Things I Was Wrong About Kitchen Edition

We wouldn’t want you to think we’re good at every thing we touch from the very first day. Actually I think that has been pretty well established already. But as further proof, we offer today’s episode. Today, we discussed just some of our many failings in the kitchen. It really was hard to narrow it down to just these. These were the winners or losers as the case may be. HAHA!

We hailed all the way back to the beginning of our marriages for this episode. We ate a lot of bad food in the early days. Thankfully we and our husbands saw potential in each other and stuck around through the burnt food.

We also talked about some cake fails, bread fails, jam fails and canning fails. Truly we laid is all bare here. If you want to feel better as a cook and as a person go ahead and give today’s episode a listen.

Did you think that was funny? Well have we got another episode for you. Click HERE to listen to Things I Was Wrong About: Parent Edition. You’ll feel better about your parenting after a listen.

How have you failed in the kitchen? Do tell! Don’t let us have all the failing fun. Head on over to one of our social media pages and tell us about it.

Do you have show idea for us? Send us an email to wifestylehustle@gmail.com

Music is by Oliver Massa. It is called Weekend Chores

Transcript

Ellyn (00:06.895)

This is a continuation of the things I was wrong about. Kitchen style. If you're looking for quality entertainment, you're on the right episode. If you're looking for something to help you grow as a person and learn something valuable, we have a lot of other episodes I'm sure you'll enjoy. Let's get started.

Lauren (00:26.03)

My first one is when I first got married. This is a kitchen fail, or cooking fail, and it's a little bit embarrassing, but I will try and get through it. I wanted to make beef stroganoff, and I didn't have the internet because I'm old, everyone didn't necessarily have the internet back then. It was definitely a thing, but it wasn't necessarily something everyone had and we hadn't gotten it yet. So I was just trying to figure it out from memory. We lived in Hawaii and the hours were off and I didn't think my mom would be available to call. So I just tried to figure it out. Like I remembered all the ingredients and I watched my mom make it a whole bunch of times. So I figured I could just get it. You know, I could figure it out. I got the ingredients together and made the food, but the color was still off. And finally I remembered it needed wine. I need to put wine in this. It was beef stroganoff, if I didn't already say that. I dropped everything and went to the store, and because I was newly married I didn’t realize I could have just sent my husband. There I was looking at the shelves and it wasn't the regular grocery store it was a gas station almost um shop at least that's what they call it in the military. They didn't have any wine so i looked but I didn't know that because i didn't have much experience shopping for alcohol either because I was young

Ellyn (02:40.857)

You just didn't know what you didn't know.

Lauren (02:45.27)

Finally I found some. And I got it and I brought it home and I put it in the beef stroganoff and it turned the right color. And you know, we moved on with our lives. My husband got a plate full and sat down and started eating and he's like, what did you put in this? It's good. I mean, it's good, but it tastes very alcoholic.

And I had put in Mad Dog 2020, which as anyone knows is not wine at all, but it's actually liquor.

Ellyn (03:25.551)

Hehehehe

Lauren (03:27.318)

And I, you know, I just didn't know. I didn't know that because I hadn't ever been exposed to that. And my husband explained to me that was not good for cooking.

Lauren (03:40.034)

But he ate it anyway and so did I and I was embarrassed and he's told this story over the years a couple of times to people and I've gotten used to it, you know, that I failed at one of my first meals that I made. But yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty awful. I thought it was nasty but he's like, it's still good. Well, eat it. I mean, he'd already had a few mouthfuls by then.

Ellyn (04:12.276)

He was in his 20s and you know, well, we'll eat anything when we're in our early 20s and live on alcohol alone already mostly. 

Lauren (04:21.875)

Right. Yeah.

Ellyn (04:26.839)

For my first one, I'm hailing back to my first year of marriage also. We had actually been married for a while. We were stationed in different places. I ended up getting out of the air force and moving to where my husband was in North Carolina. Our first year of marriage was actually our second year of marriage or close to it.  We ate some really bad food that whole year. That's my story. We ate bad food pretty much the entire year. And it just might, he didn't, Jason didn't know how to grill yet, so he was learning to grill. I was learning to cook in the house. And we both had, he didn't have a lot of cooking experience. I'm talking about Lauren and I, we both had a lot, some cooking experience leaving home, but it's not the same as cooking, you know, all the meals for yourself and not having the guidance of somebody to say, hey, you need salt or you should stop cooking that. That was done 10 minutes ago. We ate a lot of raw chicken. We ate some overcooked chicken. We also ate some burnt chicken.

Lauren (05:32.81)

Hahaha

Ellyn (05:54.679)

We had dry chicken. There's a learning curve to chicken. 

Lauren (05:57.358)

There is.

Ellyn 

Just there just is. And we ate some other bad food in between these bad chicken dishes. It just, it was not a good year for our insides. It was just bad.

Lauren (06:16.266)

I imagine it's kind of like that for a lot of couples, especially when you get married young, uh, you know, just figuring out how to cook together.

Ellyn (06:23.416)

Thank you.

Ellyn (06:28.651)

Yes, definitely.

