Failed Food

Perfectly Imperfect Food

The internet is full of perfect food pictures.

I know, that’s a statement of the obvious. Everywhere you look on Pinterest or Instagram or wherever, it seems that second only to pictures of perfectly airbrushed human models are perfect pictures of food. A perfectly cooked juicy steak, or a feta and greens salad with the colors so saturated that the chlorophyll practically leaks out of your screen. They are everywhere. The most modern cookbooks are usually like glossy picture books of food created and “plated” (arranged on a plate) by professionals who know exactly what angle to capture the most savory amount of steam and drippy butter possible.

That is not to say food photography is bad by nature. Food is photogenic, and having a pic of the finished product in your cookbook is helpful. It gives you something to shoot for. But sometimes it can all be misleading. Kind of like the way Cosmopolitan is misleading to women about what shape their bodies need to be during this summer beach season. Food dishes, like people, are messy.. And even when the picture came out pretty good, sometimes the food in the picture was actually terrible.

In the interest of honesty, and to give you all a bit of a laugh, we’ve included two pics in this post of food failures we made recently. The pictures actually look pretty good, if I do say so myself. But the food itself was, well, questionable.

The first one here is the glorious spaghetti and meatballs pic at the beginning. Looks tasty, right? Perfectly browned meatballs resting in a little nest of noodles and gooey tomato sauce. I got hungry just looking at it. But I would warn you, don’t eat it.

I made a mistake with the meatballs. I had a pound of ground turkey and a can of diced pork, and I mixed the two together along with some ketchup and garlic paste and some spices. It smelled heavenly. I formed them into balls and put them into the oven to bake. 20 minutes later they came out looking browned and amazing. I got the spatula and went to take one off the pan to drop on my plate…and it fell apart. Nothing daunted, I went for another one. It crumbled like a ball of brown sugar. Turns out, I hadn’t added an egg or anything to make them stick together. Also, ground turkey has very little fat, but I had added nothing to really give them the juiciness that comes naturally if you use ground beef.

In short, they were dry and crumbly. Gross.

Here is the second picture:

Mmm, looks tasty, yes?

Well, not exactly…

To be fair, the scrambled eggs turned out amazing. But they were the only amazing part of this concoction. Anybody who knows anything about onions knows that they tend to make you…regular. And I used an entire red onion to make this onion, ham, and turkey egg topper. Something about not wanting to waste any of the onion? The onion ended up overpowering the rest of the meal by a long shot, annihilating our taste buds and making us weep.

Then we went out on a day trip that afternoon. Mistake.

When we got back, my digestion was hating on me so badly that I got stuck in the bathroom for a long, long time. My wife had disliked the breakfast so much that she’d given up on finishing hers, so at least she was spared this part. It took several trips to the john to rid myself of this perfect food picture. I will never eat half of a red onion in one sitting ever again. Blargh.

So yeah. Even if the picture is perfect, doesn’t mean that everything is picture perfect. We freely admit it.

And excuse me, just looking at that last pic makes me need to run to the porcelain throne…