Monday, September 17, 2007

My First Real Disaster

I'm embaressed and really angry at myself. I thought by now I'd know what flavors match and which ones don't. I thought that I'm a good enough self taught cook to not mess recipes up. Man, I was wrong. Friday night, I wanted to make dinner for Justyn because his birthday's coming up. *sigh* Where to begin?

The ingrediants I had were fine. The combination of them weren't. I marinated the beef with some fish sauce, sugar, rice wine and salt. Yeah, I added salt to a marinade that has fish sauce in it. What the hell was I thinking??

As the beef marinated I chopped up some onion, chili and garlic. I heated up some canola oil in the wok. If this recipe doesn't sound messed up to you, then you should ask yourself what happens when you add wet meat to a wok. Instead of making nice dark brown carmlized marks on the beef, everything boiled. Ugh... The smell was so bad that Justyn poked his head out of the office to see was going on. He said it stank. My food doesn't stink, WTF?


I wasn't defeated yet. Even though the beef reaked of fermented fish, I decided to use some beef stock to correct the flavors. Maybe thicken the sauce up with some cornstarch?

Nope, this dish was a major disappointment. Justyn didn't even want to eat it. The beef was tough, the sauce was nasty and it smelled bad. Booo....

Although I was majorly upset over this disaster, I'm not going to give up my favorite hobby, cooking. This stuff happens right? It's a good lesson learned. Don't marinate the beef, if you do, dry it before stir frying and don't use fish sauce as a marinade heh.

Yum, doesn't this look good? Haha...

6 comments:

KellytheCulinarian said...

We all have our little mistakes and mess ups. I've had more than the average person. It gets better.

JadedOne said...

KM - Yeah heh, now that I think about it, it's kinda funny. I should have known better, but yeah... hehe

Wandering Chopsticks said...

Were you trying to do my recipe lady? How'd you get it so wet? You poured in the marinade juices? It's just a quick beef wok-fry.

JadedOne said...

WC - I didn't want to say it because what I did was such a far bastardization of your recipe, but yeah.. heh.

I feel so ashamed. I did dump all the contents of the bag with beef and liquids into the wok. I'll make it up to you and do it right sometime next week ;)

Wandering Chopsticks said...

Haha! How did you get it so liquidy? Did you put the vinegar in the beef? You know it goes into the onions to soften and flavor them right? But then remove the onions without the vinegar when you're putting it on the salad.

If you don't like fish sauce, sub with soy sauce. But don't pour the marinade juices when you wok-fry it. There will be some beef juice from the cooking, but nowhere near that much. Good luck!

JadedOne said...

WC - Thanks for the advice, I will give this recipe another go and report back my (hopeful) success ;)