Lightning Round

It turns out butwesuckatcooking.com is available. Should I get it for the site? Does anyone care?

Ok, here comes a bunch of quick disasters from the last month, in increasing order of destruction:

1) Today, I tried to make Lime Butter Sauce to serve over salmon. It calls for making an emulsion. I've never made an emulsion before, but I've kind of sort of watched Amy do it a couple times. In my mind, making an emulsion always involved slowly dripping oil into a liquid while you were rapidly stirring it. I didn't really read the instructions very carefully on the lime butter sauce, but it involved using melted butter instead of oil. So I carefully dripped the melted butter into the lime juice as I stirred... disaster. Each bit of melted butter instantly solidified on contact with the cooler lime juice. Instead of a nice frothy emulsion, I got little blobs of butter covered in lime juice... it was kind of disgusting.

However, this isn't a true disaster, because I immediately tried the recipe again. This time I poured all the ingredients in at once and mixed like hell with an immersion blender. It turned out much better. Amy approved.

Not much of a disaster. How about...

2) I made an apple pie a few weeks ago. While some of you seem to hate peeling apples, I hate apple peels in my pie. But that wasn't the disaster... the disaster was not baking the pipe long enough so I was left with undercooked, crunchy apples in a soupy sauce.

Definitely not very tasty. But is that the best we can do? No!

3) I was making sweet potato fries. I had successfully made regular fries, sweet potato fries, and even donuts in the last month, so my kitchen ego was even more golden-deep-fried than usual. I had been frying in a big 8 quart pot, but I was making a smaller batch, so for some reason I dropped down to a 3 quart pot. Big mistake. I had my oil up to 375º, dropped in my fries, and immediately the oil started to boil over up and out of the pot.

At this point, I'm faced with a dilemma. The correct response would probably have been to immediately cover the pot and then turn off the gas burner. The correct response did not occur to me at the time. All I could think about was how all that hot oil boiling over the side of the pot was about to ignite from the big fat gas burner underneath. However, the knob for the gas was pretty much right next to the burner, so turning off the gas would involve me sticking my hand into the fiery, greasy maelstrom.

Screw it. I decided to cut the gas. Miraculously, I only got a few grease splatter burns on my hand and managed to avoid setting the kitchen on fire.

Moral of the story: if you are deep frying, use the biggest pot you have. Or maybe just go to Bojangles.