Recipe for Stress
Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.
I don’t like thinking about failures in the kitchen for two very good reasons.
First, it’s never something I can laugh about afterwards. As such a good cook I find it deeply irritating. It’s stressful at the time and it gnaws at you afterwards. If it’s a big meal like a Christmas Dinner it’s even worse because you are stressed anyway, so a disaster can cause, and has caused, a meltdown.
Second, a failed meal means wasted money and for many years money was in short supply, so a kitchen disaster was one that I could literally ill afford. How to rescue it was always more of a concern. It’s easy to find it funny in retrospect if you are richer but if you are poorer you can find yourself having to think about the knock on effects before the next paycheck. As such, the ‘comic’ potential of the ‘epic fail’ is self indulgent and reflects your economic good fortune.
Yes, failure in the kitchen, as in any other area of life, is inevitable, but if you can laugh about it afterwards consider yourself lucky.
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David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 
Yes, the “kitchen mishap” is a bit of a middle class meme for the reason that many people do not have the time, money, or bandwidth to cook new and interesting dishes with fresh/perishable ingredients (never mind the capacity to laugh it off if the meal goes wrong).
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Never thought of it like that but you are absolutely right! 👍👍
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3 years after we moved into our current home, i decided i was going to make a Christmas Pudding. I’d been reading Nigel Slaters Christmas Chronicles. Now, my family never had Christmas pud. I don’t think i’d ever actually tasted it at that point. Despite this, i went about mixing and assembling, tipping the mixture into some very festive red bowls, and started steaming the first one. For the first hour i sat in the kitchen, topping up the water, keeping an eye on it. Then for some reason i went into the living room, put the telly on, and forgot about it…. until about 45 mins later when we started to smell burning. Ran into the kitchen…. smoke billowing from a bone dry pan, plastic bowl starting to melt. Thankfully nothing caught fire! But we did have to sit in a cold house with all the windows open for the rest of the evening, just to get rid of the smell. I’ve never attempted it since.
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You know, I would have done the same thing back in the day! I tend to stay in the kitchen throughout or set a timer just in case!
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