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!

There are just some things you never tell a bride-to-be and her groom. Especially if you’re responsible for making their wedding cake and it’s not finished yet even though you’re just four hours away from the start of the ceremony. Oh, and to top it off, you’re lost in the middle of a major metropolitan city 45 miles away from said nuptial confection. Give or take a few miles.

It was literally hours before my friends Marvin and Sarah would be married in a beautiful ceremony overlooking the San Pedro Harbor, and I was somewhere near Slauson and Crenshaw in the slums of Los Angeles, looking for a Mr. Wisdom and his wheatgrass farm.

“Hello,” my frantic voice screamed into my cell phone. “Mr. Wisdom? I can’t find you. Are you sure you’re down here?”

“I am on Slauson near West,” he answered slowly. “In a pink house.” Looking around, I saw dogs running rampant on the sidewalks and the thick layer of trash that lined the gutters, but no pink house. I began to wonder if it really was “wheatgrass” I was buying, and not the other kind of “grass” that might be awesome at first but could possibly result in my arrest. (I promised myself that upon my arrest, my one and only phone call from jail would be to a bakery for a new wedding cake.)

I drove around some more and finally, a bright pink house emerged from the dilapidated rows of buildings. He exists! I parked in a red zone, stepped over some homeless people lining the sidewalk and pushed my way through a creaky screen door. After weaving my way through bedrooms and hallways (and feeling weird about walking through a complete stranger’s home), I found an older, distinguished man in a white linen suit. Dazed, he looked up from his newspaper and smiled slowly. Oh my God, I thought. I really did commit to buying a massive quantity of weed.

“Are you Mr. Wisdom?” I asked tentatively.
He smiled even wider. “I am he.”
“Great! I’m Cynthia, here to pick up the wheatgrass I ordered.” Please don’t hand me the contents of a Ziploc bag.

Mr. Wisdom took me behind his house to a shed surrounded by another batch of homeless people. “You know, I’ve been growing wheatgrass for more than 25 years,” he said, ignoring all of them. One of them looked at me, nodding his head knowingly as if he was listening to some internal lecture and needed to convey his understanding.

“I will help you carry,” he said to me. I nodded back.

Mr. Wisdom opened the rickety shed to reveal his pride and joy – rows and rows grass flats, tall, in bright shades of emerald green. Some glittered under the sunlight that managed to make its way through cracks in the roof.

I grabbed a flat and started walking toward my car with Orlando, the bobble-headed homeless man. After I thanked him and handed him some cash, he admitted to me that he had a drinking problem.

“Do not,” I instructed while pointing to the cash, “buy booze or drugs with this.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” he promised. He swore to his God that he wouldn’t, and as I got in my car, he rambled on about the bible.

Orlando was interesting and I kind of wished I had more time to listen to his stories, but I had to leave. I now had three hours, including drive time, to get home, finish the cake, pack everything into the car and drive to the wedding location, which was about an hour and two freeways away without traffic.

But, at least I had the wheatgrass. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

(more…)

We’ve all been though this. Moving, I mean.

I haven’t touched a stove in two weeks (unless you count the serious cleaning that was needed), mainly because I’m straddling between an apartment and a home of my very own. The new place is a condo that overlooks a small lake with ducks, lily pads and waterfalls. Inside my tiny, tiny space are cathedral ceilings and my very own kitchen pie window. I actually have a windowsill in which to sit pies. Heaven, anyone?

So while I heave and haul 28 years of my life into hand-me-down cardboard boxes, let’s spread a little link love, shall we? I haven’t poked around the blogosphere in awhile – and it looks like I’ve missed a lot. Regular posting should resume next week. Here goes:

• First, the heart-wrenching news we’ve all heard about Gourmet. It’s been a few days, but it still stings like rubbing alcohol in an open wound. I’m anxious to see what’s going to happen to food journalism in the near future, (and what next editor Ruth Reichl will touch with her golden hands) but man, what a low blow. And for the employees, too – who according to reports, got just a couple of days to pack up and leave. What happens now?
• Esquire mag has named Jose Andres’ The Bazaar as its Restaurant of the Year.
• Food Frenzy writes about a man who’s living off of nothing but grated cheddar cheese.
• Heart-of-gold blogger The Chickenless Kitchen makes Pineapple Citrus Tartlets with honey and gets creative with cutting pie dough (nice work!).
• There’s a neat muffin concept over at The Other Side of 50: Ham and cheese on rye. Big yum!
• I LOVE those super-awful supermarket brownie bites they sell in plastic tubs. These from Night Baking look so much more appetizing – so I may have found a new brownie to worship.
• It’s called the Sex Panther. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. But you can see it for yourself at This Is Why You’re Fat.
• One of my favorite blogs out there is Tea & Cookies. Our beloved Tea recently tackled Purslane.