The Tuesday before last came with a set of challenges all its own. Namely, to make Ina Garten’s cream of wild mushroom soup. Or die trying… My many hours of simultaneous editing/Barefoot Contessa watching had finally provided me the gusto necessary to become the domestic goddess of Dylan’s dreams. If only for a little while. And so, after cleaning the apartment (as a clean home always makes me feel I can take on the whole world) and turning on some intellectually stimulating instrumental guitar, I prepped the kitchen for a whirlwind of chopping and slicing and mincing. And then.. I went to the store… What followed was a nightmare trip for mushroom soup paraphernalia. Sure they had porcini and portabello. Yellow onion, fresh thyme, and dry white wine. But where on earth were the leeks at?! Let alone the shiitake.. Having the meat guy page someone over to produce never quite panned out. And texting my mother a cellphone picture of bok choy and pleeding with her to “PLEASE tell me these are leeks!!” didn’t either. My gusto was waning. So I resolved to green onions (the closest looking thing to leeks the store had) and blanching dried shiitake for a half-hour. But that’s okay. The blanching made me feel extra savvy. ;)
I then ventured home, and chopped and sliced and minced. And when Dylan let me know I could pick him up from work, I asked him if he’d be able to take a cab home because my ‘mushroom soup was stressing me out.’ A CAB?! F’real?! His office is less than a mile away… Believe me, I know I’m crazy. :) I left to pick him up. And when Dylan cheerfully entered the car a few minutes later, I was all, “What did you do with our large pot?? I can NOT find it anywhere and it’s the only pot large enough to cook this very important soup.” Or something like that… Bursts of laughter filled the car at the sheer madness I had so obviously succumbed to. (Sure enough, said large pot ended up being in the same cupboard I had checked three times that day.) And an hour later, we were enjoying the leek-less soup I’d worked literally WAY too hard on. It was glorious. It was worth it. And I have to say, Ina Garten herself might’ve been proud.
Which brings us to June’s 1 For Me // 1 For You. Now because you’ve stuck around long enough to get to this part, I’ll cut right to the chase! :) This month, we’ll be giving away some Williams-Sonoma goodies any domestic goddess wannabe can appreciate. One Barefoot Contessa cookbook and one glass and stainless-steel cookbook holder. But first? The rules on how 1 For Me // 1 For You really works…
- What is it? It’s pretty simple.. If I have something that I find either functional, fashionable, or just plain fun, I send one of you a duplicate!
- Who can enter? Anyone and everyone who reads this blog. Whether you’re a friend, client, past client, future client, or random reader, enter away! (Please see the not-so-fine print below for full rules and restrictions!)
- How long do I have to enter? You’ll have until next Saturday, June 11th at midnight CST to enter. The winner will be chosen at random using the random number generator at Random.org and announced the next morning (always the second Sunday of the month).
- BAM! How do I get my shot at winning? You must comment (and answer the specific question asked at the end of the post) on this 1 For Me // 1 For You post to enter. Comments left via Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere will not be taken into consideration.
- But why? Because giveaways are fun, I needed some major help in the cooking department, and maybe one of you does too! :)
I give you… Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics (Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients). With the queen herself on the cover!.jpg "undefined")
Over 250 pages of pictures and recipes that make your mouth water with just one look. My goal is to (successfully) make one new recipe a week from this book. Hopefully, with half the battle my “intermediate-level” soup gave me. What was I thinking, anyway? ;).jpg "undefined")
And now introducing, the glass and stainless-steel cookbook holder I just looove. With a brushed stainless steel frame and removable tempered-glass page holder/protector, this thing also just looks plain classy..jpg "undefined")
And who wouldn’t love some good math on the side? SO helpful!
