A Hilarious Story of a Kitchen Mishap

I read about a contest that Food Nerd was having on a post by my new favorite food photographer Adventures in Shaw. They both have lots of yummy sounding recipes. Anyway, the purpose of the contest is to disclose your most outrageous kitchen disaster. I, of course, have a mishap I would love to share with the blog world.

Back in early 2006, as you may know as a result of this post, Alson and I had just started dating. We had been out together a couple of times, but nothing "serious" had yet happened. One night we decided that we wanted to stay in, and what better way to get close than cook a nice, romantic meal together. Alson suggested Rachel Ray's You Won't Be Single For Long Vodka Cream Pasta recipe, and as a sucker for Italian and vodka cream sauce, we headed to the grocery store for the ingredients and the liquor store for the vodka and some nice wine. After purchasing the needed items and returning to my apartment, we embarked on our pasta making excursion. Neither of us was much of a chef, so we relied heavily on the recipe to guide us to culinary heaven. Cue novice foodie.....

The recipe called for two cloves of garlic, so we bought two pieces of garlic. Makes sense right? Who really knows what I clove is anyway. We start mincing the two pieces of garlic....and 15 minutes later we are like damn...this is taking forever. We finally finish mincing... and throw TWO WHOLE PIECES of garlic into the pasta sauce.

I think we need an illustration: Whole piece of garlic on the left, clove of garlic in the middle....they are very different in size.


Neither of us is the wiser to the huge mistake we just made, so we continue flirting and pretending like we are vying for the title of Top Chef (which by the way is my favorite reality series). We finish cooking the pasta, pour some wine, and sit down to bite into our glorious dinner.

Let's now recall that we are newly dating and still in that "I don't want to say anything that may screw this up" phase. So we both eat the pasta without saying a word about the awful and overwhelming taste of garlic. I literally had to choke it down because it was so terrible. We both finish what is on our plate and refuse seconds "because we're full". We put the rest in Tupperware and I am pretty sure it sat in my refrigerator for the rest of the semester because I refused to eat it again.

A few weeks go by, and somehow the pasta and garlic incident comes up in conversation. We kind of beat around the bush about how it was a lot of fun cooking together, but that we both didn't really like the food, yada yada yada. We FINALLY realize that we put wayyyyyyyyy too much garlic in the pasta, probably 14 cloves instead of 2. So although the pasta was pretty much inedible, we weren't single for long and technically the recipe worked! I guess it was the thought, or the process that counted? Awwww, how sweet!?!

Needless to say, we are now both very aware of the difference between a clove and a whole piece of garlic....but after countless numbers of dinners made, we still haven't tried that recipe again.