the worst thing i ever made
I love to post pictures of things I cook on Facebook. I know some people hate food pics, but honestly, I like to flex a little bit when I nail a yummy recipe. Most of the time, they taste as good as they look, and my latest catastrophe was no exception.
Not only did it have an unappealing color, texture, and smell, it tasted like globs of rubber floating in tepid swamp water – but with less flavor. Let me tell you what went wrong with my attempt to make curry coconut chicken over rice.
I admit that I have little experience cooking Asian food. I do have a fairly good chicken recipe that I make sometimes, and I can throw together some pretty good Asian meatballs, but their appeal comes mainly from a combination of honey, soy sauce, ginger, and garlic, which is kind of hard to screw up.
I have never made Thai food before, but I figured I could follow a recipe and it would at least be passable. The main appeal was that I had most of the ingredients already in my kitchen, so it felt like a no brainer.
The first big problem was that my husband is allergic to one of the main ingredients: fish sauce. I assumed it wouldn’t matter that much, so I wrote it off without concern. There were also a couple ingredients that seemed difficult to find, like Thai basil and lime leaves, so I dismissed them with the same nonchalance as the fish sauce.
If you’re not a seasoned cook (pun intended), let me just share with you that most of the ingredients in a recipe are pretty important. I probably felt comfortable dismissing them with such ease because I’m not familiar with them – kinda like chucking parts out of your car engine because you’re not sure exactly what they do.
Anyway, I made the damn thing with my limited ingredients, doing my best to follow the instructions as carefully as possible. It looked and smelled pretty normal, until I overcooked the broccoli and lost my will to live.
I tossed the inferior stuff into bowls and served it to my unwitting husband. We each took a bite and then looked at each other over our forks. It was terrible. Not just like, “Oh, this needs a little something” bad, but like inedible bad. Remember that scene in The Birdcage where they all take a bite of Agadore’s Sweet and Sour Peasant Stew and then immediately reach for the bread basket? It was totally like that.
Now, my husband is THE MOST supportive person in the Universe. He will literally eat anything I make with a smile on his face, but even he had a hard time choking this concoction down. He did say, “It’s not that bad! It just needs a little more flavor!” which was the understatement of the millennium.
When it came time to clean up, I asked him if we should even save it, and he proclaimed that we should, by all means, because he would valiantly eat it with some extra soy sauce and was sure it would be fine. I don’t think it will come as a surprise that 5 days later, it continues to stagnate in my biggest Pyrex storage dish and take up way too much real estate in my refrigerator. And it’s also started to separate into liquids and solids, making it look surprisingly like vomit, just for good measure.
Moral of the story: Teddey gets takeout Thai, and learns an important lesson about following directions.
(NOTE: Post picture is a stock image and highly aspirational.)
