When it comes to amateur cooking, we like to be assessed on our successes.  We don’t really like to talk about or publicise our failures.  The soufflé that doesn’t rise, the steak that rivals old boots in its toughness, the over-egged cake, and the soggy chips.   If our kitchen waste bins could talk, they would tell you how much stuff was quietly thrown in them.

Amateur cooks should in fact be assessed and rated like amateur golfers by being given a handicap score which indicates our overall weakness, instead of our occasional and sometimes serendipitous successes.

Speaking from personal experience, I have a ‘Mea Culpa’ to share so, here it is.  Often, not always, when I cook or bake something successfully, I take pictures of it, add it to my library, I gleefully invite anyone who happens to be within catching distance to try it, wait for the compliments to pour in and I lap it up.  For me that’s the joy of cooking/baking, to see and hear the delight of the eaters, hoping they mean what they say.

As luck would have it, every now and again, disaster strikes and I end up with a truly spectacular, inedible piece of rubbish, which brings me down to earth with a loud and painful thud.  The strange thing is that the disasters happen with stuff I had made in the past and feel confident I can re-produce with relative ease.  I guess, it must be this confidence, or perhaps over-confidence that leads me to lose discipline and focus.

I have had a lot of mini disasters, which could be smoothed over, covered up or discretely put away before they are inflicted on others.  But I’ve had a few epic disasters that sends my cooking handicap through the floor.  I wouldn’t want to admit to all of them, but I will relate two that stand out.

Mega Disaster-1: When we first met, Claire and I had a few dates where I claimed to be a ‘good cook’ so, it was inevitable that one day she would challenge me to prove my assertions.  We agreed on a dinner date for the following Saturday and I decided to oven cook a Kuftah tray.  This is one of those safe meals that you have to be really awful at to get wrong and plain stupid to require a recipe.  Basically, you have mincemeat (beef or lamb) mixed with finely chopped onions, garlic and parsley with salt and spices.  The kuftah is spread evenly in an oven tray.  For sauce, you either add tahini and lemon or tomato puree.  If you want to go all out and produce a more sophisticated version, you add potato slices, tomato quarters, and possibly aubergine slices, all arranged in a decorative manner to please the eye.  I went for all of the above with tahini and lemon sauce, adding a generous amount of white wine to the sauce, just for the hell of it.  I covered my masterpiece with silver foil, placed it in the oven on medium heat, and let the thing take care of itself for the a couple of hours.

Claire arrived at my tiny apartment and found the table was set, the wine was chilled, and the background music enhanced the mood.  Claire said she had been out all day shopping

and was starving.  The smell coming from the kitchen was inviting and enhanced her anticipation for the meal.  Every once in a while, I checked on the meal, tasted it and all was under control.  As a matter of fact, I wondered, and hoped, if I was in the process of creating the best version of this particular meal I ever produced.

Not being very imaginative with starters in those days, I played it safe and served the then fashionable prawn cocktail, which required little creativity except for the arrangement where I made an effort and served it in red wine glasses.

I finally felt the meal was ready, and Claire was certainly more than ready, I declared: okay, I think we are ready for the main course, I will be back in a couple of minutes. I went to the kitchen, turned the oven off, donned the oven gloves and stuck my hands inside to pull the hugely anticipated kuftah tray out of the oven.  That horizontal trip from inside the oven to being in the clear is no more than 50cm journey.  However, as I pulled the tray out, the back of my right hand caught the inside of the oven and it hurt so, I corrected (or over-corrected) by moving to the left and did the same to the back of my left hand.  By that time, the tray was all but completely clear of the oven door and with me in some considerable discomfort and unable to stop the tray from wobbling, the whole thing performed a 180-degree somersault and landed in a heap on the floor of the kitchen in front of the oven.

I froze on the spot, lost the basic ability to think, speak or comprehend what had just happened.  Claire heard the unusual noises emanating from the kitchen and ran in to witness her dinner nicely spread on the floor with an oven tray covering it for modesty purposes.  She looked at me, I continued to look at the handy work I had just created, and she said: never mind, let’s see what we can rescue here.  I neither had a mind to ‘never mind’ it, nor could I see any rescue possibility from this heap of now germ-laden meal.

