Failed my cooking check

[subplotkudzu]

 I figure a critical fail means you make something totally inedible but don't know it until you try to eat it. A regular failure goes like this:

1) look through cupboards for omlet pan for 5 minutes until wife reminds you that you moved it to the hanging pan rack 6 months ago. 
2) Get egg whites & cheese from fridge, cut off cheese for today's meal, return cheese block to fridge.
3) Put pan on stove to heat. Pour out suspiciously small amount of liquid from egg white container into pan. Learn egg whites froze due to placement in back of fridge. 
4) stubbornly rip open egg white container, drop frozen block onto pan to melt. 
5) realize you didn't spray down pan and eggs will stick. Pour eggs and egg ice into measuring cup, wipe down pan, spray pan. Return to heat.
6) pour eggs and egg ice back into pan. 
7) reach for knife to have something to move the egg ice around the pan to speed melting. Knife point under towel used to wipe down pan, so towel follows knife into pan and promptly absorbs all the melted egg whites. 
8) Curse. Give up on eggs. Turn off burner. Pour egg whites and ice down drain. Get english muffins for ham and cheese muffin instead. 
9) Get ham from fridge. Realize muffin box has fallen onto still-hot burner, melting plastic bag. Blessedly, it fell closed side down, so plastic not melted to muffins. 
10) Toast muffin, add cheese and ham, microwave to melt cheese. Eat quickly before anything else can go wrong.

In the end, it did produce a breakfast....

Comments

[daftnewt.livejournal.com]

Oh god - I'm SO glad this sort of thing doesn't happen only to me!

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Likewise.

Sometimes the dice are just against us....

[adoxograph.livejournal.com]

I can say, with practical knowledge, that a truly critical cooking fail involves a very distinctive "Fwoomph!" sound, which may or may not be muffled.

Critical fails do not, however, correlate to the smoke detector going off because that implies mine is still plugged in.

As a professional, crit fails are the only ones I'm allowed to have. However, I have a much wider range of things called "experiments".

Crit Fail Contagion

[mamasays01.livejournal.com]

I was reading your blog this morning when my smoke detector goes off. I walked into the kitchen to find my toaster oven on fire. I apparently Murphied any damage you might have had while toasting your muffin.

You're welcome. :/

[mneme]

*g*

I figure a skill challenge is a better model, most of the time, with successes and failures all the way through.

Certainly, for adventures like "Josh Bakes a Cake" (part 1. I've actually baked two cakes, both from scratch; I should do that again at some point) -- which involve bits like "spend 15 minutes calculating the actual measurements based on the in-book ratio for making baking flour and the cake recipe", "realize I used a square pan instead of a circular one and burned the bottom of the layers; spend 10 minutes scraping off the burned bits", "decide that the frosting doesn't have enough chocolate. Quadruple the amount of chocolate in the frosting", and "discover that the scraped layers don't have much resemblance to a cake, as they don't have much physical coherence. Cover with more frosting," "leave overnight in fridge" and "serve to party. Watch cake-like mound (now much more moist due to overnight stay in frosting) vanish".

Some successes, some failures, some very very close to a critical failure -- but overall, a success.

Re: Crit Fail Contagion

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry about that. Change your dice out quickly.