Friday Fuck Ups - - Page 4

by ML

Friday Fuck Up: Eat the Chips Instead

I don’t post Friday Fuck Ups too often mostly because it doesn’t occur to me to take photographs of my disasters, and words wouldn’t do them justice. For everyone who wanted to see bacon disintegrate into a paper plate, egg drop soup that looked like oatmeal and French onion soup that induced vomiting on command…you’ll just have to wait. But alas, I fucked up and remembered to document it.

In Philly, we were having the best hoagies for dinner. I wanted chips. I thought, no no, chips are boring and bad for you. But baked vegetables? Good.

I decided to make Jaden’s recipe for crispy kale (I like to call it krispy kale, FYI). This didn’t seem hard: Dry kale. Toss with olive oil. Put in oven. Salt. Consume.

Not quite. It might have turned out like shit because I didn’t have the necessary salad spinner to dry the leaves. Or because…well, I don’t know, I wasn’t watching them or I didn’t wash the leaves first (oops) or I put them on foil (is that bad?)

The first batch (pictured above) was burnt, bitter, and all around horrible. My dad, like all dads, still managed to eat half of the tray. I grabbed the second batch from the oven just as I started to see some of the leaves browning. That didn’t work either. They were half bitter and krispy, or not krispy at all.

Awesome.

in Veggie 6 comments

by Lyndsey

Friday Fuck Up: Ice Cream Epic Fail

My husband and I, upon our first foray to a large farmer’s market near our new house, decided on a whim to buy a whole coconut. So exciting! So tropical! The adventure we had opening the coconut and eventually eating it made me think of other odd fruits and veggies that people eat and love – artichokes being my personal favorite. Who ever thought, back in the day, these things were edible? Why put forth such effort to get to the wonderful taste inside? But I digress. After the initial excitement wore off, and we had nibbled on a little bit of coconut meat, it now fell upon me to figure out what to do with the bulk of the coconut meat and the water.

It being August, and living in a house with no central air, my mind automatically went to ice cream. I don’t have a stand-alone ice cream maker, but I do have an ice cream maker attachment that came with my beloved KitchenAid mixer. I’ve attempted ice cream before, to utter disappointment. The problem originated from the fact that I don’t want to make normal ice cream. I want to make soy cream. We’re a lactose-intolerant household around here, and my first attempt at soy ice cream, back around Thanksgiving, used soy milk and tofu, and ended up an icy, non-creamy concoction that I threw out. This time, I thought I’d do a hybrid, taking a regular recipe and putting half dairy, half soy in it instead, along with the great goodness of the coconut meat and water – it was bound to be tasty….Right?

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in Desserts / Eggs 2 comments

by ML

Friday Fuck Up: Strawberry Jammed

Today’s F-UP comes from from Mandie, author of wtf jk lol, my former roommate and berry picking partner. We had our first college apartment together, fucked up a lot of food, but neither of us wanted to publicize our failures. Until now.

After I explained I had no idea what to do with all that fruit (and, ahem, ES readers said jam was so easy), Mandie decided to take the challenge and make jam.

The last time Mandie attempted jam, it was watery and she ended up having to remove it from the jars to recook it (big pain in the ass). So to avoid that fiasco, she cooked this batch a little longer. Sounds like a good plan, right?

Unfortunately, this second attempt ended up being “the consistency of those weird gel candles.” The fruity substance, seen above, was impossible to extract from the jars without some force and creative methods. Certainly not spreadable.

Can we get a little help, ESers? Where did she go wrong? What’s the secret to making jam look like jam?

in Personal 3 comments

by gansie

Friday Fuck Up: The Most Fucked Up Week Ever

Editors Note: First of all, I can’t even handle this week. Nine dead from the DC Metro accident, then Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett and now the King of Fucking Pop, Michael Jackson. Well, at least we can end the week on a lighter, well, okay, maybe that’s the wrong word, a sillier note.

Here’s a fuck-up via Twitter from our friend Michael Birchenall of Foodservice Monthly. Michael recently guest starred in our After School Special Blogger Boggle.

fotorules: @EndlessSimmer … will I ever stop making a FU grilled cheese … perfect on 1 side … burnt on the other

EndlessSimmer: great grilled cheese pic – mind if we post it on friday?

fotorules: go ahead … I still ate it … I used to scrape off the burnt part … I don’t even do that any more … it’s an acquired taste

You too can become famous on ES. Just send us a fuck up. Oh, come on, we know you have one!
info@endlessssimmer.com

in Cheese / Sandwich 12 comments

by Bliz

Friday Fuck Ups: How Not to Fillet a Fish

I’m not really sure why I prefer to cut my own fillets. Gutting and cutting up a fish is messy, smelly and if continually done wrong too many times, can take away from the final dish. But then again… it’s a chance to play with knives and gross out my friends.

To me, the positives outweigh the negatives. Money is also a factor, but then again, you pay less for a whole fish then you would buying pre-cut fillets at Whole Foods.

If you’ve ever watched a Julia Child show or bothered to look up the process on filleting a whole round fish on YouTube, it looks incredibly easy. It can be, though, if you can push past any queasiness of the fish looking up at you while you grotesquely hack up several whole fish figuring out the process.

And even after you think you’ve figured it out, there are days like last Friday where you have basically forgotten how to ride the bike and swerve uncontrollably into a trash can.

So what say you ESers? Am I just wasting my time and perfectly good fish by messing around with my own fillets? Should I leave it to the fish mongers? Produce another Friday Fuck Up? Keep trying it myself?

A decent salvage after the jump.

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in Fish 8 comments

by BS

Fix the Fuck Up: Asparagus Tamed

This one was all you, ES-ers! I had no idea why my Fine Cooking-inspired asparagus pasta strands were such a horrible, ugly, falling-apart mess:

But you guys were all like, duh, just shave your strands off the stalks before you cook them, and it totally worked. I cut off the asparagus tips, then used the vegetable peeler to shave fettuccine-like strands off the stalks, which worked much, much better than trying to shave the steamed asparagus. The first few strips I shaved off were beautiful, pasta-like green strands, although it got harder to shave them as the stalk got smaller, but still, infinitely more successful than the first go-around.

I cooked the fettuccine (OK well, I had used all my fettuccine in the original fuck up, so I subbed linguine) for five minutes, then threw the asparagus strands and tips into the same boiling water and cooked for another five minutes.

How much better does that look? Thank, team ES!

in Veggie 2 comments

by C. Christy Concrete

Fix The Fuck Up: It’s A French Thing

Editor’s Note: Fix the Fuck Up is an occasional series in which we try to look like we actually know what we’re doing, well, after we’ve already fucked up. Here’s the original massacre.

Eggs are evil.

Not misguided evil, like Darth Vader. Or megalomaniacal evil, like Dr. Moriarty. Or naturally evil, like cats. More like an oblivious, self-centered, lah-de-dah kind of evil; like Q. Eggs just do their own thing, often in spite of your best efforts to tame them. They collapse when you whip them into foams. They turn into waterlogged mush when you overcook them. They force you to blame your significant other for your own emission control problems. But the evilest thing eggs can do is fuck up both baking and cooking; sometimes both at the same time, as was the case with Allyson’s recent quiche quatastrophe.

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in Breakfast / Eggs 4 comments