apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I wonder if there is a way you could have salvaged this. The problem appears to be not having roasted it -- could you roast it in the oven AFTER the pureeing? And even if it wasn't good enough to use as a dip, maybe you could have used the resulting eggplant to spread as a layer in a ricotta lasagne?

I hate throwing away food, so I will try to consume the disasters myself, but every once in a while something goes so wrong that I just can't!

While I'm not sure it would have saved your baba, I have tried salvaging food by doing a gratinée with it and smothering it with cheese. It wasn't great (also a failed vegetable concoction), but it wasn't a large quantity and I managed to eat it.

A ravioli for a cold salad might've been nice, or some sort of improvised moussaka. I wonder if you could've used it as a spread for a portabella burger on a toasted bun, or maybe mix some tomato in for a filling for stuffed mushrooms.

This sounds unsalvagable to me. Roasting something mixed with tahini sounds like a good way to add "flaming pile of eggplant," "smoke alarm," and "sheepish explanation to the FDNY" to this story. Your neighbors thank you for chucking it.

I really hate to just utterly ruin something, and it seems that the few times I've made something that is just flat out inedible, it always seems to follow a multi-step, fiddly process with expensive ingredients.

Growing up, on the rare occasions my mom completely failed in the kitchen, it was traditional to order pizza. Even if there were leftovers around, a kitchen disaster meant mom had a glass of wine or a gin and tonic while dad dialed. A family tradition I have adopted and will pass on to my daughter.

I've gotten into the habit of tasting things like eggplant and zucchini for bitterness before I even add them to what I'm making. I know you can salt extract to remove some of the bitterness but I'd rather not start with bad ingredients.

Last week I made beautiful eggs in the basket with fresh eggs and bread, only to have my mouth filled with the taste of fish on the first bite. I hadn't clean my pan well enough the night before after cooking salmon, ugh!

I think I would have tried cooking it with some olive oil on the stove. I hate throwing out food, too.

My second attempt at making bread turned into a doorstop-sized brick. It went promptly into the trash even after my sweet boyfriend tried a "slice" -- if you could even call it that -- and pretended it was just "extra chewy." And that was my last attempt at bread. It's made me too nervous to try it again.

My mother once made a strawberry cheesecake that didn't set properly. It still tasted fine thankfully.

She now makes the "ruined" version instead. We call it strawberry mush, and it is delicious!

I tend to have a hard time with eggplant, too--most recently the disaster was "eggplant parmesan." I use quotes because it most certainly did not come out tasting like the real deal. Even after carefully following the pre-parmesan instructions (salting and baking the eggplant, etc.), we still had to scrape the sauce off and just eat that. The leftovers are still in the fridge...untouched!

So if anyone has a FAIL-SAFE eggplant recipe, I'd love to see it. We keep getting them in our CSA box and I don't want to ruin another one.

I usually let the "bad" food sit in my fridge for a few days and then it goes directly into the garbage.

you could have poured it over some white, firm-fleshed fish (cod, whiting) and baked it in the oven. your failed dip is like an eggplant version of taratour - the closest version I could find to my mother's is this: http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/583778 - but she baked hers right onto the fish, instead of slathering it on before serving.

also, for future lazy babaganoush, it's much faster to just 'roast' the eggplant over the open flame of a stovetop, until the outside is charred and the inside is soft & has collapsed.

Someone once commented on a message board that if you don't occasionally have to dump something in the trash and order a pizza, you're not cooking hard enough.

@badifat - I love that sentiment!

A while ago I totally botched a batch of marshmallows - somehow they turned into mushy, oozy pile of sweet. Not sure how it happened, but they went in the trash. In hindsight, I probably could have thought of something to do with them, but it's hard to be creative in the face of total and utter culinary defeat.

When I first started cooking, I made some sort of cassoulet. My future hubby and I took a bite each, politely tried not to spit, and immediately made other dinner plans while we sat at the table. Because I was a new cook, I had no idea what I did wrong--and I made enough for 8.

I told my mother that I felt bad about throwing so much "good" food away, and she told me when it was moldy that I wouldn't feel so bad. It's a pretty good rule.

I would have sauteed it in olive oil to cook it as a last ditch effort. But I seriously doubt that you can salvage microwaved eggplant.

My all-time record holder for a botched recipe came courtesy of Martha Stewart. I tried a recipe for sesame brittle from a holiday issue and the mixture seized up in the pot. I was never able to get all the gunk out of the pan (even tried boiling water in it) and had to throw out the whole pot. Sugar: $2; sesame seeds: $3.50; calphalon pot: $65 OUCH.

this one goes in the compost heap and let that be a lesson to you!

