Cooking Disasters

I’ve been having a spate of cooking mishaps. Not all in a row, frequent enough so I’ve kept track and saved them up to tell you about them.

Sous Vide salmon

Cooking disaster number one: Hazelnut and Coriander Spiced Sous-Vide Salmon. This looked like a Good Idea at the time. No fishy smell! (Not that anybody in my family complained.) Just hot water and plastic bags and a thermometer! So someday, if I am out at a hot springs and I have no fire, but I have a fish and a plastic bag, I will know how to cook it.

I bought hazelnuts and roasted them. I ground them up with the coriander. That part smelled yummy. I was especially sold by the butter in the pan part, which you can see in the video.

My salmon, I guess, wasn’t the right thickness. It turned to an oatmeal like mush and disintegrated. It was completely disgusting. Not even the cat would touch it.

Yeah. No pics of that. Not that I didn’t think, “Ooooh, I should take a picture of this vomitous ruined meal for my blog and make people gag.” I did.

It’s easier to just bake the damn fish than to mess with hundreds (okay, half a dozen) gallon Zip-Loc bags. It only takes like 20 minutes to bake some salmon. My family loves this Marmalade-Dijon glaze, though Son won’t eat fruit and Cadillac hates marmalade. It just turns into a nice, sweet glaze.

Root Beer Cupcakes

Then, two weeks ago, I made Root Beer cupcakes. I’d found Lorann Root Beer Flavor and thought I’d put it into some vanilla frosting, over a vanilla cupcake, to make a quasi-root beer float.

It says in the Root Beer directions how hardcore this shit’s supposed to be. Use only a drop or two, it’s extremely strong, like it’ll overwhelm you.

I put in a couple drops, mixed, tasted, repeated. Repeated. Repeated. Repeated.

I used a bottle and a half, in just enough frosting to cover exactly 12 cupcakes. Which isn’t very much frosting, doncha know.

At that point, the frosting had just a mere hint of rootbeer, nothing major.

Le sigh.

The kids ate them. They were good, they just didn’t taste much like a root beer float. More like root beer aftertaste float.

Pork Shoulder

Last week, I bought a pork shoulder on sale at Vons. I froze it. On Thursday, I put it in the fridge to thaw, and on Saturday it was ready.

I put it in the Crock-Pot with some liquid and BBQ sauce to cook all day, to make pulled pork sandwiches, which I’ve done before.

When I began pulling it apart with two forks, I smelled something off. Inside the pork, by the bone, there was blue-green meat. It smelled awful. I guess it was on the inside of the meat someplace, so although I inspected the meat,  I couldn’t see it. It also did not smell off when I opened the package. Anyway, I didn’t know what it was, but I didn’t like the looks or smell so I threw the whole thing away, and we had leftover salmon (not the sous vide, regular baked salmon) from the previous night.