While other bloggers are doing 2016 highlight posts, I decided to do the opposite and write a “biggest fails of 2016” post. I blame the middle child in me. Okay, being contradictory has nothing to do with being a middle child but I’ll (jokingly) blame anything on being a middle child.
I cook a lot and often don’t use recipes or just very loosely use something I see in a magazine or on Pinterest as inspiration. I’d say 95% of my original recipes turn out well, and of those, the only recipes I post on the blog are ones I’ve tested carefully and would make again and again (or in some cases, ones I’ve already been making for years! Like my favorite kitchen sink granola).
And then there’s the other 5%. So for all of the pretty recipes you see on the blog, just know there are a few others that didn’t turn out quite so well. Coming in at number seven…
7. I had the idea to make healthier pumpkin spice oatmeal cookies. I believe I used cinnamon, oats, pumpkin puree, almond butter, pecans, and honey as a sweetener. 
I sampled the dough as I was making it for quality control purposes and it was great! But the finished product was super bland, despite the cinnamon and honey, and the crumbly “cookies” were just not worth eating.
6. I’d seen one-pan chicken & veggie dinners on Pinterest but instead of following someone else’s recipe, I decided to do my own thing. This usually works but I was doing a little too much “winging it” for this particular meal. I thought chicken, sweet potatoes, and broccoli would be delicious together! And they probably would be, but in retrospect, I made at least three key mistakes.
For one, root veggies like sweet potatoes take a lot longer to cook than broccoli so I definitely should’ve divided them between two baking sheets to avoid overcooked broccoli and undercooked potatoes. Second, I should’ve left the chicken breasts whole because in my attempt to let the potatoes finish cooking, the small pieces of chicken got a bit dried out. Third, I seasoned the chicken, broccoli, and sweet potatoes all the same (salt, pepper, fresh rosemary). There IS such thing as too much rosemary, for the record.
5. I’m generally not a huge fish person, but in an effort to expand my healthy eating horizons, I bit the bullet and bought two pieces of fresh wild-caught salmon from Whole Foods when I was housesitting for my grandparents this summer.
I baked it in a parchment packet with veggies & lemon and everything was going swimmingly until I slightly overcooked the two pieces of salmon AND it turns out they had a rather fishy taste, anyway. Ugh. The whole time I was eating it, I was wishing I was eating something else. Like a big bowl of pasta. And I had to suffer through eating it at two different meals since I didn’t want to waste it.
4. As I was reaching down to put a tray of sweet potato wedges in the oven, I dropped the pan. In the oven. Sweet potatoes ended up all over the inside of the 425 degree oven.
3. You might’ve heard of avocado chocolate mousse. Supposedly, you can blend cocoa powder, avocado, and sweetener like honey or maple syrup together to create a healthy chocolate mousse. I decided to give it a whirl but was in a hurry and didn’t notice how extremely ripe my avocado was. I didn’t get a picture but it actually did look a lot like chocolate mousse! Overripe avocados taste pretty bad, though, so one bite was all I could take and I haven’t worked up the nerve to try it again since.
2. My first attempt at apple cinnamon oatmeal didn’t work out great. The apples cooked a lot more quickly than the old-fashioned oats. Luckily, after tweaking the ingredients and swapping in quick-cooking oats, I came up with a great apple pie oatmeal recipe.
1. I had the idea to make balsamic roasted brussels sprouts. They looked great and were so full of promise…
But they were really big sprouts and took forever in the oven so I think I ended up undercooking them while letting the outsides get too crispy. They were edible, but super chewy and nothing amazing.
So, there you have it– my 7 biggest cooking fails of 2016. Hope YOU have a wonderful New Year full of delicious food and mishap-free cooking!
So tell me…
What have been some of your cooking/recipe fails or mishaps?
I LOVE that this is your last post for the year, haha!
I am with you on salmon. I’m notttt a fan. It’s way too fishy and I feel like it tastes “rich”. I don’t know how to explain it so that’s the best I can come up with. White fish I love and canned tuna I love in pasta bakes but not salmon. Eugh!