Pretty. :)
Question to enter: What is the funniest/craziest mistake you’ve ever made while cooking? And feel free to out-do my tale of bok choy/leek confusion… :)
Athena - I love Ina, and I’ve been wanting this cookbook for a while now. One of my craziest cooking mistakes was putting way too much salt in a pumpkin cake recipe. I consider myself a pretty experienced baker so I should have known the quantity of salt was too much, but I went with it…big mistake. I had to scrap the cake and start over. Live and learn…go with your gut!
Brandy - I was in charge of pies for Thanksgiving one year and there were so many to make. 2 apple, 2 pumpkin, 1 pecan, 1 peach, and a lemon meringue. It was such chaos I put salt instead of sugar in the pumpkin pies (which are my favorite), vegetable oil in the pecan pie instead of corn syrup, and somehow ended up with chili powder in the peach pie. I was also making dinner for out of town family members hence the ridiculous mix ups. By the time I realized what I had done to the first 3 pies, I threw in the towel and went to Costco. I had forgotten about the roast in the oven and quickly ordered pizza upon my return home. I managed to redeem myself on a later holiday, a long while later.
Angela - I was making pumpkin pancakes for the first time, and the recipe called for ‘Jamaican All-Spice.’ I could not find it anywhere, and had no idea what it even was, so I just used a general all-spice. That was definitely NOT what they were asking for, and they ended up being salty instead of sweet–yuck!! I learned for the next time and the second bach came out delicious!!
Stephanie Briant - Well mine may not totally count since I was a little kid but… I once tried to make an omelet for my grandmother at the age of 6. I figured since I always learned from her that the peels from fruit gave desserts more flavor (she taught me about zest the night before!) That the egg shell all crumpled up in her eggs would make the egg extra flavorful! Trying to be nice she choked it down. Now that I look back I know it was one omelet she probably never forgot!
Karina Colorado - I do pretty well with exhausting ingredients during the week (planning our weekly menu so that I don’t buy a bunch of asparagus and throw most of it away). Since I was making pasta and I had some bread leftover, I thought I would toast the bread and rub it with some garlic-I’d done it before and it turned out great!. This time though, I left the bread in the oven WAY too long and it caught on fire. Literally. Caught on fire. Flames shot out when I opened the door trying to find out where the burning smell was coming from.
Danielle Nurenberg - I once attempted to make eggnog from scratch, without a recipe. Let’s just say it was bad and contained way too much rum flavoring.
Jess S - Once upon a time, I was making a quesadilla on the stove and not paying very close attention to it. It burned to the pan, leaving a big, black semicircle covering about half the pan. This was before I knew about Cameo (one of the greatest inventions ever!), so I tried everything I could think of to get the burn mark off – heavy-duty soap, scouring pads, everything. None of it worked, so I eventually threw the pan away!! A year later, I watched my mother-in-law remove a similar burn mark from a similar stainless steel pan in about two seconds with Cameo. And I haven’t wasted a pan since! :-)
pam - so this wasn’t exactly my fault but i REALLY should have caught it. Once the hubby was helping me make lasagna for all his family, I was happy that he was helping & lack concentration when he’s around. Well I asked him to chop the parsley & throw it in the mix….long story short…he chopped/threw in cilantro. Not the same at all.
Kathy - I’ve made the kind of mistakes that make people wish I had only burned the food, all on account of electric stoves. One time I turned on the wrong burner and melted my friend’s sandwich maker that was sitting on top of it. Another time something like a gunshot was heard out of the kitchen when I did the same thing to a pizza stone and it cracked clean in two. And my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook has an interesting tattoo in the shape of a heating element. I own an electric stove now, so I am extra careful!
Adrienne Bayles - When I was in 5th grade, my class had this overnight field trip on a boat where we had to act as if we were on it durring the gold rush and were each put in a specific part of the crew. Well, I was on the cooking crew and so we were in charge of making all of the meals. All of the food turned out surprisingly well except for these biscuits that were literally like rocks, only to find out later that we had accidently put in salt instead of sugar! Gross!
