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.