For Christmas last year Alex’s Mom gave me a recipe box filled with handwritten cards of Alex’s favorite dishes. As one might expect, its sat untouched on a pantry shelf for the last 9 months. It wasn’t until they made plans to visit over the weekend that I decided I should be an impressive and ambitious daughter-in-law. I would cook something! I would achieve mastery over one of her dessert recipes!
There are so many reasons why this was a terrible idea:
2. Our kitchen is the size of a box you could fill with books and still be able to carry up a flight of stairs.
3. The recipe was written on a small white card from 1999 and involved zero pictures and zero hand holding to get me through every step of the process.
Panic set in with Step One:
Combine 1 ½ cups of crushed oreos with ¼ stick of softened butter.
Let’s move beyond your correct assumption that I completely melted the butter and focus on how unhelpful it is to refer to the quantity of oreos in a post-crushed state. How many oreos does it take to create 1 ½ cups of crushed oreo? Seven? Seventeen? Seventeen packages?
This would be so much easier if I had at least four photos—taken from different angles by a camera that cost at least $2400—of the oreo-crushing process. But no.
Seeking to contain the mess as much as possible, I put a stack of Oreos in a zip lock bag and unceremoniously beat it with a rolling pin. Turns out this is a really great way to coat the inside of a ziplock bag with a thick crusty layer of oreo goo that refuses to evacuate– no matter how much you shake it like a polaroid picture.
Alex was trying to watch The Sports while I held the bag with my fingertips, haphazardly swiping at it with a pair of scissors while screaming at the top of my lungs.
“Pinterest would never do this to me!”
Forty-five recipe steps later– when every dish in my kitchen was dirty and the countertops were sprinkled with droplets of sweetened condensed milk, Oreo dust, and torn bits of plastic– I realized I didn’t even have the right dish to pour everything in.
I squinted at the cursive writing on the card.
“What’s a Spring Pan?”
I googled it and quickly realized that of all the various cookware I received at my wedding—and have thus far not touched—this was not one of them.
“No big deal,” Alex said, already sensing a meltdown, “You can just use a pie pan.”
For the rest of our lives “You can just use a pie pan” will be used in place of “oh dear lord all hope is lost.”
Nineteen hours later the kitchen timer went off and I went to inspect the fruits of my labor.
Whatever noise I made was enough to bring Alex to the kitchen.
“Maybe the pie pan was a bad idea.”
I hobbled away like a creature that knows it’s about to die and just needs to find a big enough hole to crawl into. Just then, Quirky Chrissy, a week shy of her nuptials, sent me a photo of her beautiful wedding dress. Unable to communicate on a basic human level, I responded with a photo of the abomination I had just removed from the oven.
“Looks like lightning cake,” she said.
This was supposed to be some sort of cheesecake. Instead, it looked like Tyrian Lannister’ face after The Battle of Blackwater.
Alex’s tiresome optimism was oppressive.
“It’ll still taste good, it doesn’t matter what it looks like.”
“It looks like a miniature replica of the San Andreas fault!”
Alex thought we should study it for educational purposes, to see what we could learn from the experience so as to avoid future heartache and calamity. I wanted to throw it away. In the pan. Then set the kitchen on fire. And develop a drug habit.
Instead, I lay in bed making wounded animal noises for the next two hours.
Alex tried to reassure me that it’s gravity-defying poofiness was falling as it cooled, but I was inconsolable.
In an effort to salvage an evening I could never get back, I came up with alternate uses for the failed cheesecake:
1. Bear Grylls could use it to demonstrate survival skills by rappelling deep into its treacherous crevasses.
2. We could put it on the front step to scare away trick-or-treaters: “We don’t carve pumpkins in the house, we carve cheesecakes. And children.”
3. A warning of what you do to the environment when you engage in fracking.
4. A model of what dry rot looks like when you don’t take care of your gums after having your wisdom teeth removed.
In the end, we did what any reasonable human would do when faced with such dire circumstances. We ate the center of it out with a spoon.
What’s your greatest cooking disaster? Have you ever failed to impress your in-laws? How else could we have re-purposed the doomed cheesecake?
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Maybe Alex should learn to cook.
That’s the best part– he does ALL the cooking. I only cook once a year for his birthday.
I once attempted to pass my husband’s ex wife’s cookies off as my own and gave them to my in laws as a gift. His ex wife also sent cookies. I was completely busted. It was the first time I met them. 21 years later and I still shudder at the thought.
Oh my gosh Michelle that is amazing. Totally shudder-inducing but you should write this story because that is just hilarious.
Wow. Someone who is a worse cook than me.
