Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Dumbass move of the day
Karen wanted a blueberry clafouti for breakfast today, so, loving husband that I am, I obliged.
In case you’re saying, “Huh? Wha?” a clafouti is a fruit pancake you bake in the oven. Or a giant muffin, something like that. You mix the batter in a blender, and then you pour some of the batter into a deep pie dish and let it set up a bit in the oven. Next, you add fruit, sugar, and the rest of the batter. Bake for one hour. Dust with powdered sugar.
I became inpatient with the “let it set up a bit in the oven” step. After waiting three or four minutes, the batter still had not firmed up, so I placed the dish (a heavy glass pie dish, oven safe, but not Pyrex) over a low heat. I moved it frequently so that it would heat in an even fashion.
Then, um, I forgot about it for a wee bit too long.
When I thought about this ahead of time, I said to myself, “What’s the worst that can happen? The glass will break. Big deal.” Well, it didn’t break. It exploded. Worse, Jake and I were standing right there when it happened. Neither one of us was injured, thank heavens, but we were damned impressed.
Glass was everywhere. Oh, well: I had been looking for an excuse to give the range a thorough cleaning, and now I’d found it.
This is by no means the stupidest thing I’ve done. Washing drapes with the hooks still attached, that has to rank up there in the top five. But hey, I was only 20 at the time. What does a 20-year-old guy know about washing drapes?
Okay, folks, time to ‘fess up with your dumbass stories. It’ll feel good. You know it will.
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Blog news: I’ve imported all of my wife’s Blogger posts, and I have categorized about 1/3 of them. She’ll be an occasional poster here at Balls and Walnuts. Casting about, trying to figure out what her username should be, it came to me: if I’m Walnut, she should be Balls.
She’s cool with that. “Someone has to be Balls,” she said. Or was it, Someone has to have the balls? Hmm.
When I categorized Karen’s posts, WordPress changed the author to Walnut. I’ll fix that later. For now, if you’re curious to see Karen’s earlier posts, click on “Balls cried the Queen” under categories. Uncategorized Karen-posts will have TarantulaLady as the author. I’ll get it all sorted out eventually.
Meanwhile, I’ve categorized my July posts. Kinda skipped over June — I’ll get that sorted out, too.
D.
Though I’m glad to hear you and Jake are unhurt, does this mean Karen didn’t get her blueberry clafouti? Which BTW sound heavenly! Could you possibly post the recipe?
And as for my dumbass stories – you’ve heard them all ;o)
The worst thing I’ve done happened when I was a young child. So it kind of doesn’t seem fair to include it here, since kids do dumb things all the time. Problem is, it was so dumb, I haven’t been able to top it since.
Anyway, when I was a kid I had a bright idea about making candles out of left-over crayons. I put the crayons in a covered pot, turned on the stovetop, then left the kitchen. The wax exploded out of the pot and landed in millions of multi-colored dots on every imaginable surface in the kitchen (I fleshed this little anecdote out a little more awhile back on my blog). Man, was that ever a pain in the ass to clean up!
I’ll post the clafouti recipe just for you, Jona 😉 No, Karen didn’t get her clafouti, since I couldn’t be sure that some tiny shards hadn’t gotten into the batter. I bought more blueberries at the grocery store this afternoon, but forgot to buy more flour! (The flour was sitting open on the counter, too, so I threw it out.)
Great story, fiveandfour. I read the long version over at your blog, too. I can’t even imagine how terrible it must have been cleaning up all those little dots of wax.
I have, not my worst moment, but a wax story to share. After some fancy dinner of my parents’, one which rated candles on the table, we kids started trying to blow them out from a distance, to see who could do it from furthest away. My mom yelled at us to knock it off because we were going to get wax all over the table, and blew the candles out herself. A little more forcefully than necessary. Spattering wax all over the newly painted wall. Red wax. White wall.
The stains were still there when they sold the house 10 years later.
I’ve done so many dumbass things it’s hard to pick just one.
Let’s go with the time my sister gave me a set of enameled cookware. It was beautiful, but the instructions for use and care clearly said not to bake in it over a certain temperature. I read the instructions and understood.
Time went by and I made a casserole and baked it in one of the pans. You guessed it. I didn’t follow the instructions. Soon there were terrific popping and booming sounds coming from the oven.
By the time I got there, that pan looked like it had popped off nearly all the enamel. The oven was covered with it and it was all through my casserole.
After the oven cooled, it took hours to pick and wipe all of the little spots of enamel out of there. The casserole was tossed, and I had to make something else not nearly so good.
I realized while I was scraping, washing and picking the oven afterwords, that following directions is a good thing.
Gee. I’ve really been a slouch in the kitchen disaster area. Either that, or I’ve blocked out all memory of the really horrendous stuff. (entirely possible)
The worst disaster I can remember happened shortly after I got my ceramic cooktop. (yes, I know–serious cooks use gas. I never claimed to be a serious cook.) I made a raspberry pie in a glass pie dish. The crust was a thing of beauty. I set it on the stove to cool, not realizing the burner was still hot.
No explosions, but it did take an awfully long time to get all that fruity syrup cleaned off the stove.