Guys, I have made some bad food this week. I’m usually pretty good at vetting recipes before investing ingredients into them, but this week there were 3 bad ones that slipped in. This week was also Thanksgiving.
First Recipe Gone Bad
My first bad recipe was for alphabet cookies.
I have been looking for a recipe for cinnamon alphabet cookies for years. My mom says she just made regular sugar cookie alphabet cookies while I was growing up, but I remember having cinnamon alphabet cookies. A huge tub of them. But now I can only find animal cookies or alphabet letters printed on square cookies and in a snack-pack – not a tub.
So I did what anyone with a full shelf of cookbooks would do when looking for a specific recipe: I googled alphabet cookie recipes.
I read about half a dozen before settling on ones that looked like the crisp little cookies that I wanted to make. The recipe was also lower in sugar, and had honey and almond flour in them. So I seemed like it could be a success and be within my standards of what I like to feed my kids. I decided to make a double batch so we could share them with family coming into town for the holiday.
Bad choice.
It was not a success. It was a mess. That caused stress. And I regretted my “yes” to making cookies that day.
The dough was so sticky. It stuck to our hands, to the bowl, and horribly to my counter. The letters couldn’t be picked up and keep their shape once cut, so we needed a spatula to place them. The dough kept soaking up flour from rolling, but it was still like cutting mush.
”But the picture looks so beautiful, I know they’ll bake well!”
… Oh, Deb. You know that isn’t how this works.
The cookies were sandy and falling apart. But since we made a double batch I had more rolling to do. (Note to self: try single batches of new recipes before committing the time, ingredients, and effort into a double batch, okay? Okay.)
A long time later, I had a small amount of dough left. I pressed it into a pan and baked it as shortbread. I was just ready to be done.
After the cookies solidified as they cooled, my kids did enjoy eating them. However, if they ask me for alphabet cookies again, I’m just adding cinnamon to sugar cookie dough and calling it good.
Second Blunder
I mentioned that’s it’s Thanksgiving this week. What I haven’t mentioned yet, on the blog, is that I can’t have dairy, eggs, wheat, or palm oil… or sugar… so it makes having pie really difficult.
But it’s Thanksgiving! It’s a day we eat pie! So how can I make a pumpkin pie without eggs or dairy or wheat or sugar?
I decided to go for a substitute laden pumpkin pie without a crust. There is just no substitute for wheat flour crust. I’m not far enough removed to have lost memory of what wheat is like yet, so I just didn’t even want to try. So I forwent having crust and that’s OK. That was probably my smartest decision about this pie.
I chose pumpkin pie because it’s been so long since I have had a good pumpkin pie. I haven’t been able to have dairy for seven years, but I was pretty optimistic about my choices to make a vegan pumpkin pie with my substitutes. I substituted evaporated milk for canned coconut milk. I substituted chicken eggs for bottled egg substitute. Sugar was substituted with Splenda Stevia. (No need to comment and knock Splenda. I know. This is the only substitute I can eat without regretting it later when my gut hurts.)
It was a great plan! With semi-vetted ingredients! And a mostly regular baking method! How could it go wrong!
Well, my first blunder was being out of powdered ginger for my spices. So I used 4 year old pumpkin pie spice and extra cinnamon.
Next, I didn’t add extra “egg” to offset the water content of the coconut milk. I added some flax meal to help thicken it, but if you’ve ever baked with flax you know it’ll hold things together, but it won’t bake to the strength of an egg when it comes to structure.
Anyway. The batter looked batter-y, so I poured into my sprayed pie plate. I baked it like normal and it smelled spicy and good. When the timer went off, I checked it. It was very jiggly. So I gave it another 10 minutes.
When I opened the oven next, the pie was jiggly and boiling! I took it out. You can’t get more cooked than boiling custard in the oven.
I let it cool and chilled it overnight. I still had high hopes for a good pumpkin custard.
After our thanksgiving dinner – mine consisting of meats, gluten free gravy, plain sweet potatoes, cranberry relish made with Splenda, and green salad – I was excited for pie. I had whipped my plant-based whipped cream the night before (bonus mini blunder: it’s so much better fresh!) and I was ready to go! I served myself a standard size piece!.. at least, I cut a standard size piece. Without a crust, I had to scoop out my portion with a spoon. But that’s ok. I put a big dollop of whipped “cream” on it and dug in.
The first bite was good! … until it wasn’t. There was an aftertaste. One that came with making a face. It was not great.
I ate the rest of my piece while I watched the rest of my family eat regular pumpkin pie, chocolate peanut butter cheesecake, maple walnut pie, and buttery apple crisp. I was glad I had cooked some spiced apple slices for myself along with the apple crisp. It was the best part of my dessert experience.
The company and conversation was good and lively so I got to forget my distaste from my pie.
How my pie ended was as sad as its flavor.
We got home at bedtime for the kids. It had been a long day and we didn’t unload the car right away. Jeff brought things in after getting the girls to sleep. My pie accidentally got left on the counter overnight. I scraped it into the trash on Friday morning and moved on with my day.
