Cooking Failures

After a long hiatus, I've taken up cooking again. I finally have a kitchen with a stove, an oven, a fridge and freezer, a sink, and a dishwasher, and a (newly added) microwave (in mint condition from 1985!). I haven't had such a convenient combination of kitchen essentials in several years, so this feels pretty miraculous to me. A STOVE! And an OVEN! I can basically cook whatever I want! No more breaking hunks of cheese off with my hands and drinking milk out of the carton! 

It's pretty exciting.

Anyway, I've been pretty successful with my cooking endeavors thus far, with a few exceptions. 

Around Halloween, I got a pumpkin from my church. It made a lovely table decoration until I finally decided to try to cook it and use the pumpkin puree for pumpkin bread.

I'm not sure what happened in the oven, but this is what came out:

Disgusting. I called my mom and, after conferring with her about what could be done with gross leathery pumpkin chunks, I scraped the flesh out of the skin, put it in the blender with some water, strained it several times, mashed it up again, took out the burnt chunks, and was left with this:

In my opinion, that's a little too much work for a bag of pumpkin mush! But since I'd already gone to all that effort, I decided to go ahead and make pumpkin bread, hoping that it didn't taste too disgusting with that pumpkin disaster in it.

And guess what? It was delicious! I guess all that work was worth it, although I'd never do it again (I'll just fork over the $2-3 for the Libby's pumpkin in the store).

I finished off the pumpkin bread just in time for another cooking disaster. My family has a delightful little family recipe blog, and one of my sisters posted a recipe for making oven-dried tomatoes. I was craving some Greek pizza, but there was no way I was going to fork over $3.99 for a small box of cherry or grape tomatoes. I brilliantly decided that Roma tomatoes (much cheaper) would work just as well, because tomatoes are tomatoes, right?

Obviously, I was very wrong. I'm not quite sure what happened, but somehow the ratio of thick flesh to thin juicy part turned these oven-dried tomatoes into oven-burnt hunks of gushy leather (bet you didn't think it was possible to have gushy leather!). Being the cheapskate that I am, I still put them on the pizza.

And I felt super hipster eating Greek pizza with fire roasted/charbroiled tomatoes (i.e. burnt pieces of tomato leather). Because I'm cool like that.