The Beauty of Kitchen Disasters
Pull up a chair and make yourself at home. I'm Andrea Meyers, and this is Making Life Delicious. This podcast is a celebration of the joyful, flavorful, and the messy moments that happen in the kitchen and the garden.
Episode Transcript
Today we're going back to the beginning. And by that I mean we're going back to the messes. When I started my website, Andrea's Recipes, in 2005, it wasn't a blog. It was just a digital filing cabinet for family recipes while my husband and I were living between two states. It was basic hand-coded HTML, nothing pretty and definitely not searchable. It wasn't until I moved to WordPress that I realized people were actually visiting. I had comments, I had a blog, and once I had that epiphany, I knew I had to be honest. I am not a professional chef. I'm a home cook who sometimes needs to leave her type A personality at the kitchen door.
I decided to write my first official blog post, My Top ten Culinary Flops (So Far), which shares the true stories of my messiest adventures in the kitchen until that time. This was my comedic way of letting my readers know that I was not a trained culinary professional. My sense of adventure in the kitchen means that I have experimented with numerous flavors and ingredients. If I taste something that appeals to me, I'm likely to try making it at home. From artisan baking to a gourmet dinner, which sometimes means a mess or a complete change in dinner plans like making salad and sandwiches.
The Daring Baker Years
Let's start with the Daring Baker Years. In 2007, I joined the Daring Bakers. The goal was to learn techniques and have fun. But my first challenge, the strawberry mirror cake, felt more like a three day marathon. The good. It tasted amazing. The bad and the ugly. I had to make the genoise twice. My strawberry Bavarian cream was so chunky that the top of the cake looked like the lunar surface. I even had to disassemble the whole thing halfway through just to fix a structural error.
But I didn't give up. I learned that even a floury mess is a step toward mastery. The Daring Bakers was a wonderful group that I participated in for several years, and I learned so much from the members. There were numerous people like me, home cooks who were eager to learn, and pros who were willing to share what they knew. It was amazing, and I made many, many floury messes in my kitchen along the way. If you would like to read the full story of the strawberry mirror cake and more about the Daring Bakers, you can find it on andreasrecipes.com.
The Canning Conundrum
Next we have the canning conundrum. Do you like to make jams and jellies and preserve vegetables at home? My mother and grandmothers did, and they had shelves with jars full of summer and fall harvest that we would eat year round. While growing up, canning was a chore. I spent my summers snapping endless bushels of green beans on the floor with my sister, and I swore I'd never do it as an adult. But then our own garden exploded with peaches, grapes, tomatoes, and plums. We had all that produce and we needed a plan.
My biggest hurdle was estimating the head space in the jars. I'd overfill the jars just enough to prevent the lids from sealing properly, which meant starting the whole sticky process over. Now I know better. If it doesn't seal, it goes in a freezer container. I've learned to make lemonade from the lemons.
The Legendary Floor Cake
And now for the story of the legendary floor cake. Every family has a kitchen disaster that becomes legend. Ours happened on my husband's forty first birthday. It was a carrot cake. One layer came out perfectly, the second stuck to the pan. My mom offered to help with a trick she knew. She gripped the pan, gave it a firm shake, and then--pop. The cake flew out and landed squarely on the floor.
We stood there in stunned silence. But it was late. I was out of ingredients and the cake was almost intact. So I picked it up, blew on the pieces, and then used the cream cheese frosting like mortar to glue it back together. My husband didn't suspect a thing until we told him a year later on his forty second birthday.
I haven't dropped a cake recently. Well, not too recently. But yes, I have used toothpicks and bamboo skewers to hold layer cakes together because they do work very well. And there's nothing wrong with using some extra frosting for the same reason, especially if the frosting is very delicious.
Reflection
Looking back on my top ten culinary flops twenty years ago, I thought a failed recipe was a failed mission. I felt like I had to get it just right to earn my place at the stove and the oven. But twenty years and thousands of meals later, my perspective has shifted. I've realized that the perfect recipe is actually the one that teaches me something.
As an educator, I know that learning is in the struggle, and over the years I have embraced that in my kitchen. So if you're standing in your kitchen looking at a mess, don't throw in the towel just yet. Here's the modern day Andrea tip.
Ask yourself, can I make it work right now? Is it too sweet? Add a squeeze of lemon. Is it too salty? Add a bit of peeled potato to soak it up. Or maybe a splash of cream to mellow it out? Is it too mushy? Turn it into a puree or a soup topping.
The biggest lesson I've learned isn't how to avoid disasters, though that is quite helpful, I will say. It's how to lead a delicious life through them.
My Last Bite
My last bite for this week is this: a burnt dinner or a messy cake can be a great story in the making.
I hope you enjoyed this first episode of the Making Life Delicious podcast. Remember to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, may your garden be green and your kitchen disasters be few. Thanks for listening and let's make life delicious together.
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