Upon closer inspection, my egg substitute was 10 days past date. But I don’t think all the problems could be from that one thing. Though, maybe they were. Don’t worry. I didn’t get sick: it was sanitized when it was boiling in the oven.
Third and Final Recipe Fail
This one happened after Thanksgiving, so no people outside my immediate family were harmed by proximity to this recipe.
One holiday food I adore is ginger-pickled peaches or pears. They’re sweet, spicy, and syrupy. They’re absolutely delicious and I think about them every year around this time.
I had a very ripe pineapple that was forgotten for a day or two long. You know the ripeness test where you pluck out a center leaf from the pineapple top? A whole chunk of leaves came out of this one! Oops.
I decided that I would make ginger-pickled pineapple. But my moms recipe sounded way too sweet to use overly-sweet pineapple in, so I went to my old standby.
Again, I googled a recipe. Nothing came up how I envisioned, so I found a very basic pickling recipe and added fresh ginger and lime slices to it. I was aiming to hybridize the two recipes: use far less sugar as in the internet recipe, and use the flavorings that sounded good from the recipe my mom has.
(One thing to note: I am used to consuming apple cider vinegar multiple times per day: in salad dressings, marinades, or in water to help with digesting and processing simple carbohydrate-heavy meals. It helps me feel good and I like that’s it’s fruity and good for me, at the same time.)
The brine needed cooking so into the pot went vinegar, water, sugar, salt, lime slices, and ginger slices. Not a bad mix, right? I doubled the recipe because I had more pineapple than called for. I’m, like, so full of good ideas. Doubling is always what I should do with untested recipes.
As the stench of vinegar permeated my entire house, I added the pineapple. The peaches recipe says to boil them for 10 minutes and that’s using fresh peaches and they’re always delicious so I boiled the pineapple for 10 minutes.
My husband came down the stairs and said “What is that smell?!” He is not a fan of vinegar as it is, but cooking vinegar and all of its generated steam makes it even worse. I told him I was making ginger-pickled pineapple. He told me he was sure someone had thrown up. I ignored him. I was making the best treat for myself and he would just miss out on having any, with comments like those.
After trying them, I wish I also missed out on trying any of them.
I took them off the stove and tried one. I swallowed, more out of habit than desire.
Who published this recipe?! Why did I double it?? Where is my water cup? This is disgusting!!!
I checked the recipe again. I had done it correctly, but it was so wrong. In my double batch of pickles, using a single pineapple, there was 1/4 c of salt. It was inedible.
But I couldn’t just give up: I had made my house stink, and I had to have something to show for it! So I added three times more of sugar to try to take away the saltiness. It didn’t work. There were still so disgusting. I decided that maybe they needed time to just age in jars so I jar them up and I set them aside. I let them cool down for a couple of hours and then I tried them again. I know that a few hours isn’t long in the life of pickles, but I did what I did. They were just as disgustingly salty. So I dumped the brine down the drain and I threw them away.
These were not even worth wasting fridge energy to cool them down to check again. There’s just no hope for overly salty, pineapple pickles using a recipe that looking back on it I’m pretty sure they used the wrong spoons measurement. Maybe 2 teaspoons of salt would’ve been better. Maybe 4 teaspoons of salt would’ve been better! What would have been better, ultimately, was if I just didn’t make these at all, and had thrown the pineapple away without cutting it because it was overripe. That would’ve been better because then I wouldn’t have wasted my time, my effort, or my delightful vinegar, that somehow my family thinks smells like throw up, on something that I just couldn’t even tolerate eating. Garbage. Yuck. Nope.
The Over-Arching Problem
If I had a common thread through all these kitchen failures, it is this: I didn’t vet my recipes properly. I got caught up in the excitement of the idea that I didn’t do my due diligence in picking good recipes to begin with.
Here are my simple rules for choosing quality recipes:
One) in baking, everything must be accurately measured. I’m a baker by trade and I don’t believe in “scant” or “heaping” anything when it comes to recipes. Without an accurate measurement you cannot have an accurate product.
Two) More reviews = more accurate rating.
If there were more than 100 reviews and it’s over 4.5 stars, it’s likely a really good recipe.
If it’s less than 10 reviews, even if it’s 5 stars, I don’t trust it: your family ate your recipe and left you a reviews from what they ate.
If the recipe hasn’t been reviewed at all, don’t make it. Unless it’s new that day and from a reputable source.
Three) Read the recipe.
If something doesn’t look right in the recipe, it might say something different in the instructions. If there is missing information, measurement discrepancies, or if it just says “mix,” I say to steer clear. There are thousands of other recipes with more thorough instructions that you can choose from. Keep looking.
Four) Try a single batch first.
Don’t make my mistake of doubling experiments: make the original recipe first.
I realize this is dangerous to tread here while I am wanting to add recipes to the blog. I’m hoping my rules can keep me straight as I set up recipes on here. I don’t want you to be let down in the sane way I was by these food blunders this week!