Just kidding. My disasters tend to be dishes that turn out a lot more bland than I intended, like some squash & potato soup I've just made. I think I can rescue it though by throwing in a bit of pesto and some good sausages.

I wonder if you could have rescued the eggplant by baking it with some olive oil drizzled on top, and some delicious bread crumbs...make a sort of gratin out of it? slices of tomato too? If you eat meat I think you could put a couple of good lamb sausages on top and bake it for 45 mins or so.

I tried to recreate my favorite thai restaurant's satay sauce and ended up using WAY too much curry paste. Inedible. But I tried again the next night and it worked out much better.

I told my mom about it and she reminded me of how much pizza and Mexican food we ate during her Asian cooking phase.

The moral of the story is that women in my family should stay away from the wok.

when i make something that i just can't stand, i do one of two things:

1. if it's reasonably sound and just not something i like, i bring it into the office.

2. if it's actually gross and/or burnt, i toss it out into the woods for the critters. i do this with bad fruit and veggies, too.

My most recent disaster: my second botched attempt at Saag Paneer this last winter. The recipe I was following said to cook some chickpea flour in hot oil to make a roux of sorts, then add a bunch of plain yogurt. Very hot oil cold yogurt = a splattered, separated, oily mess. After I got over being thankful that I wasn't burned by the scalding oil/yogurt mixture that lept from the pot, I let it all cool down, dumped it in disgust, and went hunting for a new recipe.

Maybe you could have oven-roasted (or even smoked?) another eggplant, pureed it, then added it to your original batch to fill it out and correct the flavor?

It would be difficult with your dish but this is a very creative use of ruined cupcakes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvIW7ZtwPww

if you're afraid of being rick rolled search for cupcake dance and amelie on youtube.

My husband acquired an English setter puppy a few months after we married. Dear gentle Katy---she ate a lot of my mistakes. My first one was a blueberry pie that looked beautiful and tasted terrible.

Get a bird dog---they never tell secrets :)

I had my very first inedible disaster 2 weeks ago. I tried making blue cheese bacon hamburger patties. First of all, the meat I had was not exactly ground... It was some sort of shredded stuff from Trader Joes. Second, I used reduced fat blue cheese that some how found its way into my fridge and that was sick. Then I added overcooked bacon that added a tooth-snapping crunch. The last straw : a friend of mine let me in on his secret for juicy, tasty burgers. Seasoned rice wine vinegar.

It was bad.

Whenever i truly fail at a recipe, i just put it in the fridge until it goes bad. Then i can say "oh shucks darn, guess i'll have to throw this out afterall!" Guilt-free way to dispose of the horror. Well, guilt-reduced anyway. Guilt-lite.

for eggplant, i've made some mean ratatouilles the past couple times as my no fail recipe. even winging it was perfectly fine but i used the keller ingredients for guidelines. if you slice the eggplant really thin, it only takes about 20 minutes in the oven and they taste like butter.

I hate wasting food, especially if I've put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. Once I bought a bad watermelon... I tried to save it by making granita. It was overly sweet, so I decided to melt it down and make jello... But too much gelatin caused it to seize up like a brick and it tasted terrible. Into the trash it went. Sigh... Some things (like bad watermelon) you just can't fix.

If nothing else, this post inspired me to finally make some Baba Ghanoush. I've always wanted to make it but for some reason, never have. I had a fresh eggplant in the fridge and time on my hands to roast it properly. I followed the recipe in Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" book, and it turned out fantastic.

But like most of the other posters, I also hate wasting food. It has to be pretty bad for me to just toss it-otherwise I will suffer and eat it, begrudgingly.

My worst ever was incredibly stressful at the time, but actually turned out to be a hit. My sister and I had taken over our mother's job for the weekend and were in charge of cooking at a camp for about 50 people. We were making a (giant) coffee cake in a huge pan, and for some reason it was not setting completely and was undercooked in the middle. We kept cooking it but breakfast was already late and it was a main component so we couldn't leave it out. We ended up scraping it into bowls and calling it "bread pudding" and acting like it was intentional (it looked sort of like stuffing). It turns out that no-one at the camp had ever had bread pudding so they all believed us. And they loved it and ate all of it (rarely happens with anything as we ere on the "make too much" side of things).

It's funny now, but it sure wasn't at the time :)

Laurie Colwin once wrote (quoting roughly from memory) that the nice thing about cooking is that the worst-case scenario is that you end up ordering in a pizza. Honorable failure is a part of being a cook, and some times you have to accept that and order in.