Lauren (06:28.738)

Now I do pretty much all the cooking, Steve cooks sometimes, but you know, I don't have a job, so I do most of the cooking. But when we first got married, of course I had a full time job. So we split the cooking and you know, we both were learning how to do it.

Ellyn (06:41.943)

Hmm.

Ellyn (06:53.135)

Mm hmm. Yeah. And it's the same for us. And I can't say Jason did a whole lot of in the house cooking when we were first married, but he to this day, and I know Steve does too, did all the grilling. So we lived in North Carolina, summer was a lot longer then. So we ate a lot of grilled food that year. And most of it was bad.

Lauren (07:07.246)

Mm-hmm.

Lauren (07:18.938)

Yep, ours definitely was too. There's the grill and you know Steve actually did come to our marriage knowing how to cook some things but it was all indoor cooking. And the grill just like anything you know it's a thing an acquired ability and I don't think he had spent much time grilling his dad did that. So I guess that's something I need to think about with our kids.

Ellyn (07:32.063)

Mm-hmm.

Ellyn (07:39.02)

Definitely.

Lauren (07:47.53)

Making sure that they figure out how to use the grill too.

Ellyn (07:54.248)

Yep. We'll get there.

Lauren (07:55.826)

Yep. So my second one is a cake fail about

Lauren (08:03.678)

I don't know, probably about six or seven years ago, my oldest is nine, I decided that I loved my husband's mother's tradition of making her kids a cake every year. And she made a themed cake. Now I don't want to make this sound like she was building some kind of cake castle because she wasn't, most of the time what she did was she made a sheet cake and then drew pictures on it. She was artistic. So uh she'd draw pictures on it with frosting and you know it would be whatever the kids wanted which I thought was a really cute idea and not I mean when you do it like that it isn't a really big time commitment uh or

huge skill level either. It's just a cake made of love. With something that the kids like, you know, on it. And over the years, they took pictures of them all. They were always something the kids loved and that she loved to make. And I wanted to have that experience too. I loved the idea of it. So I bought myself some cake pans and the first year she was actually here and helped me make the cake so that cake was good. But the following year I made one on my own and I couldn't get it out of the pan. I guess it's best when you make a cake in like a round cake pan to put not only grease or butter or whatever it is you use as uh, grease in your pan, but also to put in some kind of parchment paper. And I didn't know that. And so I didn't put in parchment paper and the thing I couldn't get it out and it came out in pieces and I had to glue them back together with icing. And that's my big cake fail. I've had that happen more than once because I don't make cakes like every other day. So I forgot. And there have been times when it was so bad that I just had to throw it away and start over. I mean, I didn't throw it away because it was a perfectly good cake. I just put it in the freezer and we took out pieces and ate it between birthdays for dessert. But you know, I had to, I had to start over again.

Ellyn (10:45.015)

I need a little piece of cake. So my next one for my fail was a couple years ago. It was about this time of year, so early fall. And so for me in early fall, I'm like inside outside. I'm still dealing in the garden, but I've moved inside with some of my kitchen things, I've started baking bread again. It was a super busy day. And I stuck bread in the oven and then I went outside and I like, I'll remember, I'll come back in, you know, 15 minutes or 20 minutes and check that, which is a lie. I never do that. And it's silly of me to think that I'm going to do that this time, I should set an alarm. And I've gotten better after this incident. I have gotten a little bit better.

really try and set myself an alarm on my phone that I take with me. But this time I didn't. So I'm out picking beans or something, doing something in the garden. And I realized like 50 minutes later that I forgot and I come in the house and I, did you know that burnt bread smell is one of the hardest things to get out of your house?

It was like black billowing. It was so bad. And of course you open the oven and which is the last thing you should do. I go and if you have a fire in your oven, don't open it. Because it starves itself of oxygen. This is like a PSA. It starves itself of oxygen. It'll go out. But if you open the oven, you give it oxygen and

Lauren (12:22.114)

Really?

Ellyn (12:39.463)

make the fire bigger and worse. And so if you have, I didn't have a fire in my oven. We were only smoking at that point. It was bad. It was so bad. So I'll never do that again, she said.

Lauren (12:46.001)

I was gonna say...

Ellyn (13:22.207)

Another time, and this is along the same lines of trying to kill my family, I put hot or spicy peppers into a pan, thinking that I was going to just soften them up with a little bit of heat. And unfortunately, if you've never done this before, don't. It releases that capsaicin that's in the pepper out into the air and we were caught, we were all downstairs that time the whole family was and we were coughing so bad we thought we were going to die. It was so bad. So if you want to warm your peppers, don't or put something else in the pan first so that it's not just the pepper sitting in the pan. So you know, whatever your other sauce is, put it in your sauce so that it doesn't release that spiciness into the air. And don't be me. Don't try and kill your family with hot peppers. That was not a good idea.

Lauren (14:29.298)

Yep. So on a totally related note to that, a couple of years ago, no it was last year, I decided to make dried smoked pepper spice. And so I got it all dried out and it had been smoked and then I let it dry and then I put it in my blender and I had the blender inside, which is a mistake because little particles from the peppers like kind of float around. Like as you're grinding it up, they're minuscule, but apparently enough to kill you. And we, were coughing, like I was coughing so bad that I felt like I had lung damage from that. It was so awful.

