up eating pizza at 9 pm or so. DH looked at me after this debacle and said, "What happens when we get old and goofy?"

I think forgetting sugar is a big theme here. That is probably the biggest goof I can remember. It wasn't me, but my dear wife Laurie. My mom, bless her heart wanted an apple pie back in 05 and she said my dad wouldn't make her one. I'm sure, him being near deaf and her being blind...there was a communication issue there....I really doubt my dad would have refused to make her a pie...well...anyway...my DW Laurie said she would make one for her.....did everything...but forgot the sugar in the recipe. Let's just say..like others have mentioned...that kind of is an important ingredient in the pie recipe.

Duane

Today I attempted to make demi-glace. I had to reduce a quart of beef stock to 1/2 cup. I reduced it to 1 cup, got distracted while I waited for it to reduce more, and it was burnt in the bottom of the pan when I thought about it!

Yesterday I made banana pudding for DH. As I was pouring in the last layer, I realized I hadn't put in the vanilla. I considered trying to sprinkle it on top of what was already in the dish, but in the end, I put all of the vanilla (1/2 tsp) in the remaining pudding and made sure it was evenly spread across the top.

The day before, I made Peppermint Bark Popcorn. I decided to "improved" the recipe by grinding the peppermint in the food processor and then adding it to the white chocolate, then pouring all over the popcorn. Well, do you know what happens to white chocolate when you introduce ground peppermint? It seizes, BIG TIME!

And that is just the last 3 days.

I had one just last night....I was making English toffee which I've been making every Christmas for years without problems but I took my eyes off the candy thermometer for just a minute and it shot past 300. It went from a yummy buttery sugary delight to a horrible scorched sugary mess just that quick. Boo! I ended up making another batch later last night just because I was bound and determined to get it right.

Lars, you are cracking me up! "I'm only giving those to people I don't like." I don't generally give gifts at all to people I don't like :)

Tracey

A few years back, I was making some tomato sauce in a pressure cooker. I went outside in the garden and got into a long conversation with a couple of neighbors.

When I came back into the kitchen, I found the entire 8 quuarts of tomato sauce sprayed all over the kitchen, the ceiling, the cabinets, the floor -------. Apparently the pressure regulator failed and the safety valve worked.

Over a thousand dollars later to clean, refinish and repaint everything, I went to the supermarket and bought $5.00 worth of tomato sauce.

dcarch

My effort toward Cooking in the Boneheaded Tradition is complete today! In my second attempt at ice cream, which WAS going pretty well with the custard base (very yummy tasting!). I chilled it in the fridge, in the ice cream freezer canister, as per directions. A couple of hours ago I got the canister out of the fridge, put it in the bucket, put the motor on and started packing the ice and salt. I waited. I waited. I futzed with the ice and salt. I waited. One of my kids came in and said "how long does this thing take? The sound is really annoying." I answered with "It is taking a long time. I'll check in a few minutes to see if it's doing anything."

I was going to empty the dishwasher before I checked. I pulled out the top drawer, and there was the dasher.

Oops!

I guess I am just going to let it thaw out in the fridge, and try again with the same batch. I feel SO SILLY about this. I knew I would need a nap the minute I opened my eyes this morning...

I forgot to add the brown sugar to a simple batch of oatmeal shortbread. With only 4 ingredients, how could I forget the sugar??!! They were pale and crumbly when I remove from the oven.

The fix: After it cooled, I used a fork to break it into crumbs, then mixed the crumbs with the brown sugar, pressed it into the pan (again), baked (again), let cool, cut into squares ---- and the result was delicious!

I like this thread! I severely mistrust people who only post their perfectly arranged, perfectly lighted, perfect food :-P

I have flops in the kitchen pretty often, but my most repeated failures are pie crust (I swear, it must be impossible), bagels (always, always collapse. My dough is too wet, I think). Pizza (I don't have a pizza stone, and the middle gets soggy) and rock-hard sorbet (I think I finally learned from this failure-- unless you want to make it obscenely sweet, it needs two or three tablespoons of alcohol per cup of liquid). I recently got very mad at myself for overcooking a chicken-- it was a nice, expensive, free-range chicken, and I cooked it on too high a heat. My last one went in at 400 for 40 minutes and then 200 for like five hours and was much better.

Probably the last really bad one was a shoo fly cake.

