Once-is-Enough Kitchen Feats

[Opty]

Veal stock,although it should be simple and a basic. My wife and I tried it in a tiny New York kitchen without ventilation, every single dish,glass and everything else in the kitchen wound up being covered in a film from the evaporation.

I would also add trying to make fine chocalate covered candy, if you dont have the right tools and the right technique, your begging for several hours of mess and dissapointment.

Edited September 12, 2010 by Opty (log)

[Darienne]

Reading Chris Amirault's post this morning, in Food Foolishness: Why Make it When You can Buy it, brings me back to this thread.

I suppose there are some people who love to make their own pomegranate juice. I tried it once and thought...why bother? It didn't really taste any better than the store-bought stuff and was a lot of messy work.

[ScoopKW]

Reading Chris Amirault's post this morning, in Food Foolishness: Why Make it When You can Buy it, brings me back to this thread.

I suppose there are some people who love to make their own pomegranate juice. I tried it once and thought...why bother? It didn't really taste any better than the store-bought stuff and was a lot of messy work.

I'm one of those people. Why bother? Because our pomegranate bush provides us with two or three BUSHELS annually. It's either juice it or waste it.

That being said, I wouldn't go through the effort if I didn't have to.

[Darienne]

Hmmm. Well put. We have a lot of apple trees on our property and we make apple juice each year. ...well, the DH does...

[annabelle]

I once made a homemade gingerbread house when my children were very young and were going to "help" me. Never again.

[Marlene]

Just making Hollandaise is enough for me. Come to think of it, that's something I've only done once, and am not in a hurry to do again.

I swear by blender Hollandaise and Bearnaise. 15 seconds. It's done. Never ever ever breaks.

[andiesenji]

When I posted my earlier note about the bombe, I totally forgot the one thing that was more intense than that, took longer and required more help.

The Christmas I moved up here in 1988, I was challenged by a friend to prepare a traditional Polish poppy seed strudel from scratch.

This may not sound very complicated but preparing and stretching the dough to the correct thinness and the correct size (same as a twin bed sheet) was a major operation and took a significant amount of time.

It turned out okay but I vowed, "Never again!" Purchased filo dough has worked just as well for anything I had to prepare since then.

[plum tart]

The first time I made coulibiac it was winter and we lived in an industrial loft over a taxicab meter repair business. All day long you could hear cars driving into the garage below. The exhaust of waiting taxis polluted the outside air.

The kitchen in the loft was tiny - everything was tiny, stove, fridge, counter - there really wasn't a counter. I had to use my Quebec pine table to roll out dough. Also, I had a baby, about one year old. She was very busy.

Anyway, for some reason the recipe for coulibiac in the Time/Life Classic French Cooking book interested me and I was young and fooishly brave. I broke the recipe up into sections and spread the work over three days. - the rice, egg and herb mixture one day, the veloute and crepes another and the salmon and the dough, and final assembly on the last day.

Miracle of miracles, it worked out. It look like the picture in the book and it was sumptuously delicious. A foodie friend of my husband wept for joy. He had never eaten anything like it anywhere. If I hadn't already been married, he would have married me.

About 12 years later, in my present home with a good kitchen. I decided to invite friends for dinner and make coulibiac. I had done it before, I could do it again! I remember my success fondly. A cherished memory. I was on vacation, and would have the requisite three days.

This time however, it was summer. The first two days were fine - the rice, egg and herb mixture on day one; day two went well, the crepes and the veloute; but day three was hell - humid and hot, the salmon poached as it should have and was suitably pink and moist but the brioche dough was out of control, rising too quickly,overflowing the bowl, buttery slick, unmanageable. After considerable effort, I assembled the dish but this time, it did not look so gorgeous as the time life photograph did. Nor did it serve so neatly and beautifully. It sort of slithered all over the plates. Collapsed, it made for confused eating and messy plates.

Really it was not the kind of dish for a hot summer's day. It tasted good and it made excellent picnic fare at Stratford the next day (in the rain) but somehow coulibiac lost its magic for me. I have never made it again.

[Borgstrom]

Cooking a suckling pig at home. Entire house smelled piggy for a week, and had far too much piggy pig meat leftovers for far too long...

[Wholemeal Crank]

I suppose there are some people who love to make their own pomegranate juice. I tried it once and thought...why bother? It didn't really taste any better than the store-bought stuff and was a lot of messy work.

I find it pretty trivial to take a pomegranate, slice it in half, and put it in my citrus juicer. I have a reasonably heavy duty versionlike this, and it makes the juicing easy. I don't try for every last bit of juice.

I have an acquaintance who brings me fabulous pomegranates every year, and I juice them and make curd, jam, or simply drink the juice. Well worth a little trouble, although I probably wouldn't do it if they weren't free, or nearly free.

[plum tart]

The picture says it all!LOL.

[harrysnapperorgans]

Eggs Benedict, for 18 people, in a small, not very well equipped kitchen that was way too hot. The meal was beautiful though, and good friend and conversation.

[karlos]

For me, apple cider. My eight year old daughter and I were on a kick to make our own "basics" one weekend. We made our own butter, bread and apple cider. The cider made a substantial mess (we did the cheesecloth method as opposed to a press) and wasn't appreciably better than what I can get from Wegmans or local farm stands. And it was significantly more expensive than store bought as well. But it's a memory she and I will always share so it was worth doing once, but never again. The butter making and baking projects continue.

[Emily_R]

Sadly, Xiao Long Bao -- soup dumplings. I've tried twice now, starting with the whole making ultra gelatinous chicken stock by adding a piece of pig skin in, to making the filling and cutting the little squares of stock, to making the wrappers and wrestling to get filling and cube of stock in there, and then to steaming them only to find that... ARGH! All the soup leaked out! I've tried store bought wrappers and home made ones, with the same effect. I love love love soup dumplings, but I don't think I can go through the disappointment again.

[christine007]

I made the gataux of crepes (Spelling) from the second Julia Child's PBS series of cookbooks. Don't get me wrong, it was wonderful. But Blanching broccoli, matchstick carrots,slicing mushrooms, making the creamsauce, adding the cheese, making twenty four little crepes... needless to say,as good as it was, it was one of those things, took over an hour to prepare, another forty minutes to cook, and it was gone in the blink of an eye.