Did you have a nice Thanksgiving? I did! We went to my parents’ house for a few days and had a great time. Since O’s food allergy diagnosis I end up doing the bulk of the meal planning and a lot of the cooking to make sure that things are safe for him. And wow, do I appreciate all those years my mom did it all on her own and we just showed up when it was time to eat! It’s a lot of work! At this point I have my favorite dishes, a vegetarian stuffing with apples and craisins, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with chipotle (which we didn’t make this year and I missed!).
And while almost everything turned out great, we did have a few hilarious failures that I wanted to share to show you, hey, nothing’s perfect! First up, as I was making an apple crisp, my mom said, “Oh! I wish we had some of that caramel sauce you talked about on your blog!” And then we decided, hey, we might as well make some! I’ve made caramel before, it’s not that hard!
And you’d think I would know by now that whenever you think something’s going to be a piece of cake, that’s when it becomes a disaster. So my mom googled a recipe for salted caramel sauce and we started making it. My first warning flag should have been when the recipe didn’t have any water and just told you to melt the sugar in a pan on the stove. I’ve never made it that way but who am I to judge, I just trusted the blogger’s recipe. I’m sure it COULD be done that way but we just kept stirring and stirring while the sugar clumped up and some of the crystals browned unevenly. But eventually it all melted, got to the right temperature on the candy thermometer and it was time to add the butter. If you’ve ever made caramel before, you know that it kind of foams up when you add butter and you have to whisk while that happens to incorporate everything.
Well, I added the butter, the caramel foamed up, I whisked and whisked and whisked and the melted butter just sat on the top. The next thing I knew, in the blink of an eye, the caramel turned rock solid. I mean, it was so hard my mom spent like 20 minutes chipping it out of the pan with a wooden spoon. So yeah. That was fail #1. Could have been temperature, could have been time, could have been angry caramel gods…who knows. But the next attempt (a new recipe which did include water!) went much better and we ended up with delicious salted caramel sauce.
The next fail was when, after a full day of pre-cooking on wednesday, my mom and I decided we should have margaritas. We definitely earned them. So we put Aa to work making them. My mom had some margarita mix in the cupboard and all the other ingredients and he put it all in the blender, blended it up, salted the rims of some glasses and poured the drinks in, and in about 1 minuted, they turned gray. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen and I’m not sure if this picture accurately captures it. It was like a grayish blue color and the liquid separated from the ice almost right away. The only thing I can think to compare it to was that it looked EXACTLY like dirty dish water with foamy soap scum on top. So weird!
The next batch turned out normal (we went with on the rocks instead of blended this time) so we’re still not sure exactly what happened.
And our final Thanksgiving fail wasn’t mine but my brother’s. He and his girlfriend were in charge of the mashed potatoes, among other things. And when they arrived, T, my brother’s girlfriend, told us the story of how she always always buys plain yogurt, never flavored and so, when making the potatoes, when my brother decided to add some yogurt (good idea!), he grabbed it out of the fridge, stirred it in the potatoes and THEN noticed that it was french vanilla!!! Apparently they’d been mixed up at the store and she had accidentally bought vanilla. And N, thinking they never ever had flavors didn’t even think to check when he added it (totally understandable!) Luckily, you couldn’t taste it at all. I think I may have gotten a little whiff while I was reheating them but they tasted delicious. So maybe french vanilla yogurt is a new mashed potato secret ingredient?? Should I blog a recipe?
Anyway, Thanksgiving was lovely, the rest of the meal turned out perfect, and we all had some good laughs about our Thanksgiving failures. How was your Thanksgiving?
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