I'd been having problems with them just not setting up during baking, so I decided to divide this one between two 8" round pans.

They cooked over, all over the bottom of the oven.

And caught on fire.

You know how bad burning molasses smells?

I finally traced the problem I was having with the cakes to my stirring the flour with a fork to aerate it a bit before I measured it.

Once I quit doing that, my cakes started coming out right again.

Put the water in the saucepan, brought it to the boil, added the pasta, turned my back and promptly forgot about it.

You know your days of cooking are over when you manage to burn the pasta!!

Each year our local newspaper sponsors a holiday cooking contest at the beginning of November. And each year I submit recipes. They pick 10 contestants to prepare their submitted recipe and then there is a tasting/judging.

The day of the contest arrived and I had a soup entry. It was Catalan Chicken Chowder. For the presentation, I was to mound saffron rice in the center of the crockpot (to keep it warm) and then ladle the soup around it so it would be pretty.

Got it all in said crockpot and it was time to leave to deliver it to the facility where the judging was to be held. To keep our dogs from escaping (since I was the only one home at the time), I dragged the garbage can over to the back door and balanced the crockpot on it to open the back door. As I did so, the entire crockpot fell INTO THE GARBAGE CAN, soup and all......

Luckily I had just put a brand new liner in it. So, yes, I poured that soup right back into that crockpot, wiped it off, and delivered it to the contest. No, it wasn't so pretty any more, but it still tasted good enough to garner 3rd place!

Needless to say, the now-Ex and I had a good snicker at the local dignitaries & chefs who were that night's judges. The soup is forever known as "Zuppa de la Oscar".

There have been so many that I promptly try to forget each one and do a pretty good job of it too. One I will never forget is not long after I married DH and his adult children were there for dinner. I baked his favorite pecan pie and when I took it from the oven it had not set up and was an awful green color. Green! I finally figured out it was because I had accidently omitted the eggs. Just don't know why that caused it to turn green. We had no dessert that day.

My oldest sister had a great goof. Don't know what she did but the biscuits she made turned out rock solid. We had a good old dog that ate anything so she threw it a biscuit. When the dog spit it out and it hit the floor with a thunk my sister burst into tears. That was about 30 years ago and sometimes we still remember the time Amos spit out the biscuit.

I've goofed lots of stuff. Hmmm.... wanted some habenera in my chili, oh had fresh cayenne, and fresh serreno from the garden. Oh I like it hot but that turned out to be liquid fire.

Doh doh... gonna make beer. Okay fermented for 10 days... bottle it tomorrow... well maybe tomorrow... well maybe soon. It turned out so oxidized that it tasted like I had added lemon juice. Dumped 48 bottles of beer down the drain and started over. Never again will I let beer sit in the primary fermenter after fermentation is done.

: )
lyra

When I was a new bride, about 45 years ago) I decided to impress my new husband with homemade pancakes. Actually one BIG pancake, it was beautiful,
unfortunately when he started to eat it was not done in the middle, and oozed in all it's glory making the most lovely pool of raw gunk you can imagine.
He ate the edges and declared it the best pancake he ever had! AHH . . . true love no wonder he is a "KEEPER'

Maid O cliff, I sometimes do that with regular sized pancakes, especially if I put blueberries in them. I've also learned not to stir frozen blueberries right into pancake batter or I get purple pancakes!

My most remembered food disaster wasn't cooking, it was transporting, much like Pat. My daughter requested the infamous green bean casserole for a sports banquet at school. In spite of my better judgment I make a big pan of the stuff, replete with canned cream of mushroom soup in the red and white can and a LOT of homecanned green beans, I think 8 quarts. Into an aluminum roaster, the canned crunchy onion things on the top and into the oven.

I take the still warm roaster and set it on the front seat of my van where it will travel safely the TWO BLOCKS to the school. When I stopped suddenly for something in the road the whole darned thing went off the seat and onto the floor. I had green bean casserole juice oozing out of the carpet forever and I never did get the aroma removed entirely.

Annie

Bread made with a lot of semolina flour that was a doorstop comes to mind. My kids still tease me about that one.

For Thanksgiving this last year I made everything ahead except the green beans and the mashed potatoes and froze it all, packed it into a suitcase and took down south to have our dinner on the sailboat on which my son has been living since September. I learned that gravy doesn't freeze and thaw well. It separated and was gritty for lack of a better word. I might have been able to fix it with a stick blender but none existed.

