When cooking from scratch goes awry

[leebee]

The thing is I've made this particular soup many times and it's always been good. Not this time, haha! I am usually pretty good at throwing things together without a recipe, and I absolutely hate following recipes (although I grudgingly do when baking), but I have the occasional fail.

This is me, too. I rarely use a recipe when I cook, and 99.9% of the time we are always very happy with the results. However, I ALWAYS follow a recipe when I bake. Baking is food chemistry, proportions have to be correct, or you don't get what you are hoping for. My sister can bake with a blindfold on- she understands the proportions/ingredients for all kinds of baked goods- but I have to follow a recipe when I bake.

I had a giant fail this weekend. I made pea soup, and it's awful. I make pea soup pretty regularly, same way every time, no recipe, and we LOVE it. Not this time! For some reason, it tasted pretty funky. I used a frozen ham bone and think maybe it'd been in the freezer too long? I tried to fix it, added some white wine, bought a piece of ham to chop up and add, let it sit overnight to mellow. It was... barely ok? We were heating it up again yesterday, got distracted, and it burned on pretty badly. We ate it for late supper (with the Pats' game) but it's just not good. I am considering straining it through a mesh sieve to get the burned parts out, but DH is voting for just throwing it away. If he won't eat it, it must be pretty bad! It's disappointing as we love pea soup and it was destined for easy dinners/lunch this week, but I think DH is correct. I'd like to think that we can get another ham, make more soup, but honestly, we had ham for 4 different large meals over a 5 week timespan, and we are pretty hammed-out, so it'll be awhile before I get my pea soup, I'm afraid!

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

I have had more fails from Pinterest and random internet recipes than I care to mention. I've almost completely stopped using people's blogs and informal sites to find things. Either people have no idea what good food is or that haven't really tested out a recipe. I've been trying to stick to sites that have good reputations and seem to test out their recipes numerous times.

I've found so many gems through Pinterest, Pillsbury, and Food Network.

But I read the comments to glean some helpful hints especially things like 'needs more liquid, I did this instead, etc', look for things like 'Kitchen Tested' on Pillsbury and Food Network.

We will also remove ingredients that we wouldn't eat but I look at the recipe to see if that would make sense (like we wouldn't make a seafood style dish and take out the seafood lol).

We've been trying to do frozen meals (meaning you make meals and freeze them for the future) and that can be hard finding ones that would actually do well if frozen but we've found some good ones. Just had to search for ones designed as frozen with ingredients that freeze and then thaw well.

 

[portocall]

I've had my fair share of fails. The macaroni in the soup is one that stands out because I knew to keep them separate but was trying to save time. For the most part I am a great cook and can come up with a tasty dinner even when my pantry looks empty. My husband taught me how to cook. When I first got married I was pretty hopeless.

 

[Cogswel_Cogs]

I almost always make stuff from scratch aside from wonton wrappers.
Made some really bad dished. Worse was a recipe for lettuce soup. It was so so bad.

 

[ronandannette]

I almost always make stuff from scratch aside from wonton wrappers.
Made some really bad dished. Worse was a recipe for lettuce soup. It was so so bad.

Sounds similar to an invitation to a snipe hunt. I can't believe you fell for it.