Meals that didn’t go as planned
Posted by Matt SamyciaWood on Monday, March 16th, 2009Tags for this Article: bunny dinner, not to plan, pear shaped, prosciutto
As a foodie I enjoy trying something new, sometimes veering away from a recipe or sometimes veering away from all reality to try something different and new. This often results in magical oral delights, but sometimes it fails, and when it fails, it fails BIG. There are also situations where you make every effort to have the meal be perfect, but the whole experience does not go to plan for reasons out of your control.
For example there was the time I cooked for Claire (my wife), it was our first date meal. Talk about pressure, I wanted to obviously impress her and make her something special. At the time she was training for the Ironman triathlon, so I went with a nice healthy salad. Mixed leaf lettuce, toasted pine nuts and to add a special element I went to Sanata Barbara Market on Commercial Drive and purchased some great prosciutto – which was rolled up and served with the salad. Growing up in Leeds in England we didn’t eat much salad (probably because it doesn’t taste great when deep fried) but when we did we always had rolled meat to accompany the salad.
Now this is where it all went pear shaped as my wife grew up with different cultural and culinary experiences (they grew their own food and butchered bunnies, my parents went to a supermarket). I am going to hand over to Claire at this point in the post and have her write her side of the ‘tale of the rolled meat’.
There I am in my boyfriend’s (now my husband) dining room awaiting this promised delicious meal. I had just finished a tough training session with some of my Ironman buddies and I was absolutely famished. I was really looking forward to having a big meal with lots of carbs to pick up my energy. In comes Matt with a beautifully decorated plate of salad. To my horror, however, there were these raw looking pieces of meat on top of my salad. Having never been served anything like that before I was clear that I was not going to eat the meat but I had no idea of the best/polite way of telling him this information. I was also trying to avoid my face showing absolute shock and disgust but unfortunately I was far too expressive for my own good.
Ahhh, my darling wife. After the initial disappointment of ‘that’ meal we have gone onto being happily married for many years (and I have vowed to never serve her meat on her salad again).
Please share your story of a meal that you screwed up or that didn’t go as you had origianlly planned.
I decided to cook my new boyfriend, a meat and potatoes English lad from Biggin ‘ill, my signature dish – chicken fajitas which I’d learned to make whilst in Mexico.
Turns out getting those same ingredients at the shop in Stratford (East London, where I was living at the time) was not as easy as the markets in Monterrey so I decided to make do with what I could. I hadn’t appreciated that the chili powder in the UK was a hell of a lot spicier than in Canada so I added some. Then accidentally spilled a lot more than anticipated into the dish.
He was far too polite to tell me he’d almost burned his tongue off. I made sure I always tasted the dish several times before I served after that ;)
The first time I served a meal as a newlywed to my father-in-law I ended the meal with a homemade lemon meringue pie. He took a bite, never said anything, and put his fork down. I took a bite of mine…and nearly fainted dead away! I had forgotten to add the sugar to the lemon. So I lifted off the meringue, scraped out the lemon part and put it back on the stove, added the sugar and remade the pie. Scariest part of this story is that I re-served it!!! He never forgot it. Neither did I. Tough on a new bride!