I suck at cooking. Much like my ability to kill any plant in my possession, I also have the innate knowledge of how to ruin any dish, no matter how simple.
Would you like an example? OK then. This is a prime example, because out of all the types of cooking, baking is possibly the one I am worst at. I have grilling down. And I even usually remember to turn the gas off when I'm done! Even when I have a nail penetrating through my foot! But baking. Baking and I do not get along.
So, once upon a time, I decided to bake Joel a cake for his birthday. I spent the better part of a work day (old job, old job, would never do such a thing now) looking at recipes online and eating nothing but coffee and oatmeal, and all of a sudden my stomach started rumbling while I was reading the recipe for a Pumpkin Roll Cake. I don't really like pumpkin pie, so I don't know why a pumpkin cake sounded so good, but IT DID. I had to have it. Because everyone knows when you bake a cake for your boyfriend's birthday, it's really all about you.
I went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients for this pumpkin cake, which were pretty basic, because we already have most of the rudimentary baking ingredients, thanks to all my friends who moved away after college and left me with all their flour and sugar and corn starch. I love using things up, so that was one more reason why I was dead set on cooking this pumpkin cake, if it killed me. And it almost did.
The first problem I encountered was that the recipe called for the use of jelly roll pan. To this day, I still do not know what a jelly roll pan is, but at least now I know that if a recipe calls for something, and you have no idea what that something is, you should probably not make that recipe. It's a good rule. Sort of a derivative of the right hand test for books that the school librarian taught us in first grade: if you're not sure if the book is too hard for you, open it up to a random page, and if there are more words you don't know than there are fingers on your right hand, you should probably not read that book. I didn't listen to that rule, either. In fact, I read all 1000+ pages of The Yearling in something insane like 4th grade. Which is probably why deer are just about the only members of the great wide animal kingdom that I dislike.
Anyhoo, not knowing what a jelly roll pan was (and certainly not HAVING one) wasn't going to stop me, besides, I'd already bought a can of pumpkin. However, I did know from past experience that you should not attempt to bake something in a different size pan than what the recipe suggests. If you do, your brownies will turn out like pancakes, and your lasagna will be sad and thin-looking. Unfortunately, none of our many, many pans, were even the same size of the jelly roll pan that I was supposed to be using, but did not have. Things were starting to get tricky.
And here my memory also has blocked out some of the finer points of making a pumpkin roll cake. I do remember that involved making a delicious cream cheese-based frosting to go inside the roll, and also using a kitchen towel to roll up the cake, let it cool, and then roll it up again. A kitchen towel? Put that on my pumpkin cake and then roll the whole thing up? I'm all for cream cheese frosting, but I draw the line at putting towels in a cake. So I decided to scrap the whole rolling part and just make a layered pumpkin cake. And then returned the nemesis of the incorrectly sized pan.
Now, from the past brownie and lasagna experiences, I know that you can neither use a too-small pan (which will cause your baking time to be significantly longer and burn the bottom) nor a too-large pan (which will cause your brownies to be thin and hard as rocks). What do do? Well, being the culinary genius that I am, I decided the best solution would be to barricade off the superfluous portion of the pan, to "create," if you will, THE PERFECT PAN. I constructed my barricade of flatware wrapped in aluminum foil. It worked about as elegantly as you're imagining it would. Pretty, it was not. But nevertheless, it worked, and into the oven it all went.
There I was, pretending to be Susie Homemaker happily baking the afternoon away, when Joel came home from work and noticed, that in a frightening development, I appeared to be using the stove. "No! Don't look! It's a surprise!" I shouted, but he looked anyway, because he is no fun at all. He wondered why I might be baking a pan filled with orange goo and aluminum foil. "Well, fine, Now you've ruined the surprise," I told him. "I'm baking your a birthday cake. But we didn't have the right sized pan, so I blocked off some of this pan with silverware wrapped in aluminum foil. Great idea, huh??" I was totally expecting some praise for my ingenuity, or at least a measly "thank you, you are the best girlfriend in the world for baking me this lovely cake", but instead Joel pushed me out of the way, opened up the oven, threw my carefully constructed barricade in the sink, and proceeded to berate me for putting our wood-handled knives in the oven.
To be honest, I can see his point, but I still think he was being a little bit melodramatic. When's the last time you heard of someone's wood-handled knives catching fire in the oven? Exactly. And I"ll have you know, that I finished making that cake, AND we ate the entire thing. It was not pretty. It did not look anything like the picture they had online with the recipe. It was certainly not rolled. But it actually tasted pretty good.
**************************************************************
Now that you have that bit of background fresh in your mind, let me fast forward our scene approximately 2.5 years, to last night. After eating pizza for 5 meals in three days, I decided it was time to eat something with a little more... nutritional value. That something was catfish. Why catfish? Because it was in the freezer.
I have made catfish several times before, because Sam's Club is good enough to sell it in a large bag of boneless fillets. And if I do say so myself, it has come out quite well in the past. I bread it with an egg and some breadcrumbs, bake it up, and then serve it with my personal favorite: spinach sauteed in olive oil, both also from Sam's Club. Mmmm.
Last night, the catfish was not wholly defrosted. That did not stop me from cooking it. I just decided that to compensate I would allow the oven to completely preheat before putting the fish in (normally, I consider preheating unnecessary and a waste of time). I set the oven to 400 degrees, and went about sauteing my spinach and even cooking some rice, because I was feeling a little bit crazy and wanted to make a "well-balanced meal." When the oven beeped, I put the fish in, and left it alone. I did not even open the oven 20 times to see how it was doing. I waited until my rice was done, and THEN I checked on it. And to my surprise, it was not even close to being cooked. I realized that the package directions said broil, but I hate broiling, because I don't really know what it means, and all I know for sure is that the broiling pan is really hard to clean. I decided to compromise by turning the oven up as high as it could go (550 degrees, to be exact) and letting the fish cook for another 10 minutes.
Ten minutes later, I put on my sturdy oven mitt, took the dish out of the oven, and set it down on the marble countertop. Or, I should say, I was about to set it down, but as soon as the first corner of glass dish met the cold marble, it fell apart. Crack! And all the sides fell off.
If you ever get asked a trick question "is it possible to break a glass baking dish without even dropping it?" you will know the answer is an unequivocal YES YES YES it is possible, and in fact it is quite easy. I'm willing to give lessons for a reasonable fee if anyone's interested.
In case you're wondering, yes we did still eat the fish. Not eating the fish never even crossed my mind. I checked it somewhat carefully for pieces of glass, and determined that they all shot outwards and onto the floor, to become embedded in the cats' paws, do doubt. There was no glass in the fish. At least I didn't taste any.