Trying to make something edible from a wild boar roast was a mistake. Nasty old thing. I thought I'd never get the stink out of my memory after I finally got it out of my kitchen.

As a very young thing I made a passable beef stew for my boyfriend and myself. Just as we were thinking about sitting down to eat, we were mobbed by company. I tried to stretch the stew with the addition of more potatoes. It was very potato-y.

Pretty much every loaf I baked in my bread maker was so-so at best.

I made homemade lasagna noodles not too long ago. I dusted the noodles with flour as they came out of the pasta machine and then unthinkingly set them on top of one another to save space in my work area. When I got ready to assemble the lasagna, I discovered that the noodles had bonded to one another to form a solid mound of noodle dough. I had to run it all through the hand crank pasts machine once more.

There was the incredibly labor intensive "Vegetable Pate" from the "Silver Palate Good Times" cookbook that took hours to prepare and was beautiful to slice but completely tasteless.

Lastly, I've logged many a scorched muffin, cookie, and pot of rice as well dozens of flaming potholders over the years. My teakettle bottom is warped from being boiled dry so many times.

My very biggest flop was a birthday dinner for DH and I when our kids, as teenagers, were away at camp.
I decided to make tamale pie....which DH dislikes, without a recipe.
I felt he would like it because I would add a can of creamed corn, which I hate.
The kids called to wish him Happy Birthday and their first question was "What did Mom made you for your birthday dinner."
His quiet reply was to tell them to be glad, very, very glad they were away at camp.

Just had a flop tonight... It was so hot I decided to make sorbet -- used frozen raspberries and peaches from our garden. Figured pureed fruit plus simple syrup would have to be good. Added a tablespoon of triple sec to keep it from freezing too hard. When I noticed the puree was too sweet, I added some heavy cream to break the sweetness. Froze it and the result? Basically identical in taste to cheapo supermarket brand frozen sherbet! Its amazing -- all that home grown fruit, and it still tasted somehow like bubblegum.

Em, those fruits sound delicious! Maybe some lime juice or lemon juice would have done the trick, too.

Last nights dinner was a big disappointment.

Potato gratin pie. The idea really appealed to me, but the end result was really disappointing. Great crust, filling was my regular gratin, but grated rather than sliced. Together not so great.

When we were all making that Summer Torte and experimenting with various fruits to put in it, I decided pineapple and cherries would look so pretty. I didn't have cherries, so I had to just use the juice. Well it looked pretty enough before baking........

But when that bad boy came out of the oven, boy did it look funny!!!!!!

And it didn't taste all that great either.

I'll stick to the strawberries and blueberries

shaun, I just spit out my diet coke on the screen, that's one funny looking dish, interesting really.............. it has a certain je ne sais quoi............. lol....

Hee Hee! Mitch, we called it Boobie Pie.

shaun, you said it, not me, lol........

At one christmas dinner I was hosting years ago, I decided to buy a smoked turkey, instead of cooking a regular bird, and I also baked a huge ham,
both meats tasted identical, what a bomb............
My brother thanked me for hosting the Easter dinner, lol....

LOL Shaun!!! That cake is hysterical!

I also had many flops. This one isn't so much a flop of the recipe, but a dear friend made a pan of lasagna for our family as a kind gesture during the time of a family funeral. It was made in a pyrex dish with one of those rubber covers (you probably already guessed the rest of the story!) I put the pan of lasagna, rubber cover and all, in the oven to bake! Fortunately I thought about checking it about 15 minutes later because I didn't recall if I covered it with foil or not. Yikes - the rubber cover was ruined, but did not melt yet. So the lasagna was saved but I bought my friend a new pyrex casserole dish!

My most recent was making pancakes that I've made a HUNDRED times and instead of adding 6 teaspoons of baking powder, adding six tablespoons, bitter and not edible! I guess I was still half asleep...these have been fun to read!