Meghan Stang - I enjoy the adventure of cooking new things, but sometimes it doesn’t always work out… I tried to make cake balls and I was not successful. My mom and sister were not impressed.
Chris Potash - I was boiling water for pasta, forgot about it, and when I did remember my pot was literally melting on my stove – seriously – liquid metal everywhere. Luckily it was in the middle of winter so after my initial freak out I ran with my red hot pot and threw it in the two feet of snow outside of my front door. But I have burn marks on my counter and my floor where the metal dripped to remind me of my ridiculously dingy moment!
Breanna - So, i have had too many stories of cooking gone wrong.. one i will never forget was steak in the oven, forgot about it and literally smoke EVERYWHERE… the kitchen was so thick of smoke i was choking and couldn’t breath for a day.. yupp it was bad! LOl On the plus side i made mean beer bread and garlic garlic dip and cookies as well. The cookbook looks awesome! Can’t wait to see who wins!! :-) XO
Martha - First off: BAHhahahahaha…. I think I would have had the exact same reaction if Rob interrupted a soup-making-project of mine. Hilarious! Though I’m sure he appreciated the ride ;)
Also, I too enjoy a nice clean apartment.
I don’t think I really have any funny/crazy cooking stories to share :( but once I left a can of pumpkin pie mix in the cupboard too long (I didn’t even know that was possible), and didn’t realize something was wrong until halfway through the process when everything was this weird beige color.
So not delicious.
P.S. LOVE your giveaway items this month! You’re so awesome!
Christina Shippey - That cookbook holder looks gorgeous- you don’t know how many of my cookbooks have gunk splattered all over them from my crazy cooking!! One of my worst cooking disasters- chocolate chip cookies without the flour- looked like a cookie pan covered in goo- yuck! :(
Lauren Knisely - Last year my roommate assured me that making homemade frosting was really easy. There are only 3 ingredients and all you have to do is mix. I watched her make it once. Then I tried to make it the next day without any supervision. How could I mess this up? It came out tasting like powdered sugar – no matter what I added. I still don’t know where I went wrong. So I’m transitioning from baking to cooking. And never making frosting again. At least not without more practice.
Esther - My funniest/craziest cooking mistake dates back to junior high. I had a few girlfriends over for a sleepover and the next morning I wanted to WOW them all with my amazing banana milkshake skills that I had recently learned from my Mom. It was my first time flying solo with the blender and uh… I didn’t realize that the glass pitcher LIFTED out and that you didn’t need to TWIST it out. I ended up demounting the base and long story short – banana milkshake everywhere and years of kitchen ridicule.
PS: Lovelovelove the cookbook stand.
Randi-Michelle - Once when making my favorite salmon dish, I accidentally switched the salt and sugar portions and ended up with fish so salty it was practically cured! I also ROUTINELY forget to dip chicken in eggs before breading it, or rubbing it with spice before putting it in the pan!
Sarah Casas - I tried to make a cake for valentine’s day once and it was a disaster! I was 18 and the boy I made it for didn’t have the heart to tell me it was terrible! :( Haha! Oh well, funny story now.
Andi S - The “best” mistake I’ve ever made cooking, and the one my family still won’t let me live down involves tapioca pudding. I was making tapioca pudding from the box on the stove. I thought it was like most pudding where you added the first few ingredients, cooked a bit, dumped in the box of pudding and finished cooking. Well, something wasn’t turning out right and so I called my mom over to come take a look. She picked up the box to see what the recipe said and when she noticed the box was empty she began to laugh. The box said to add 3 tablespoons of the tapioca mix. We had to turn off the pot and run to the store to get more ingredients to finish making the pudding, as well as move it into a bigger pot. I think we ended up with 64 servings of tapioca and filled every tupperware we had. My sister didn’t eat tapioca for a long time after that. I read recipes more thoroughly now.