And yess to avocado chocolate mousse. I LOVE avocadoes but I can’t do avocado mousse. Yeugh!
I’m glad you agree about the salmon! Maybe it’s fishy if it’s not fresh enough?
And I’d totally try the chocolate avocado mousse again but I’d hate to waste the ingredients AGAIN if I didn’t like it!
I love “fail” posts – they feel so real 🙂
Hmm. I do love salmon, so I can’t help there, but it does totally suck if overcooked/unfresh. I’ve made both those mistakes before! And on the avo mousse… I’ve wanted to try it, but I have such a hard time believing it works, and I love my avocado as is or in guac, so I don’t feel terribly inclined to change it.
Happy New Year, my friend!
I’m with you– I think I’ll stick with putting avocados in my guac and enjoying the “real deal” chocolate mousse. Happy New Year to you, too, friend!
Salmon should never taste fishy. If it does, the fish is probably too long out of the water or defrosted too long before you bought it. I always ask when the fish came in before I buy it. If has been there two days, I don’t buy it. This probably wasn’t your fault. You have to watch the specials in restaurants, as well. Sometimes fish is on special so the restaurant can get rid of it while it is still eatable.
Good to know! I’ll ask how long the fish has been at the store in the future for sure.
Ahhh I LOVE this post! I’ve had my fair share of recipe fails this year as well! Some of them include forgetting to add baking powder to a bread recipe, not putting in enough sweetener to a cookie recipe, and not greasing a pan before making brownies!
Oh man! Bummer when those happen since it’s no fun to waste food but I think it happens to everyone!
Haha so many recipe fails happen in my kitchen. It’s so easy to overbake salmon! We’ve eaten dried salmon on many occasions for that reason.
Such a bummer since salmon’s already a bit on the pricy side! Now I know to keep a close eye on it while cooking 🙂
Haha, I ALWAYS wing it, and I have had so so so many crumbly healthy cookie experiences! When I bake, my roommates have learned to ask whether it’s an experiment or an actual proven recipe.
Haha! Too funny that your roommates have figured that out 🙂 Winging it seems to work well for cooking but I haven’t had much success for baking so I think sticking to recipes is a better bet for me!
Haha, I love this!! I commend anyone for being a recipe tester. I think I would go mad trying to do things without recipes already made out for me!
After rereading this post I just wrote, I may need to do a little less recipe testing 😉
This is perfect, cause I made SO many cooking/baking fails. I tried to make way too many ‘substitutions’ for gluten free, and I got really doughy things (way too doughy), really shapeless crumbly loaves, and.. well the list could go on. O_O it was a humbling year in the baking area, for sure.
Oh boy I can definitely imagine that things get tricky with gluten free baking!
lol – we had a similar fail with avocado brownies. Almost put my husband off avocados for life! I’ve also dropped so many things when getting them out of the oven it’s not funny! Oh well, most of the time what I make is edible!!
Oh no! I’ve seen avocado brownie recipes on Pinterest but have been a little too skeptical to try them. They could be great but with overripe avocados, they’d have no chance!
I love that you showed your fails! This was awesome. I feel like these type of things happen more often than not when I try to “wing” something, so I haven’t been so daring with straying from recipes lately.
I wonder if you could’ve made something with your cookies still? Maybe crumble them up and make them into some type of dessert? Then again, that tends to take away from the healthy aspect of them. 😉 Haha!
Have a great day 🙂
Yes! Winging it can sometimes turn out great but other times, I’m wishing I didn’t try to be so creative haha. And that’s a good idea! I could’ve probably crumbled them on top of some yogurt like granola or something like that.
Lol! Don’t we all have those recipes that just sound amazing and then they flop! Love that you are keeping it real and showing that life/ blogging isnt all that it seems on instagram! I always fail any time I try to cook with coconut flour- gotta work on that one!
Oh I’ve heard cooking with coconut flour is so tricky!