I once mixed up a batch of brownies from a recipe on a box of cocoa powder: Cocoa, flour, eggs, butter, baking soda, salt. It's lucky I let the kids taste the batter before I cooked it; after they were done making faces, one of them pointed out "These might be better with sugar."
In London for a while I had a roommate from Italy, not fluent in English, who one day took a frozen pizza and, following what he thought were the microwave instructions, put it in the microwave on high power for thirty minutes. The result was, to say the least, not edible.
For a while I was keeping a folder of recipe errors and corrections. (Then I realized I had more important things to do, like track down all the times Harry uses or tries to use the Cruciatus Curse -- what is it with that boy, anyway?) But here are a couple of favorites:
1. Last week's recipe for Superbowl Salsa should have called for two jalapeño peppers, not two cups of jalapeño peppers.
[Actually, I might like the two-cup version better...]
2. Do not follow the instructions for deworming your cat given in last week's Pets supplement, as this will cause the cat to die.
Yeah, the ones where you have to read them over and over remind me of those annoying assignments in school, where they purposely tried to trick you by telling you to read the whole thing first, and then throwing in some surprise at the end that negates the whole exercise or something. Both for assignments and for recipes it's unfair. There's only so much short-term memory the brain should be expected to hold.
Those are worthy of sending to Consumer Reports for their back page. Especially the "cat will die" one! Yikes.
The two cups of jalapenos reminds me of a time my sister made hummus for a high school project of some kind. She and my dad happened to be the only ones home that night, and neither of them was sure how much a "clove" of garlic was. So they decided it meant the whole head, just to be on the safe side. The resulting hummus, with its four heads of garlic, was, uh, garlicky.
In London for a while I had a roommate from Italy, not fluent in English, who one day took a frozen pizza and, following what he thought were the microwave instructions, put it in the microwave on high power for thirty minutes. The result was, to say the least, not edible.
For a while I was keeping a folder of recipe errors and corrections. (Then I realized I had more important things to do, like track down all the times Harry uses or tries to use the Cruciatus Curse -- what is it with that boy, anyway?) But here are a couple of favorites:
1. Last week's recipe for Superbowl Salsa should have called for two jalapeño peppers, not two cups of jalapeño peppers.
[Actually, I might like the two-cup version better...]
2. Do not follow the instructions for deworming your cat given in last week's Pets supplement, as this will cause the cat to die.
[NOW you tell me.]
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The two cups of jalapenos reminds me of a time my sister made hummus for a high school project of some kind. She and my dad happened to be the only ones home that night, and neither of them was sure how much a "clove" of garlic was. So they decided it meant the whole head, just to be on the safe side. The resulting hummus, with its four heads of garlic, was, uh, garlicky.
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