A Day of Cooking Fiascoes

It has been awhile since a day of cooking fiascoes, but yesterday was just one blooper after another. Here are some lessons learned.

Lesson 1: Do not use boiling water with yeast, the dough will not rise well. For breakfast I wanted to make Hoddeok (Korean Pancakes). It is our family favorite and I had made it many times before. The mistake I made is to pour just boiled water to my bowl and then mix in the yeast, salt, sugar, oil and flour. Even after waiting for 3 hours my dough ball raised just a tat, normally it is overflowing within 1 hour. Needless to say, we did not eat these for breakfast :(.

Lesson 2: Pouring too much oil into a shallow pan. Even though my dough did not rise as high as I wanted, I was still able to knead it and form hoddeoks. To fry them I used a flat and narrow cast iron pan, ideal for flipping pancakes. Prior to cooking I watched a youtube video on how haddocks are made in Korea. The video showed the delicious Haddocks street snack cooked in a lot more oil than I normally put in. Eager to try to make it more similar to its origin, I poured a lot more oil into my pan than usual. I got the crispiness that I wanted, but flipping was hard since my pancakes were just sliding all over the pan. With each turn the hot oil just splashed everything with its main target being me, OUCH!!!

Lesson 3: Never ever try to make butter out of Light Cream. My daughters had been begging to bake cookies. The recipe they wanted to try was on the back of an Eggnog carton. It called for 1 cup of butter. After checking my butter supply I was all out. No problem, I told the girls we’ll just make our own, watch how easy it is. After almost 2 hours of whipping, swirling with food processor  hand mixer and finally putting the liquid into a tightly sealed jars and vigorously having everyone in the family shake it, we were able to get a little under a cup. Normally when using heavy cream I get abundance of butter in just 5-6 minutes. This time I got abundance of dished to take care of. Oh and at the end I got “Mom, I think it would have been easier to just go out and buy butter”.

Lesson 4: Omitting or being short on primary ingredients. I had my daughter help me with reading off the ingredients from the Eggnog carton and get them ready for me whenever possible. After spooning the watery cookies batter onto a baking sheet few inches apart, the final product out of the oven was a very thin single cookie. “Hmmm” my daughter said innocently “Oh Mom wait! You did add 3 cups and then ¼ cups of flour right?” BLINK, BLINK, BLINK. The blunder came in when she mentioned 3/4^th cups of flour vs. 3 cups and then an additional ¼ cup. LOL, the purpose of my site is to help my girls not to end up with cooking fiascoes, not for them to help me make mine.

Lesson 5: When too many things go wrong in one day just order pizza!