Naiveté + Inexperience = Disaster Our teenage son had his first real girlfriend, and we wanted to have her over for dinner and a video at our house. After much discussion, we finally decided on cheesburger pie, something most young kids like and easy for me to fix--although my husband usually does the cooking, I decided that I wanted to be the cook for this very special occasion. The day finally arrived and things were going smoothly. The pie crust was perfect, and I was bustling around the kichen. The pie came out of the oven and looked fine. Our son said, "Boy, does that look good!" and his girlfriend smiled in agreement. I cut into the pie and what's that?!? It oozed red liquid. No one said the meat had to be cooked before it went into the pie--it was still raw and bleeding! What could I do? I stood up and said, "Pizza, anyone?" Well, this happened almost ten years ago. My son has dated many girls since then and has just started dating a new girl. As we started to get to know each other, I invited her to ask me anything she wanted about our family. She said, "I already know all about you--your son told me about the time you served raw hamburger pie to his girlfriend!" My mother emigrated from Poland during World War II. She married my Irish father and for all our lives, we were treated to her wonderful Polish dishes. My mother was especially famous for her stuffed cabbage, or what she called "pigs in a blanket." They were a lot of work. When she made them, she would make enough to pass out a few to the neighbors, who loved them as much as we did. Years later, living on my own, I decided to make my mom's recipe for a group of friends who were having a cluster of ethnic dinner parties, with everyone going to different houses each week. I called my mother for the recipe which, although tedious, was really quite simple. All I had to do was steam a large head of cabbage, peel back the leaves, fill it with a mixture of hamburger, ground pork, and rice. You pour Campbell's tomato soup and whole tomatoes over the whole thing, put some bacon on the top, and bake for forty-five minutes. It looked and smelled wonderful. My guests arrived, I served them, and sat back waiting for a glowing review. But my guests kept asking for more water and more water and still more . . . ! I was so busy getting water for everyone I hadn't had a chance yet to sit down myself. When I did, I understood the problem. My "pigs" were crunchy! My mother meant 2 cups of cooked rice. I was mortified! From then on, I had to listen to endless stories about "the night Dennis served seed pearls in a blanket!" I'm a food photographer. About ten years ago, I had an assignment to photograph an extremely famous chef in his extremely famous Manhattan restaurant. This guy is so famous that the average non-culinary Joe Shmoe walking down the street would probably know his name. Mr. Famous Chef, while a certified genius, was-- how can I say this politely?--rather controlling. While shooting a picture of his display of cold appetizers in the front of the restaurant, I moved a couple of the bowls to get a better arrangement for the shot. Mistake. Mr. Famous Chef was instantly transformed into a French hurricane of wrath. What was I thinking of?!? Moving the dishes! Insult! Disaster! Outrage! It was as if I had led a pack of horses in from the bridle path in Central Park and had them defecate on the carpet. My client, a great food writer and editor, had visions of us both being chopped up and thrown into the chicken cordon bleu. I did my best to grovel. "Mr. Famous Chef, I meant no disrespect. I only moved the olives (or tomatoes, or whatever) to fully bring out the beauty of the food . . . " Yadda, yadda, yadda. The storm clouds subsided. His eyes lit up. "I have an idea!" he proclaimed. Immediately, from every corner, people started marching into the room--chefs, waiters, busboys, accountants, whatever. "I want to show that 51 people work in this restaurant!" he said grandly. The resultant photo showed a horde of people squeezed into a small corner of the restaurant, faces smeared with sorry smiles with Mr. Famous Chef looking on, beaming like a demented headmaster. