Massive Cooking Failure
So I know, I come off to people as though I think I’m some sort of Emril or Jamie Oliver. I love cooking, I cook all the time, blah, blah, blah… but let me recount last night’s dinner so you can point and laugh. The recipie in question was pretty simple. It’s just a sauteed chicken breast with a spice rub, covered with a green olive tapenade. I’ve made this recipie 4 or 5 times. It’s quick. It’s easy. It does not generally lead to respiratory failure. Ah, but last night…
I was pre-mixing the spices into a little dish, and I was being very careful, because last time I put on a little too much spice. So I’m actually measuring and I actually cut the recipe properly so that I would only have enough spice rub to cover the two chicken breasts I was making, rather than the 4 the recipe calls for.
Now a bit of background on my spices for some reason the last time I bought the two spices in question, cumin and cayenne pepper, I could only find cumin in a smallish bottle, and the cayenne in a gigantor one. This is kind of goofy, since I have enough pepper now to last me for years (even the most spicy food I make never calls for more than half a teaspoon), and the cumin is often used in recipes to the tune of 2 tablespoons. So you can probably see where this is going. Apparently I put in 3/4 of a tablespoon of cayenne pepper and 1/2 a teaspoon of cumin, because I just assumed the bigger bottle was the cumin (have I mentioned that I’d already fed Stella, given her a bath and put her to bed… I was tired).
I didn’t notice that anything was off until I started choking while trying to flip the chicken. It was like fire. I was coughing and could barely breath. The spice was being lifted into the air by the heat. I thought maybe this was because I’d used less olive oil than usual. Wrong. Somehow I got the food plated and Julie and I sat down to eat. She took one bite and immediately started gulping milk and eating bread. I took one bite and knew it was time for fast food. Julie was very hungry, and ended up taking another bite. The fire was horrible. It was like there was a sludge of pain going down the back of your throat. And the worst part was that it didn’t even taste good, so there was no reason to go on eating.
Man, what a horrible, simple mistake…
Comments
Jeff
2006-09-26T18:00:23.000Z
Dude… Central Market has a bulk foods section for a reason. You can buy your spices in little baggies a few tablespoons worth at a time. Definitely keeps things fresher if you’re buying pre-ground spices, that giant jar of cayenne will be so stale by the time work your way through it that you’ll need 2 tablespoons to get any heat out of it. Besides, I like my giant test tube spice rack. Helps keep the mad scientist vibe going in the kitchen.
mcoker (http://www.phat32.com)
2006-10-02T22:23:49.000Z
of this time an ex-girlfriend made some chicken enchiladas. She’d made them a dozen times, and they were so incredibly delicious. This time, I think she was in a hurry at the grocery store or something. Anyways, she pulled them out of the oven and took a bite of one while I was in the restroom and all I heard was crazy panting, then screaming… turns out she accidentally put like 6 little cans of jalapenos in the recipe instead of green peppers or something like that! I thought they were GREAT. And I took some to work, and a coworker said they were so good, he’d pay her to make him some more! Crazy how that works out sometimes.
Tim (http://www.loadedguntheory.com/blog/director/listblog/tim.html)
2006-10-03T16:29:05.000Z
The problem in this case was that the Cumin was supposed to give the chicken the taste. So rather than using a really hot pepper in place of a not so hot pepper, I basically eliminated all the taste of the chicken with my mistake also. A lot of cayenne pepper just tastes basically like you’re eating really hot dirt. Trust me, when Julie and I are hungry enough we’ll go through a gallon of milk with too-spicy food. This was not only spicy, but also tasted like ass.