That One Time I Tried To Make Instant Pudding…And Failed

Since I don’t intend to have a Video Cooking Adventure up until later tonight, I thought I might share one of my first cooking disasters with you. This, in my mind, pretty much sealed the deal for me to always have some sort of difficulty in the kitchen. I was still in school, though what age I’m not entirely sure. If I strain my brain hard enough, I think I can remember it being middle school. I did not cook at this time. My sensibilities were that I had parents, they knew how to cook, and my extent of knowledge on cooking was limited to a Home Economics class where we made granola and smoothies. Even so, cooking is really not the point of this particular memory. All I had to do was mix two things together and wait. And I failed.

My dad had asked me if I could stir up some pistachio pudding for him. I quickly found the box in the pantry and read the directions…sort of. I ripped open the package and poured the puce-colored powder into a bowl. Looking back at the directions, I read that I needed to add however many cups of COLD… I didn’t actually read the rest. In my head, the only thing I thought it could possibly mean was water. My rationality was this: on a package of cake or muffin mix or anything like that, I’d never seen anyone say to add cold milk. It just said “milk”. And no one ever asks for cold milk on any instructions! So why go to the trouble of bolding and underlining COLD on the package? Why not just write “milk” and be done with it? But water! Often times recipes call for HOT or COLD water. That made more sense.

And so, I added cold water to the pistachio pudding powder. Pushing it into the fridge to set, I waited in the living room, blindingly ignorant of the mistake I’d just made. When the requisite time had passed, I returned to the fridge and pulled out the bowl, expecting a shimmering chilled pistachio wonder. It was not to be. Instead, a liquid with the color and consistency of swamp water looked up at me. I asked my dad what I could have possibly done wrong and after we determined my mistake, he laughed and I felt like an absolute moron. He still tried to eat it, just so I wouldn’t feel so bad. But pistachio soup on top of vanilla ice cream really isn’t the same.

Never made that mistake again.

Nope.

~KSilva

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J-E-L-L-No…

COOKING ADVENTURE # 63: Strawberry Pie

(Thanks to Celena for the title suggestion!)

No, no. Wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess… You are wondering why the picture above is not of a strawberry pie! Good question. It’s because this Cooking Adventure turned into a disaster; kind of. Had the end result not come out to be something super sweet and incredibly delicious, I would have written the thing off entirely. It is true that the creations above appear to be some sort of strange cr-wierd-ssants… made with pie crust. Had the directions for this recipe been just a tad clearer, it might have come out okay. But they were not and I was left to fill in some blanks myself… which is most of the time just a bad, bad idea. Also, this recipe involved jello which, along with onions and flour, is a particularly nasty foe of mine in the culinary world. Why do you ask? Because I’ve had trouble making it before. Yes. Jello. It’s okay. I can hear you laughing from where I’m sitting. It’s okay, because you’re not technically laughing at me, you are laughing with me. I realize how pathetic it is not to be able to make jello. But I think I’ve learned my lesson this time, the key word of that sentence being “think.”