This past Friday, I ask my good friend Vicki to with me to the Farmer's Market. It was flooded back in May and only just recently has opened, so I haven't been all summer. I was dying for some really good peaches and decided I wanted to make peach ice cream as a "goodbye to summer". We strolled through the stalls one by one, enjoying the people, sights, smells, and some really fresh lemonade. The plant booth was beatufiul, so full of mums, winter ornamental cabbages, corn bales, and plants of autumn in full bloom. It was a sensational day. At last, I spied the ochre orbs that looked fuzzy, delightfully soft. I carefully placed them in my bag and walk gingerly to the car, avoiding all those that might graze or smash the delicated bundle. We get home and I set them on the counter before resting. After all, peeling peaches is one of those labors that has to be a labor of love, as they can be mushed by thumbs and the juice runs everywhere (juice running down one's chin is fine, all over the counters and making your hands sticky is another; not my favorite, but I keep my I eye on the goal). Carefully, I weigh the 24 ounces of yellow and red tinged fruit and then put it on the stove with 3/4 cup (1/2 for the recipe, and 1/4 since it calls for 24 ounces of sweetened fruit) of sugar, in a pot. I smash it and simmer until it is absolute ambrosia. I pour the bubbling mixture in the blender and pour in 1 1/2 cups of cream (all of this measuring is so that you know I am making this summer's recipe here), and puree it. It tastes perfectly sweet, but not cloyingly. As I take it off the base, the blade on the bottom of the blender fall off and it all comes gushing out, onto the counter, the cabinets, the area rug I just spent $30 to clean, and me. Just stood there and cried. I did scoop as much off the counter as I could, but it made about 4 instead of 12 servings.

I can't cook rice.

Seriously.

AAAARRG. I am SO sorry.

Susytwo, Try the method I use. Perfect rice every time.

Ann

About 10% of my dishes are flops in one way or another.

Fish course for SWMBO's surprise dinner was kind of floppy. Indifferent cod is not greatly improved with hollandaise sauce.

Cooking bacon on the gas grill was a flop. Too much grease and flareups, result was 2 lb of bacon that tasted like a house fire.

Come to think of it, much of the stuff I make on the grill is a flop. I just don't ''get'' grilling, and probably lack the patience for a two-level approach.

My experiment with sweet sauce on halibut was a flop. Tried making a hazelnut sauce, didn't know how so ended up basically making a custard suitable for hazelnut ice cream. SWMBO said, thoughtfully and gently, ''well, this would have been really good ice cream . . . ''

When I first started simmering fish for a Japanese-style dish, I thought that it was like meat - longer simmering at lower temperature would make for the tenderest fish. Silly. Ended up with fish-flavoured rubber. Learned that less is more. Now I simmer fish for at most 3 minutes.

So far all of my attempts at xiao long bao (dumplings filled with broth) have been floppy. I don't have ''the touch'' when pleating the dumpling skins, end of pinching them too hard resulting in dense, tough pleats. The broth is tasty but you have to gnaw through the pleats to get at it. I am determined to persevere.

Last holiday, I spent untold hours (days, actually) making aspic for a big dinner. I liked it, but some guests looked askance at jiggling cubes of meat jelly. Some of it ended up being recycled into soup broth, which is a disappointing reward for that much work.

Along the same lines, there is a soup I've had in Taiwan which is sort of aspic, cubes of jellied meat broth that stand up in little piles on the bowl, but are perfectly calibrated to dissolve into scrumptious soup as soon as it touches your warm tongue. I've not succeeded in making that. I think I can, but will need to get the consistency just right. So far, I end up chewing my soup which is Just Not Right.

I went through a phase of bringing home and cooking up various organs and other peculiar animal parts. Hearts, kidneys, tongues, livers, spleens, tendons, necks. Cost me the trust of my children that summer. For months they would interrogate me on the precise nature and source of any meat dish. You'd think I was serving the family cat or something.

Oddly, I have a hard time making fluffy rice without a rice cooker. I know, it is supposed to be simple to make on the stovetop, but I get impatient and peek/stir/sample too much, resulting in pasty, mushy rice.

The first time I made tomato pesto (pesto a la trapanese) I used a food processor. Results looked like stomach contents after a college drink-fest. I learned you have to hand-chop it, or have a much lighter touch on the button.

Broiling is a fertile source of floppery. When 15 seconds makes the difference between perfect and burned, and you have to sit on the floor in front of an open oven door to monitor, well, sometimes I end up dumping a half sheet pan of stuff into the trash and starting over.

And on and on. If you're not flopping, you're not trying!

I just went to see Tyler Florence and he scorched the custard for banana pudding. TWICE. the second time he couldn't save it. Just as well, the egg whites never did whip for the rmeringue either.

Which just goes to show that it happens to all of us...

Rob, sorry about those peaches, though, I'd have cried too.

Annie