Heidi Ann - My friend and I decided to make chocolate chip cookies one day, and we were goofing off while were making them, but we finally got them in the oven. Then after a couple of minutes we noticed that they weren’t really baking as much as melting, but we left them in anyway, and when we went to take them out of the oven the entire pan was one big cookie. We tried to get it out of the pan but our “cookies” were completely glued to it and to each other. We even took the pan outside and hit it against the ground and even jumped on it, but it was stuck like nobody’s business. Turns out we had used confectioner’s sugar instead of flour. Oops…
Michelle Lynch - Once upon a time, the boyfriends mother finally was teaching me how to make her gumbo. It worked out fantastic, so I decided to be Miss Oh La La, and make the dish for my friends since it has always been a crowd pleaser. Well once this magical gumbo was done, it was ready to be served, devoured, and ended by my friends praising my wonderous new cooking skills, or so I thought. To this day I still don’t know what went wrong, or what was used incorrectly but I do know my friends only let me boil water in lue of the deadly apple that was that gumbo. :]
Erin Haase - Recently, I was making up a new dish of pasta with veggies and crab and alfredo sauce. There was so much happening on the stove that I burnt the bottom of the pan on the alfredo sauce. I’d done it before and was able to use the sauce, but not this time! I didn’t realize how badly it was burnt and when on to use it, but the sauce was so burnt that all you could taste was the flavor of charred wood!
Heather - Determined to prove that I too could be a domestic goddess, I tried to make a chocolate carrot cake from scratch for my daughter’s birthday party. In a rush to get all the party plans together, I forgot to add in the sugar AND I used regular flour instead of cake flour. The mistakes were not discovered until after the cake had been served to all of our family and friends. Needless to say I’ve used a box mix to make all of our birthday cakes since then!!!
Lindsay - I have made every baking mistake in the book… tbsp for tsp, salt for sugar, baking at the wrong temperature, forgetting them for an extra hour, etc. But generally, I’ve conquered all of those, and while I’ll never open my open bakery, I get frequent praises whenever I do bake now. (Execpt for chocolate chip cookies…which I just don’t bake anymore because they never turn out how I want…they are always so FLAT!)
I think the worst debacle, at least the most stressful for me, was after I volunteered to make the communion bread for church. I was stoked, I get to serve my church and Christ through baking! The bread is kneaded, pierced, and browned for symbolism of what Christ suffered for me. I know God doesn’t judge me based on my failures, and sees Christ in my place, but that day I definitely felt like I’d let him down in so many ways and was a complete failure — and that he might just hate me for it, for not even being able to use the gift he gave me. The recipe calls for a bread machine, which I didn’t have, or a stand mixer, which I also didn’t have…so I tried to do it all by hand. So much mixing, so sticky, and so much flour…it was so dense it wouldn’t cook, and when it did I couldn’t even break it, I’d made rock hard frisbees! I was devastated and embarassed and after about one more try…I cried a bunch and asked to be taken off the communion-bread-baking rotation. Now there’s a breadmaker on my wedding regsitry, and I’m determined to learn hot to properly bake all kinds of bread, leavened and unleavened.
Jill Bogli - My most non-professional, completely idiotic cooking moment was over none other than a simple- (what should’ve taken 10 minutes to make), Chocolate Cream Pie. Store bought crust and some chocolate pudding already made in the fridge. Until I tried taking the crust out of the tin container and placing it on the plate. While my best friend was yelling “It’s going to break! Like that! Jill! Like that!!! It’s breaking.” While I sulked on the floor, watching the dog scrounge up every last piece, not knowing what in the world to do; seeing as this pie had to be done in an hour for our church’s annual Pie Social. My best friend, thankfully had the intelligence to quickly whip up a homemade crust. My end result: a chocolate cream pie, with HOMEMADE crust, cool whip, raspberries, and topped with chocolate shavings. Much better than the original plan. And might I add, did happen to go first at the social ;)
I feel your stress, Lyse!