Make a note, people. Not to, if you're gonna do that, take it outside to grind it up.

Ellyn (15:31.639)

Don't be us. See, this is an educational episode. We thought we were just gonna laugh at ourselves. No, this is education right here. Don't be us. Learn from our stupidity.

Lauren (15:48.314)

Yes, it's good, it's very good. That wasn't even my next one, that was just a side note on peppers. Be careful with peppers, they're dangerous.

Lauren (16:02.274)

So my next one is actually about canning. The worst thing a person who's canning can come across is your jars not sealing after you take them out of the pressure canner or water bath canner. And I had that happen so many times. And it's because I think it was because I was actually boiling my lids along with my jars. Before you do anything before you put your sauce or applesauce or you know whatever you're canning into the jars you're supposed to sterilize the jars in boiling water and I had been putting my lids in too. I thought it would  soften up the rubber and then they'll cling right on. No apparently that's not a good idea it's better not to do that with your lids.

Lauren (17:03.03)

So I stopped doing that and all my lids started sealing. Voila. Yay.

Ellyn (17:08.631)

Yay! We might eventually do a few canning episodes where we'll delve more deeply into canning. And if you are canning and wonder what to do with your lids, you just stick them in when you pull your jars out. The water isn't boiling anymore and that gives that rubber a little bit of a chance to soften, but not boiling hard, which as Lauren learned, will ruin your lids.

Lauren (17:37.887)

Yes.

Ellyn (17:40.807)

Speaking of canning, my next one is all about canning or not really canning, but more trying to kill myself with canning. Last week I did up 56 quarts of tomatoes and not even 10 minutes into that project, I was cutting up green pepper to put in my tomato sauce. And I was in a hurry because I knew how many tomatoes I had in front of me. And I cut off the tip of my thumb, which ruined my life for days. This is such a tender area that you touch on everything. I ended up finishing all of the tomatoes with just pain, so much pain. 

Lauren (18:13.323)

Ugh. It's awful.

Ellyn (18:38.571)

It doesn't hurt anymore, but now I wonder, what is it going to look like when it heels because really I cut off like I don't know I probably should have gone off to the hospital I probably a quarter inch off the tip of my thumb. will I have a print anymore could I rob a bank and I get caught that would be kind of cool.

Lauren (18:56.802)

Only if you only touch the money with your thumb.

Ellyn (19:07.007)

I don't know. But yes, that was my kitchen fail for my most recent kitchen fail. And it was really bad. I have this excruciating pain for 56 quarts of tomatoes.

Lauren (19:24.338)

I'm sure you put on a glove, but whenever you're doing tomatoes and you have a cut anywhere on your hands, it's like, ow, every time you do anything because it's acid in a wound.

Ellyn (19:28.756)

Yes, of course.

Lauren (19:42.578)

Well, it's happened to me many, many times that I thought I was making double the food so that we could have it another night, and it turns out I didn't. Or people liked the food more and I don't know, I'm kind of weak when it comes to my kind of scrawny children asking for more food. They eat. They eat all the time. Every single day. Kind of constantly, but they just stay so thin. So when one of them asks me, mom, can I have seconds? I just can't say no, they're hungry. And you know, sometimes the food is really good and maybe I didn't make quite enough. So that's happened to me a whole bunch of times when I thought it was, I thought it was going to be enough and then it just didn't end up being enough and I didn't have the courage to just deny everyone seconds.

Ellyn (20:48.215)

“Go sit in the corner!”

Lauren (20:49.734)

Exactly. “You can't have anything else.”

Ellyn (20:55.111)

And my last one, this was last year and I made probably 25 or 30 pints of jam last year. So I guess I shouldn't think that this is as big a fail as it was, but it felt really big because making jam is such a commitment, a time commitment. So when it doesn't act right or do what you thought it should, it's really disheartening. So I made peach jam last year and I still don't know what went wrong. But...it came out super thin and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. I mean thicker than water but thinner than jam should be and it made me so mad because, you know, I had an entire batch of jam that failed. I labeled the top of every jar failed peach jam. I was so mad. Still tastes good just thin. So it was a failure. Oh well.

Lauren (22:02.506)

I got some plum from you last year that the kids loved. Just want to say. It was so good.

Ellyn (22:08.141)

That was a good batch.

Lauren (22:32.642)

This episode does actually have a purpose and that is to remind you that no one's perfect. And I don't think we've ever said that we are. But I know it's implied a lot on the internet when you read a recipe that somebody wrote and you know you see their kitchen and it always looks perfectly clean and the item that they're trying to make that has no mistakes well that's not life that person failed probably three or four times before they took those pictures and put that recipe up on the internet.  What I want you guys to feel, and why we did this episode is that you can keep on trying. And whatever you do, it doesn't have to be perfect the first time, but if you try again, it probably will be. Ordinarily perfect. I've made beef stroganoff probably hundreds of times since then, and it has always come out better than that first time.

Lauren (23:34.37)

People make mistakes. Not everything in life is perfect. The purpose of this episode was for us to remember that. Until next time.