Blue Sauce, or Delia (and Daddy) make dinner

[pegkerr]

Fiona hasn't yet shown much interest in cooking, other than making an occasional batch of chocolate chip cookies. It's a family joke that she even has the ability to burn a salad (she made a salad once and set the mixing bowl it was in down on a burner on the stove, not realizing it was on.) Delia is much more interested in messing around in the kitchen. She decided she wanted to make dinner last night. She chose a couple recipes that her Girl Scout troop had made together for a supper for the troop's parents: sweet and sour chicken (except we substituted pork tenderloin since it'd been hanging around in our refrigerator and needed to be used up) and potstickers from scratch.

We never made it to karate last night. Rob and Delia worked on the dinner for about two hours. They made the classic mistake, starting the recipe without reading it through all the way first and realized too late that there was a stage where something had to sit a half hour.

Then, too, they had to improvise: the sweet and sour sauce is based on pineapple, but Fiona is allergic to pineapple; it gives her hives. So they decided to make a separate sauce for her based on pears. Trying to make sure that the sauces wouldn't get mixed up (which was really thoughtful of her) Delia decided just to put one drop of food coloring in Fiona's sauce. She chose blue, thinking there would be just a slight tint and -- wow. Just one drop turned the sauce neon blue. It was really funny. Fiona couldn't bring herself to put the sauce on her pork, and I couldn't quite blame her.

Rob got burned with hot oil. The dinner was finally on the table at about 8:45 p.m. The sweet and sour sauce had been sitting at that point for about an hour, and they'd used a titch too much cornstarch to thicken it, so it was more like sweet and sour gell. "I'm sorry it's so late," Delia said gloomily. But we ate it up, and it tasted pretty good. I brought some of the leftovers for my lunch today.

"Well, it's all part of the learning experience," I told her. "I remember the story I read in a job-hunting book once: a woman who hadn't worked outside the house in years went job hunting, and she was asked during an interview why, with her lack of experience, she thought she could work for the company.

"I can get the meat, the potatoes, and the vegetables on the table at the same time. That's management."

Comments

[mjryan.livejournal.com]

A favorite story of my mother's is when she and I were going to make M&M cookies. I dumped the bag of M&M's into the empty bowl and said, "What's next." Despite that, and many other misses (probably because of the misses),I've turned out to be a pretty good cook.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Which is why I suck as a cook; I can't manage such things very well.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Why is there no blue sweet and sour food?

[redbird]

Yes, that's management.

Three adults who have worked together before did not manage to get the sweet potatoes ready at anything like the same time as the turkey, rolls, glazed onions, and green beans. (Cranberry relish was easy to make ahead, and this year I put "take relish out of refrigerator" on the to-do list.) The tentative solution for next year is either no sweet potatoes, or a casserole that can go in the oven early and take care of itself at the end.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Blue sweet and sour sauce is the best accidental food I've heard of in a month.

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

"I can get the meat, the potatoes, and the vegetables on the table at the same time. That's management."

I don't think I've ever met anyone who managed software development that could make that claim...

[trogon.livejournal.com]

My worst cooking-disaster story was made far worse by errors in the recipe.

Last year at Christmas, my wife gave me a cookbook with a recipe for steamed fried Chinese pork buns, much like (we thought) those at our favorite dumpling house. We'd never made them before, but we're both good cooks, so we planned to make them a few days after Christmas, while we were still visiting my parents.

The day before we planned to make them, I came down with a nasty stomach bug that barred me from the kitchen.

My wife is a vegetarian, and not used to cooking with meat (we were planning to make two fillings, one vegetarian).

We'd never made the recipe before.

This would have disaster written all over it even WITHOUT the critical error in the recipe that had you steam the buns before frying rather than vice versa, very effectively gluing them to the (cast-iron) frying pans we were using. It took 20 minutes between each batch of buns for my dad to chisel the remnants out of the pan before starting another.

Supposedly they tasted all right, but it was a three-hour ordeal.

[eal.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Just the potstickers could take hours. I'm impressed that they did it in two hours (of course, it's also possible that my parents' recipe for potstickers truly belabors the point, if you know what I mean :)).

[skg.livejournal.com]

Hi, nice to meet you! ;o)

Managing the timing of my cooking is much easier than managing the timing of my offshore developers though...

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed. (I wonder, idly, if Delia and Rob would have eaten this if you had cooked it. You may have found an answer to some of your problems...)

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

That damn sure is management.