Imani F. - I was baking brownies once. I mixed all my ingredients, sprayed the pan and put them in the oven. After they were done I took them out and noticed they looked flat, deflated, and oily. So I threw those out, and tried a new box. 35 minutes later.. the 2nd batch looked exactly the same. Good thing my mom buys in bulk, because when I opened my 3rd box of brownie mix… I finally realized I had forgot to add eggs the first two times!
stephanie rita - one time i put the cheese in the mac & cheese before i drained the water… so when i drained it… it ended up being just mac. no cheese to be found. =)
jessica - ok…so i am trying to come up with something super crazy so i can have the chance to win this awesome AWESOME prize cause I am all about the kitchen;) anyhoohoo, i am not coming up with anything too drastic….but here goes…this weekend was my bday!!! yup…i’m even older now…and although i had a wonderful smattering of pastries and ice creams ranging from the wonderful hands of a baker in the DR to Ben&Jerry’s…well, i decided Sunday evening I wanted a cake. and i was gonna bake it from whatever i had in the house…so, a pumpkin walnut cake with brown sugar buttercream frosting it was:) the thing is, i was soooooo in anticipation of eating it that i didn’t let it cool properly and when i turned my cake pan over to the cooling rack half fell out and the other half stayed in…when i finally got it all out it was sooo dicombabulated! it still tasted good as i then just frosted it while hot and the buttercream melted all over! yummy, but ugly;) and if you know anything about my cupcakes…they needs to be perty;)
Mischelle Morgan - In my first year of marriage I decided to make my mother-in-law’s chili recipe. It was a very simple recipe and one of the hubby’s favorites. Well It was a complete failure! I burned it terrible with out realizing it. So when we went to serve it it tasted AWFUL!!!! I wanted to throw-up and throw it away, but they insisted it wasnt so bad and ate it anyway. Needless to say, I rarely make chili!!!!!
Molly L. - I buy butter that is handmade at a farm near my house, and its really really delicious. BUT, it doesn’t have the nifty measurements that most sticks have on the packaging. One day I was making cookies and took a guess at how much butter I needed, and ended up using half of what the recipe called for. I realized what I did half way through baking and thought for sure I would have rock-hard cookies that would break teeth. What came out was amazing. If you want cookies to be soft and fluffy like the supermarket ones… cut the butter in half! It was the best careless mistake I’ve ever made, and I do it every time now!!
Mackenzie - I was making turkey burgers on the stove, and as my husband bit into it he politely said…um this is pink haha oops…since then I’ve perfected (well almost) grilling so this cookbook would be GREAT!
Patricia Williams - I also love Ina, and covet the cookbook cover! My story is about a Thanksgiving turkey, cooked and browned to perfection at my sister in law’s home many years ago. She used one of those toss-away foil pans, and yours truly offered to lift it out of the oven. And didn’t put a cookie tray (or any other supporting-the-bottom feature) under it (I wasn’t there when he first went into the oven.) I dropped that monstrous slippery bird, right thru my legs and slid clear across the kitchen floor, slamming into the baseboard cupboard. (all that butter that browned him up, just got him a little “slippery” is all.) Yes, we rinsed him off and plopped him on the platter!
Another funny, my sis-in-law loves to tell the story of how she was baking bread for the first time, and instructions said “place the dough on oven rack to rise for 2 hours” so she laid the dough right on the racks. It took her an hour to peel all the dough off the racks. She’ s a delicious cook today!
Jen - Forgetting the eggs were boiling…I didn’t remember until they exploded!
Lelia - Oh gosh! Which mistake to choose? I still remember the time I made cheesecake and used salt instead of sugar. It was so salty you couldn’t eat it, well actually my sister did and claimed she couldn’t taste anything wrong. I also tried to make lolipops once. That was an entire afternoon of trying to cook sugar right. Somehow I ended up with unedible taffy/lollypop/hard sugar in a mint flavor. Gross! I think I could really be helped by a cookbook that tells me what to do and keeps the ingrediants simple!