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'd just started cooking in the kitchen of a Malaysian restaurant in Melbourne, Australia. The occasion at hand was a grand Malaysian-style makan besar, which translates to "a large banquet for special Malaysian diners." I was preparing the final course, a sago and cashew nut dessert called sago gula melaka. It's made with a combination of palm sugar and regular white sugar. The sugar and salt bins were arranged along the far side of the pantry, all in a row, with the MSG (monosodium glutamate) also ranged alongside the sugar and the salt. Bear in mind that these all were labeled in Chinese, as the other cooks were all Malaysian-Chinese. Sure. You guessed right. I picked up a bowlful of sugar and kept on adding the required four bowls into the cauldron. After stirring it, I took a sip to taste the dish. Tragedy! I kept tasting the awful mess, trying to mentally retrace my steps. What had I done? Then--horrors! How could I have done that? Dinner was to be served in two hours; no sago could be produced in such a short time. I ended up washing the grains in a large pot of cold water, then adding the rest of the ingredients, all the while working frantically to re-assemble the wretched mess just in time for dessert. Of course the whole thing was a disaster, and all because I couldn't read Chinese. Our eldest daughter Chris is a teacher, a chief and a very fine food and travel writer. She and I have a back-and-forth banter about food in general, and preserved foods in particular. So there I was in Chris's kitchen, looking at her latest culinary find. Chris was given the directions for an ancient Arabian kitchen product called "salt lemon." When she left the room for a moment, I had my chance to taste this ancient thing. WOW! Super salty and lemony strong enough to nearly bring me to my knees, I groped for a glass of water save my tastebuds. Chris returned to the kitchen and somehow knowing what I'd done, asked how I liked the flavor. "Nice," I croaked, trying to smile past my puckered lips and cheeks. She told me of the uses for this awesome flavoring, saying that Arab cultures used it on stewed or broiled camel meat and things like that. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "For killing infidels, driving out demons, or perhaps ending a plague or two." At one point when we were in graduate school, I went up to retrieve my physicist husband from the lab at about 3:00 AM. Thinking to be a great housewife and have a hot meal ready when he came home hungry with no delay for cooking, I put a can of beans on the stove, verrrry low flame. When we got back, he headed for the bathroom to wash up, and I headed for the kitchen. The beans went to the electric can opener and then was my dear husband surprised as I ran shrieking. Boiling bean puree sprayed itself in lazy circles all around the kitchen, over the ceiling, across cupboard doors, etc. Never did that again. We used to attend a wonderful church which had potluck lunches after every service. Many people there were vegetarian, and used tofu with ease and tasty results. I decided to give it a try myself. After volunteering at our local food co-op, I took a deep breath and paid good money for a quivering, gelatinous block of pale white tofu. It looked like something that had been wrested from beneath a rock. Not only that, I had to baby it along by bathing it two or three times daily until I was ready to do something with it to make it palatable enough to consume. Before I had even attempted following a recipe, I was already grumpy at having to give something other than myself or an as-yet-nonexistent child a bath, let alone having to do it multiple times daily. At first I tried cutting it in cubes and frying it, as one recipe suggested. It did not taste even remotely like chicken, despite everyone's assurances to the contrary. Then I tried pureeing it in my new food processor, and adding it to a special tofu spaghetti sauce. The very sight of it, with all its little tiny bits of white throughout the sauce, was repulsive and finally I gave in. I simply threw the whole tofu mess out, and turned happily to more familiar animal proteins. That was the extent of my experience with trying to cook palatable tofu. Now I just say no to tofu. On our seaside honeymoon, we decided to be really frugal. Instead of eating a shrimp dinner in a restaurant, we thought we would have lots more shrimp if we cooked it ourselves. With that same frugal spirit, we decided to buy the cheapest shrimp available. It turned out to be the smallest shrimp available, too. Six hours later, we had peeled and fried hundreds of the little things and by the time they were ready to eat, we were ready to run screaming from that kitchen. So we had them for dinner, and then the next day for breakfast, and resolved that from then on, it wouldn't be a terrible thing to eat restaurant meals every now and then. We also decided there was something to be said for buying the larger sizes of shrimp when and if we ever had the taste for preparing our own shrimp dinner again. MORE >> BACK TO MAIN DISASTER STORIES PAGE Catherine S. Vodrey is available for freelance writing, editing, fundraising/development, and photography projects at: Post Office Box 835 East Liverpool, Ohio 43920 USA E-MAIL: WordBanquet@gmail.com Thank you for visiting www.WordBanquet.com!