Your comment about dirtying every dish in the kitchen reminds me of the time a friend & I made dinner together. His assignment: make the Top Ramen, something every college student learns to do at one point or another. (Hint: read the instructions on the package.) Which he managed to do, after a fashion.
Later, when I was left with the duty of washing up, I was surprised to find that he managed to dirty every pot & pan I owed in making the Top Ramen. Even a few I have no idea how they could be used in an exercise that consists of (1) boil water in a pot; (2) throw the noodles in the boiling water (as well as any other items one might want to add — which is optional; (3) remove from heat after 3 minutes. (All explained in the instructions.)
Funny thing is that he considers himself a gourmet & a much better cook than I. And since I try to be a friend, I permit him to delude himself this is true.
Oh man– ramen takes me back! I used to eat this at a friend’s house in middle school. I used to think her parents were so cool for letting us boil water and drink as much Dr. Pepper as we wanted. I would die if I did that now.
You’ll make an even better impression if you ask her how to smoosh the oreos.
Actually I think I will just start asking everyone how to smooth oreos. Seems like a good ice breaker.
You actually escaped further disaster but you don’t know it: if you had had that springform pan, chances are, you wouldn’t have known to put a cookie sheet on the rack below the springform — to catch the butter that inevitably seeps out. The recipes always forget to tell you that part. So, not only would your kitchen *look* like a tornado had hit, it would *smell* like you had also managed to start a stove fire despite the high winds.
My first attempt at grandma’s shortbread, which is about the most simple cookie recipe you could ever hope to find, resulted in flavorless grey hockey pucks. I didn’t try again for at least 8 years.
And I once baked a simple, 2-layer chocolate birthday cake that for some reason cracked down the middle after applying a shiny layer of ganache-style frosting. We forever after referred to that one as the butt-crack cake. It was delicious.
Meatloaf? Another deceptively simple concoction in most folk’s arsenal of “easy” meal ideas, and it totally eludes me. I’ve tried, and failed, so many times that I’ve given up. I don’t mean failed as in, it was crumbly or dry or too greasy. I mean failed as in so bad that there was no way anyone could eat more than one bite. Nothing to be done with it but toss it in the trash. I mean, who fails at meatloaf?!
What!!! No it absolutely did not include this warning! Jsoanagsikqkpzohbakis I feel so cheated, thank goodness I have you.
I will also wait 8 years before I try again…
Traci! Try my moms secret recipe for meatloaf! It’s on the Quaker oatmeal box. Or tube/barrel. Use v8, and add green pepper.
I have perfect in-laws (well, only one is left, but still). they were always helpful and never intrusive. Perhaps more relevant to your story is the fact that I’m a great cook, my MIL not.
Great cook that I am, I once made a Martha-Stewart picture perfect strawberry shortcake. We broke a butcher knife trying (and failing) to cut it. Everybody screws up in cooking. The disasters make the best stories so they are worth doing repeatedly.
Ha! Breaking the butcher knife. Incredible.
I have a very serious problem with not doing things I know I am bad at. Cooking is one of them.
I do have to say– Alex’s family is wonderful. So wonderful they confuse me: No one is in a feud? No one has a secret identity? Why aren’t we talking about sex or politics?
I bake many things. All the time. I am often left with a week’s worth of baking to do in only one or two days, because I feed people so that they will love me – let’s not analyze my issues, we don’t have that kind of time – so I’m in a position here to help you. And, fortunately for you, I like you enough to do it. Are you ready?
Send. Him. Out.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve discovered that I didn’t have what I needed after I’d already started a recipe, and when that happens, I shout for my husband and send him out to get whatever it is. He does not like this, but since he does like eating the things (and getting the kitchen back when I’m done littering it with mixing bowls and pans and basically every stirring implement ever invented) he heaves a great big sigh and, while tying his shoes, asks me to check what else I will need so that he only has to make one of these trips today.
Okay so this is crazy because it didn’t even occur to me to just run to Target and buy a Spring Pan. I mean come on here– I have the Red Debit Card I could have saved FIVE PERCENT.
I think my agoraphobia is really starting to affect me.
So, you didn’t say how it tasted when you ate the middle with the spoon. It looks pretty yum to me. Anything with chocolate chips calls me name.
In my memoir anthology, one of my short stories is dedicated to how I didn’t know how to cook when I got married. Here’s the kicker, I’m Italian and raised in a household where everything was made from scratch, especially pasta and sauce. Pasta! After I got married, I had to call my mom from my tiny apartment and ask her how to tell when WATER WAS BOILING so I could throw the store bought spaghetti into it. Yes, I was THAT bad.
