Sometimes the best recipes appear as a result of stuffing up and creating a disaster that actually worked.
Many years ago, I was cooking up some chicken wings, reached up to the overhead shelf that the electric fry pan was sitting under on the bench, sprinkled some garlic powder on the chicken, then as I went to put it back I bumped the honey jar and it fell into the frying pan and the lid came off. I managed to rescue the jar before the plastic started to melt, but the chicken was now covered in almost a full jar of honey. DISASTER! Definitely not the recipe I was planning on. But I decided to not waste it and my brain when I asked it what goes with honey went straight to soy sauce, so I tossed in some soy sauce and let the chicken wings simmer away until cooked through. The end result was a very thick honey-soy-garlic sauce basted all over the extremely tender chicken wings. Everyone loved it and wanted me to cook it again, and again... it became a family favourite.
More recently I tried to make some lime and pineapple jam/marmalade that utterly refused to gel no matter what I did with it, and normally that would be seen as a disaster, but I decided oh well, lets see how this does as a syrup on pancakes - it worked! It's like a fruit version of maple syrup, and loved so much that the maple syrup has taken a back shelf to it.
What culinary disasters have you created that worked?
Many years ago, I was cooking up some chicken wings, reached up to the overhead shelf that the electric fry pan was sitting under on the bench, sprinkled some garlic powder on the chicken, then as I went to put it back I bumped the honey jar and it fell into the frying pan and the lid came off. I managed to rescue the jar before the plastic started to melt, but the chicken was now covered in almost a full jar of honey. DISASTER! Definitely not the recipe I was planning on. But I decided to not waste it and my brain when I asked it what goes with honey went straight to soy sauce, so I tossed in some soy sauce and let the chicken wings simmer away until cooked through. The end result was a very thick honey-soy-garlic sauce basted all over the extremely tender chicken wings. Everyone loved it and wanted me to cook it again, and again... it became a family favourite.
More recently I tried to make some lime and pineapple jam/marmalade that utterly refused to gel no matter what I did with it, and normally that would be seen as a disaster, but I decided oh well, lets see how this does as a syrup on pancakes - it worked! It's like a fruit version of maple syrup, and loved so much that the maple syrup has taken a back shelf to it.
What culinary disasters have you created that worked?
