This Solo Cooking Fiasco Saved Me Some Calories

Who eats pumpkin bread in January anyway?

For those who enjoy following my (mis)adventures in the kitchen, I really blew it this morning. I was so efficient. I got the laundry started, gathered my ingredients and proceeded to make pumpkin bread. It was going to be so good. I would even clean the kitchen while it was in the oven.

One can of pureed pumpkin is enough for two loaves, so I doubled the recipe. Blame it on not wearing my glasses or not paying enough attention, but as I added things to the mixing bowl, something didn’t look right. It was taking an awful lot of ingredients, including all my sugar and most of my milk. Four eggs. Four cups flour. A whole stick of butter? Four cups milk?

The milk is what tripped me up. My old handwritten recipe said one-half cup milk, which when doubled would be one cup. I thought it said two cups, which doubles to four cups. It seemed crazy, but I had to follow the recipe.

It wouldn’t mix. The butter wasn’t soft enough and floated around like yellow islands in an orange sea no matter how hard I stirred with the wooden spoon. I got out the electric mixer and gave it a couple minutes, spraying drops around the counter. It was still a gloppy mess. I started to spoon the “batter” into the baking pans. Pure liquid. Something was not right.

That’s when I took another look at the recipe. One-half cup milk, not two cups. I had poured in three times as much milk as I needed. I uttered a few choice words at that point. It’s not like you can take the milk out or send all the ingredients back to their respective packages. All I could do was throw it away and clean up the mess. Of course, I had to go under the sink and unclog the garbage disposal first.

I’m a pretty good cook but not perfect. And yes, two loaves of pumpkin bread seem like a lot for one person, but my plan was to freeze one loaf and eat one a slice at a time for breakfast, with fruit. Damn. Guess I’ll be eating toast with my grapefruit unless I buy something sinful at the coffee shop open mic this afternoon.

When you have a cooking disaster, it’s good to be alone so you can curse freely, and no one is grossed out by the mess. My late husband would have been too busy watching football to notice unless he strolled into the kitchen about that time and realized it was his turn to wash dishes. Now, it’s always my turn.

Meanwhile, my new Cooking for One book by America’s Test Kitchen has arrived. OMG, it has everything you need to know. I mean everything. You have half a cauliflower? Here’s what to do with it. A handful of strawberries? Here you go. It does not have a recipe for pumpkin bread, but it’s loaded with tasty-looking dishes sized for one person.

One of the most useful sections is on how to store and preserve all kinds of food. That’s a big issue for me because I can’t eat things fast enough. I have some oranges going bad in my kitchen right now, mostly because I’d rather eat cookies than oranges but also because those bags of little mandarins from the store hold too many oranges for one person. Turns out I can freeze the excess. Who knew? In my next post, we will go deep into food storage.

Tomorrow’s going to be a big day in the United States. Good or bad? Who knows? Treat yourself to something sweet.

Meanwhile, tell us in the comments about your biggest cooking disaster.

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How did I end up alone? My first marriage ended in divorce. My second husband died of Alzheimer’s after we had moved to the Oregon coast, far from family. I never had any kids, only dogs. Now I live by myself in a big house in the woods. You can read our story in my new memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s, available now at your favorite bookseller. Visit https://www.suelick.com for information on all of my books.