and.....again?!

One could say this has not been my month in the realm of all things baking and cooking..

Let me share with you my not-so-great moments in the kitchen. All of them having a unifying element: BURNIFICATION
*note this has all happened in the span of two weeks*

1) I had decided to make a dessert pie for girls night. The pie is comprised of a cookie crust, covered with ice cream and then topped with fudge, choc chips and butterscotch chips. Since I was making homemade pizza (and no, that did not burn) at the time (and the girls' arrival was fast approaching) I decided to bake the cookie dough in the over with the pizzas at a much higher temperature but for a shorter period of time. whelp, I wouldn't recommend doing that. When it came time to serve dessert, I tried cutting the pie with no avail. No matter how hard I pushed the knife back and forth, I made no progress. I ended up being able to lift out the entire pie from the cake pan it had been in to discover a blacker-than-pavement- brick on the bottom. It was ROCK solid. No joke. WE all laughed for a VERY long time about my mishap in the kitchen:) The girls were troopers and ate the top of the pie and top part of the cookie crust that hadn't been burnt. I wish I could've gotten a picture of the devotion and determination of the one and only Julie Harrison digging into the pie. She had to hold her spoon at the very base in order to get any of the good cookie haha

2) making cookies for a group of friends that had come over to hang out. Short and simply: put the cookies in the oven, went back out on the porch to hang out, COMPLETELY forgot about said cookies.....and they were left in the oven for far too long. Sadly, only 8 of the 20 cookies survived that fateful evening.

3) Now to the most RECENT of BURNIFICATION stories. Husband (a.k.a. Adam Bethany) loves HushPuppies. So I, as the loving and devoted wife, set out to make him some. Though the thought of heating 4 quarts of oil to 365deg did make me a tad bit nervous. Since I didn't have a cooking thermometer, I just set out to heat the oil until I thought it was hot enough (mind you I have NEVER fried anything at all either...not really a recipe for success). So after a few minutes, I decided to test it out and threw a ball of cornbread mix into the oil, it started fizzing (like I see it done on cooking shows) and I thought to myself "so far, so good" then the floating, bubbling ball proceeded to turn black in less than 20 seconds. First hush puppy: FAIL.

I continued to drop the balls of the cornmeal mixture into the oil. Some burned and others I actually got to look golden brown! Once all the batter was finished, I went outside to tell the guys (Husband and Andy Gooslby) the hush puppies were ready. Upon reentering the house, it was then that I saw the whole entire downstairs had been filled with THICK smoke. It was BAD. It wasn't before than that all the windows with screens were open and ceiling and box fans were blowing full speed. So, in a kitchen filled with smoke, the guys tried some of the not-burnt-to-a-crisp- hush puppies......welllllllllll, they ended up not being so great. They actually weren't even hush puppies. The middles were still soft and gooey, filled with uncooked batter since the oil was too high and burnt them before they even had a chance to cook all the way through.

HUSH PUPPIES: 1 WIFE RUTH: 0

On that night, those gooey, burnt balls of "goodness" were thereafter called GUSHPUPPIES.

Here are some documentations of that night:




"Gushpuppies"