Beth Nell - I just recently came across your blog from my cousin’s website and facebook (Martha Swann)….I’m in love with your work!!!
I was making some kind of dessert and it called for some kind of spice that i can’t remember what it is now, but anyway, i grabbed what i thought was that spice, used it, baked the pie and when we had the first taste we CLEARLY knew I had done something wrong. I had used paprika instead of the spice! it was NASTY.
Also. :) I once was TOTALLY not thinking, and I made banana pudding in a plastic white mixing bowl…and i wanted to brown the meringue. So I stuck the whole bowl in the oven. A few minutes later there wasn’t much of a bowl left. I apparently don’t use my brain much when cooking.
And this isn’t my story-but figured it’d be an added bonus. My sister was making a seven layer salad and it called for the miracle whip(mayonnaise) and she thought it said cool whip. So we had a seven layer salad with whip cream in the layers.
=)
Sarah Korzun - So many mistakes to choose from, but the one that comes to mind was a cookie recipe that went bad. So vinegar and oil look very similar, so by an accident I put vinegar instead of oil in the cookies. Surprisingly no one noticed something different when they tried them!
Carrie Stiles - Just love that cookbook holder! My biggest mistake was one year I tried for hours to get a cookie recipe right. It was for cookies that my grandma made every Christmas & she had passed away two months before & I wanted to make them in honor of her. So, these were important cookies! :-) Every time I made the sand tarts they just did not come out right & I was reduced to tears because I couldn’t figure it out. Finally I called my mom & told her the ingredients & how I was going about the recipe. You see, it called for butter, so I was using the “butter” I had, one of these reduced calorie, healthy butter spreads in a tub. My mom quickly pointed out my mistake! I needed REAL butter. What a blonde moment! I fixed that little problem & after 5 batches, I was finally was able to produce a real sand tart! :-)
k a t e - i definitely put cups of baking soda in cookies instead of teaspoons when i was 13 or 14. and then cried in the bathroom and resolved to never ever bake again. haha now i’m pretty bomb at it though :)
Sarah Jane - I once accidentally used powdered sugar instead of flour while making lemon squares. Two white, powdery substances, right? The mistake was evident as soon as I did it, though, as the batter was a strange texture. Into the garbage it went.
Rebecca - I’m cracking up at all of the comments! Glad I’m not the only one! :)
So I love to experiment while cooking, and so I have been trying to “trick out” my Mac and Cheese by adding veggies, etc. I try a mexican theme … one of the ingredients was black beans. I don’t know why it didn’t work, but it SO didn’t. Somehow I turned the entire creation brown. Hahaha! SO gross. I would love a cookbook! :) PS: your work is fab.
Erin - when I was a kid, I didn’t know fractions, but wanted to bake my parents an anniversary cake. We (my neighbor friend and I) thought that 1/3 meant 3 CUPS! So we emptied our house, and our neighbors house of cooking oil for that silly cake! Ironically it was a little dry ;)
Noelle - So I am pretty much awful at cooking, even though I still like to try and be like Betty Crocker. I’ve messed up everything from cookies to easy mac. Which brings me to my worst cooking experience even if it only involves a microwave. When I was a Junior in high school I was making EASY mac in the microwave. Since I failed to read the alerts on the packaging stating how HOT the bowl will be after bringing it out of the microwave I completely burnt my wrist so badly that I had to completely wrap it for over a week until it fully healed. I went to pull the bowl out I then realized how hot it was and since I tried to put the bowl back down so quickly I spilt the boiling hot water down my wrist. Lets just say I still have not made a bowl of easy mac to this day.
Stephanie Shelor - I think the craziest cooking mistake I made was measuring salt over the bowl when I was making a cake and of course pouring it into the recipe! That one totally was dumped!