Sometimes wrong is oh so right.
Friends, 2016 has been a miserable year. We need a little magic for 2017. Hannukah and Christmas coinciding is a good start. The bakeries of the Marais have a little extra help planned as well. So, in the twin spirits of food gone wrong and food gone right (sometimes a bit hard to tell apart), I wish you all a magique holiday season!
(And many thanks to my friend who took this photo!)
It’s almost Hallowe’en, and I am out of words. What cannot be pumpkin spiced? What has not been pumpkin spiced? Next October, I predict, supermarkets will replace all the food with one big vat of orange fluid flavoured with pumpkin spice. Customers will come by, take jugs of the stuff home to eat, or simply stick their faces right in it. The truly devoted will jump into the vat and stay there, orange and fragrant till their last breaths.
(Thanks to Sonja for this!)
Ah yes. I remember this part of Dante’s Inferno. Not the third circle — gluttony — but the sixth, heresy. It’s a little known fact that Farinata degli Uberti was condemned to eternal, fiery punishment due to his perverse use of pumpkin flour. You’ve been warned.
Thanks to Elan, for documenting his purgatorial shopping trip.
I’m not sure what’s worst about this box of pumpkin spice Cheerios. Is it that all foods in America are adulterated with pumpkin spice starting in August these days? The Starbucksification of every meal of the day? Or is it the fact that it would be really easy to make your own pumpkin spice breakfast cereal by just sprinkling some cinnamon and nutmeg on it before pouring the milk?
Oh, the humanity.
(Thank you, Christopher, for the photo.)
I hosted a belated Thanskgiving yesterday, my very first, and the first one in Germany. I had never made any of the basics before — cranberry sauce, turkey, stuffing, even gravy were all new to me. Some of the guests helped cook, and I allayed their worries by telling them that anything that didn’t turn out right could go on this blog.
They protested: but this dish wasn’t so bad, but that one was burnt but still good.
But that’s the point of foodgonewrong — mistakes are not disasters. They’re just part of cooking, and experimenting, and trying. And just about anything can be made palatable with gravy or ketchup. Or caramel sauce.
Today’s contribution comes from Jenny, who like me, celebrated Thanksgiving abroad. She and her husband made an American pie, but in a German oven. As you can tell, the edges got a bit… crisp.
But I would still totally eat that pie. And I’m betting you would too. It’s almost more beautiful for being ruined. You know that this pie was made at home, in a real home oven. The wrong oven, but you get the idea. It’s a pie made with love, and love sometimes comes burnt at the edges.
Have a picture of Food Gone Wrong? Any special Thanksgiving disasters? Submit!
You know that psych-test image where you look at it one way, and it’s a young woman with a slender neck, and you look at it another way, and it’s an old hag? And it’s supposed to tell you if you’re disturbed?
Do I really need to say anything more here?
Thanks to Bridget Lucas (and her genius husband) for this horrifying, but memorable, festive treat. And happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Have a picture of Food Gone Wrong? Submit!
Friends, it is almost Thanksgiving. A time for gratitude to the generous bounty that is America. A land of boundless inventiveness, where the human spirit leaps and soars, leaving behind the shackles of convention and what some might call “good taste.”
A land that gave us Maple Bacon frosting with bacon bits on top. Don’t believe me about the bacon bits?
Oh ye of little faith.
And thank you, also, to Elan Justice Pavlinich for his fine work in the field.
Have a picture of Food Gone Wrong? Submit!
