Kitchen Disasters - Bad Eats

Fortunately, complete and utter disasters in the kitchen have been pretty rare for me. There was the ragu I tried to make for the Talbot Allens in washington, which ended up in the trash after I cooked the meat to an internal temperature of nuclear, resulting in small black nuggets of ground beef and pork in a sour sea of boiled red wine (thankfully I whipped up another sauce before they got home for dinner!) And the time I followed Mark Bittman's recipe for pan-fried beets (essentially, a giant beet latke) ended up as a sweetened lump of oily flour. But generally things have worked out for the best.

The other day, though I got inspired by an episode of "Good Eats" on the food network, in which Alton Brown prepared "Butternut dumplings" (read: Butternut gnocchi) in sage-brown butter sauce. The recipe looked pretty straightforward, and our CSA already had provided us with the squash and the sage.

The first step was to halve and roast the butternut squash, along with some potatoes. Check - it tasted delicious when it came out of the oven.

Next I mashed together the squash and the potatoes with some egg and spices. Seemed pretty easy.

That's when things got ugly. The recipe directed me to add 1 1/2 cups of flour to the mixture to form a dough. On TV, Alton Brown in fact got away with a little less than this, and ended up with a nice sticky dough that he easily formed into dumplings.

However, after a cup and a half, I still had squash-potato gruel. So I added another cup of flour, and then another. At this point I turned the "dough" out onto a floured board, but it was so sticky and moist that I couldn't work with it at all, so I had to return it to the bowl. I repeated this entire operation a few more times. Ultimately, I must have used at least 5 cups of flour. So by the time I shaped the dumplings and cooked a couple, they tasted like wood pulp. The final result: a very pretty but utterly useless orange mass of gluten, in the garbage can.

I did learn an important lesson: always read the comments to online recipes! I'm not the only one who ended up dumping the dumplings.

11in11

Noah Galuten writes a food blog called Man Bites World, in which he chronicles his attempt to eat a different type of food every day for as many days in a row as he can. And by different type he means food from a different ethnic tradition. So a five day stretch might consist of Mexican-Filipino-Thai-Hamburgers-Ghanaian.

It definitely helps to live in Southern California to pull that kind of thing off, though I imagine you could do it without too much difficulty in NYC or the bay area, or less so in Boston, DC, or Chicago.

Anyway, for Day 73: Chinese, he decided to combine his project with a friend's annual event: the 11 in 11. What is that, you ask?

So what’s 11-In-11? Well, for the past five years, folk hero Jason Bernstein and his cousin Mark have been setting up a one day a year event where “…we visit 11 food establishments in 11 hours and devour 11 mini-meals.”

Sounds like an awesome thing to do, if you have 11 hours, $50 or $60 and 3000 calories to spare. I'm not sure why 11 is the magic number, but viv and I were just brainstorming 11 different restaurants within walking distance each representing a different ethnic food. Once the weather warms up, we'll brave the inevitable tummy-ache and give it a shot.