However, I wanted to learn how to cook because I DO enjoy it. Must be the Italian in me. I did eventually get my cooking groove on. The story is titled Hope Lies in Meatballs, and it’s in my anthology called Home Avenue if you want to check it out on Amazon.
There are a few unnerving similarities between me and my father (besides the obvious <-- joke in poor taste) and one of them is that he only ever cooked desserts. I love baking cakes, cookies, all of that! But I'm not so sure cheesecake is in the cards for me... The only pasta I have ever made is the little store bought tortellini. ACCOMPLISHMENTS. I've never called for boiling water but I did used to have a weekly text session with a sister in law because I can NEVER find anything at the grocery store. Sliced olives? Where? What?
I did..it’s actually in the anthology Mom For The Holidays. haha
Oh, nice!!!!
Things don’t always look like you think they’re supposed to when you finish them. That does not, in fact, make them bad. Having been trained on the job to be a dinner cook, I could go on all day about the first-try failures I have perpetrated. Puff pastry? Pfffttt! Bechamel sauce? You mean it’s not supposed to resemble grainy, coagulated eggnog?
I seem to remember Briana having a failed cheese cake story, something about evaporated milk being different from condensed milk, but I wasn’t around for that one, so I can’t be sure…
I like to cook, and I’m fairly good at it. But frying, especially chicken, makes me feel like I need a shower afterwards. Don’t let those bastard recipes get you down. 🙂
I grew up with a mom and grandmother that cooked well so thought it would be easy. I baked as a kid and teen pretty well (basic cakes and cookies) but cooked few things and not so well–like when I added sage to chili because I knew my Dad loved sage dressing at Thanksgiving so sage in chili would make him happy, right? Skip a few years to my first home when I became ambitious to give dinner parties. Suffice to say that it took me years to be able to coordinate everything being ready at one time, and to this day my husband usually has to remind me to take the rolls out of the oven before they burn. Oh, I am known as a good cook–but still keep a jar of peanut butter around in case all fails and I have to feed my guests something! My trick is to have one course that is a sure thing so that the other new recipes I try can bomb yet I know we will eat one good thing.
Do they not sell boxes of Oreo crumbs in your neck of the woods? Because those things are a godsend, Pure pre-crushed make-your-life-easy heaven, they are.
Also enjoyable to snack on by the spoonful while waiting for things to cook/bake/crackle into cheesecake hellfire. I mean…uh, of course I don’t just eat Oreo crumbs with a spoon over the stove. Repeatedly. No sir, not me.
Recipes can be so vague. I was following one that said to add a shot of Tabasco sauce. So I got out a shot glass, filled it to the brim with Tabasco sauce and added it to the dish. It should have said to add a dash of Tabasco. I don’t have any dash glasses. I think we ended up ordering a pizza that night.
So here’s the thing: I can sorta cook. I have friends who could effectively argue for both sides of that. I can follow a recipe. What I cannot do is improvise. “Hey! We are out of basil! Ok, what else is green?”
So….like oreo cheesecake fondue? 😉
well, my former sister-in-law one mae a challenging russian cheesecake that took her all day to make and then her cat climbed on it and peed on it for some reason and she scraped it off and still served it to her boyfriend. does this count?
Was your brother the boyfriend? Because if so, that would explain why she’s your FORMER sister-in-law! (Thanks for the huge laugh.)
it’s like one of those crazy logic puzzles. ) it was my future ex-husband’s sister, serving it to her future ex-boyfriend. )
My friend and I gave her boyfriend food poisoning with undercooked hamburgers when we were about seventeen. He turned out to be a total nutcase so I don’t feel bad. I
Rule of cooking/baking 1: Never apologise, never explain
Next – do NOT tell M-i-L that this was an attempt at one of her recipes.
Serve with aplomb saying “wow – even though I say this myself – this has turned out brilliantly”
Rule of long and happy marriage – who gives a flying f**k what the M-i-L thinks anyway.
I’d try to reassure you here but I think we’d both see through that. Just remember: you’re smart, you’re pretty, you write very well, and you have a great sense of humor. They have bakeries for a reason.
I just choked on my celery. Hahahahaha! Thank you for this!
I am still laughing about this comment. A shot of tabasco. That is great!
Not entirely sure how I missed this post buuuuuutttt I REMEMBER THAT CAKE. I still would have eaten it. 🙂
According to my mom, not making pie crust from scratch makes my delicious pumpkin pies a failure. Thankfully, the pies still impress my in-laws, I think the only thing I do that impresses them!
I’ve definitely seen worse, if that’s any consolation! And BONUS: The kitchen didn’t burn down! Really…that’s a win….. You win!!!!
Ramen is still a staple in my house…
Ha! I see it at Walmart every so often and I am MIGHTILY tempted…