Recipe Mistakes – From Disaster To Delicious

Mistakes are rarely something to crow about. But on Thanksgiving day I made one of the biggest mistakes in my more than fifty years of cooking in the kitchen. But luckily  it turned out to be delicious!

I love Chef Michael Symon. And I saw him prepare his “Pap’s” corn pudding recipe on TV. It looked and sounded delicious. And since I happened to have all the ingredients on hand (except one) I decided to whip up a small scale, modified version for our Thanksgiving dinner. That’s when the crucial ingredient error was made. I substituted some sour cream for the mascarpone called for in the recipe. No problem at all with that change. But next I made a MAJOR ingredient error.

I had several cornbread Jiffy mix boxes in the cupboard…or so I thought. So I began to combine all my ingredients and dumped the mixture into a baking dish.

I couldn’t wait to try it. It looked delicious! And it looked even better after I baked it.

But as I began to clean up the kitchen I stopped dead in my tracks. The Jiffy mix I had  added was a YELLOW CAKE MIX…NOT CORNBREAD MIX!

So let me set the stage for what happened next.

I had promised to provide a Thanksgiving meal to two of our dear neighbors…and I began to wonder if I should include this “mistake” on their dinner plates. I tasted the dish, and even though it tasted sweeter than what I expected it was actually VERY good! Surprisingly good! So I decided to say nothing…and I added it to each plate, along with all the rest of the meal. Turkey, dressing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy and a Hawaiian dinner roll. Plus pumpkin pie. I threw on my mask and I set the steaming hot plates on our table outside as the neighbors came by to claim their dinners to take home with them. And I waited. What would they think??

Later that day I got this Instagram alert. Please note what our neighbor wrote…directly on the corn casserole!

I couldn’t stop laughing!!! (And I still can’t stop.)

And so, Dear Readers, for all of you who think this old Meemaw never makes kitchen mistakes…I hope this post will set THAT record straight!

Just chalk up Meemaw’s Thanksgiving kitchen mistake to good old 2020…the gift that keeps on giving.