At a homecoming dance my freshman year of high school, I belted out the lyrics to the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover of the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster.” It went something like this:

• “At the bus stop/of lo-o-ove
• At the bus stop/whoo-ooh-ooh!”

It wasn’t until years later that I realized my enthusiastic warbling of those lyrics was totally wrong. (For those who haven’t heard the song, the real lyrics are “Rollercoaster/of lo-o-ove.”) Luckily, I’m not alone in my public embarrassment.

There’s this site called Kiss This Guy, which houses thousands of other unfortunate misheard songs and lyrics. (And lo, I wasn’t the only one singing about a bus stop.) Between page clicks and our tears of laughter, my bf and I noticed a trend: Many of the misheard lyrics were about food. For example, Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” is turned into a heartfelt love song about everyone’s favorite meat candy:

• “Bebo, loves bacon/
• Bebo, loves bacon”

Real lyrics:

• “Viva, Las Vegas/
• Viva, Las Vegas”

So who’s Bebo?

(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more of my favorites.) (more…)

You know what I like about Thomas Keller’s recipes (aside from everything)? His simplicity. Yeah, he’s got intricate recipes with ingredients not readily available to many home cooks, but when he gets the chance to be simple, he’s good at it. Especially when we’re talking about recipe titles.

For the most part, Keller takes a no-frills approach when naming his recipes. His brownie recipe from ad hoc at home is simply titled “brownies” — minus any capitalization and all the other things you can add to a title (i.e., “double chocolate brownies” or “best brownies in the whole freaking world”). Things many of us do to try and make our recipes stand out from the rest of the pack. He doesn’t need all that.

ad hoc at home, Keller’s latest installment, is by far my favorite.  It’s also the first Keller book that I’ve seriously cooked from, unless you count the time I made Bouchon’s onion soup. Though fantastic, it came at a steep price: Cooking the required 8 pounds of onions for 4 hours made my tiny apartment smell like I had a Funyun party the night before. With each passing day the intensity of the onion scent diminished, but the actual scent got worse. It went from smelling like sweet caramelized onions to the inside the mouth of a halitosis sufferer. But I’d spend another 4 hours of my life stirring a stock pot full of onions for that rich, buttery onion soup.

The wafting aroma of baking brownies is much easier to stomach than that of 8 pounds of slow-cooked onions. And in winter, a house smelling of chocolate and warmed by an oven is one of life’s pleasures. A simple pleasure, just like Keller’s brownies. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe.)

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Thank you all for entering this little contest here. To recap, entrants had commented on this post about their worst cooking disasters — and there were some doozies for sure!

The grand prize winner receives a personalized painting from the talented Lisa Orgler. Three random winners will each receive 8 ounces of Chuao Chocolatier’s cacao powder for baking.

So without further ado, the grand prize winner is:

MEFX, who suffered continuously while making pies. In her words:

“Crazy holiday baking story? I’m in my third year of law school, and it’s the first time I’m not going home for Thanksgiving. A group of friends is getting together to share the holiday meal and play an ever-raucous game of mafia. (Don’t you wish you were a fly on the wall during those games?) I volunteered to bring the desserts – pumpkin pie and apple cobbler. I had previously mastered the distinct parts of these recipes, but had never put them together…made the pumpkin filling, but w/ a frozen crust…made the crust myself, but w/ a different pie filling…etc. So the night before comes and do I ever have a plan. 1) make pie crust, 2) make pie filling, 3) finish pumpkin pie, 4) while pumpkin pie in oven, prep cobbler crust and filling, 5) bake apple cobbler, and 6) attain sense of achievement.

“Best laid plans or something like that. My lovely, flaky pie crust shrinks to 1/2 its original size in the oven. So I start over and make another pie crust, doubling the recipe and using all of it. Even with so much extra, the crust shrinks again, but less this time. And at 12:30 am, I remove from the oven a sub-par, but still delicious pumpkin pie. I finally get the cobbler into the oven, and it’s worth loosing sleep to have one presentable dessert to bring.

“No such luck. On the drive over to my friend’s place, a car in front of me stopped short, and I followed suit. Guess whose pumpkin pie flew off the back seat and landed in the cobbler? Mine. So I show up with two imperfect but salvageable desserts. I have such great friends; they didn’t care, and I carefully reconstructed the desserts.

“When dinner was over, I pulled the pumpkin pie out of the fridge and set it on a burner on the stove and put the cobbler next to it. “I’ll warm the pie up,” I thought and turned on the burner. About 5 minutes later, somebody smelled smoke, and it was my lovely pumpkin pie. Rushing to remove it from the burner, I merely touched it, and the pyrex baking dish blew up and shattered, sending shards of glass, bits of pie crust, and globs of pie filling everywhere, including into the cobbler. Love’s labor lost.

“After cleaning the kitchen, we searched out ice cream and cake and discussed the liquid qualities of glass in its ability to expand and contract. And then the townspeople killed me in mafia.

“ps – I have still not solved the mystery of the shrinking crust.”

Man. Shrinking crusts, burning pies and shattered glass is almost more than a person should bear in a single day. Maybe this win for her epic story is the silver lining?

The three random winners were chosen by using randomizer.org. Each comment was assigned a number and the computer chose three. The winners are:  Kristin(2), Susan Wozniak-Hakim and Claudia Davis! You’ll all receive an e-mail from me later today.

Please visit this post to read all of the wonderful (and cringeworthy) cooking disasters. They sure kept me entertained!

And stay tuned for tomorrow’s post: Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc brownies. Thank you for reading!