When I finally recovered part of my faculty to think, most of my thoughts were around how long Claire would take before she ditched me; my optimistic estimate was in hours and the more pessimistic, was in the next 15 minutes.  I then attempted to create a fictional scenario that might appeal to her better nature and wondered if I just fell on the floor and went into a self-induced coma might give me some mitigation.  While I was going through all of that, Claire managed to salvage two plates of the food which was upper most in the heap and therefore a reasonable distance from the floor. She urged me to return to the table and join her in eating the main course, which I did.  We probably ate the meal, had dessert and drank more wine and then it was time for her to go home.  I have no idea as I was in another place that evening.  Needless to say, Claire forgave this infraction, but never forgotten it, we moved on and I inflicted upon her all manner of starters, main courses, dips, etc.  I was not always successful but none of them came close to that Saturday nightmare.

Mega Disaster-2: This disaster is really new and fresh in my mind, heart and soul.  It only happened in the last few days, but it was 3 days in the making.  Older and wiser? Give me a break!  When the culinary gods pick on you, they don’t care how old or experienced you are; they have the power and means to cut you down to size in the cruelest manner imaginable.  The most unfortunate thing about it is that the hungry victim on this occasion was also Claire!

If you are an average baker, making your own pizza dough should not be much of a challenge.  But, if you want to make an exceptional pizza dough, you have to go the extra mile.  I came across this recipe which requires making the pizza and proving it over three days.  Yes, THREE days.  I tried it a couple of times and it is true, the taste of the dough is much richer and more enjoyable.  As far as the topping is concerned, you can have what you like, I personally prefer Margarita anyway.  Staying with the theme of making exceptional pizza, the baking in an outside woodfired oven also adds to the yumminess of the pizza.  So, I invested in buying a pizza stone which fits perfectly in our BBQ set as well as the kitchen oven.  With patience, equipment and basic skills to mix the dough, I was confident I could produce an exceptional pizza.  Three days before the 75th VE Day celebrations, I started out on this pizza odyssey. The dough was mixed, placed in a clean bowl and stored in the fridge for 24 hours.  The following day the dough was brought out of the fridge and given plenty of time to adjust to room temperature.  The tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, peppers etc. were prepared and I was ready to shape the dough.  The BBQ had been lit an hour or so before- hand to make sure the stone was hot enough.

Pizza assembled, I opened the BBQ door, sprinkled a handful of semolina on the stone to make sure the pizza was able to slide easily over the surface.  There was a hint there for me to take note of, but I ignored it; the semolina instantaneously combusted with a flourish, something I had not seen happen before.  I carefully placed the pizza on the stone and shut the door, knowing it should not take more than 5 minutes for the pizza to cook.  The initial aroma coming out of the BBQ was very promising.  After 3 minutes I decided to check on it to see how things were going.  The top of the pizza was not quite golden or crispy enough so, I closed the door again and waited for three further minutes.

I opened the door for the last time, the top had begun to turn black in a couple of places but that’s to be expected.  However, the second hint that all was not well was noted and ignored, the initial inviting aroma I experienced a few minutes earlier had been replaced with a smell of a cremated skunk. Using two wide spatulas, I carried the cooked pizza out and placed on the wooden serving board, the friction noise between the spatulas and the bottom of the pizza was alarming.  I finally plucked the courage and looked at the base of the pizza.  It was completely black and in the least affected places, the scorch had travelled about 75% up the thickness of the pizza.  My heart sank and I constructed a vile and obscene sentence with only words like ‘what’, ‘the’ and ‘happened’ would be allowed on a porn site, the rest would be too rich and tasteless even for the most depraved of human beings.

As ever, Claire declared the situation ‘not being as bad as all that’ and proceeded to salvage what can be loosely described by a starving person as barely edible.  If she recovered 5% it was due to her generosity of spirit but to my amazement, she had a go and ate more than 5%, perhaps 7.5%.  I however, managed to consume 0.5%.  Thankfully, Claire had made a very nice salad, which came in handy that evening.

Do I feel stupid and embarrassed? Yes, I do!  Do I feel deflated and defeated?  Yes, I do!  Do I intend to try again?  You bet your last pizza I will try and try again.

Eat well and stay safe.

 

Mufid