I get what you are saying. I was just saying there is this show called Worst Cooks In America. If you can read a recipe, how can you mess it up? I'm guessing they never use a recipe? I have never burned anything, undercooked anything, overcooked anything or messed up anything lately. The first thing I ever made was pancakes in high school Home Ec class, which I'm sure they don't have anymore. I'm sure now it's just a cooking class. This was before smoke alarms anywhere. I guess I wasn't paying attention to them because you could suddenly smell smoke! They were burning! We had to throw them out and open the windows in class to let out the smell and the smoke. That has been the only time anything like that ever happened. I can read so I can make just about any recipe put in front of me. I even made up my own recipe for a contest. I didn't win but it sure tasted good. I will have to post it here. That's why I don't understand how someone can make a horrible meat loaf or terrible scrambled eggs or burned mashed potatoes if you can read and follow a recipe. How hard is it? I also remember a show called How To Boil Water. If you could burn a pan boiling water, unless an emergency happened and you forgot the boiling water, how do you do that? I guess I don't understand is all.

Tomorrow I am making this recipe for dinner. Then I will let you know how wonderful or not this was.

Most people mess up their cooking because they don't understand the terminology, how are you supposed to sweat onions if you don't know what a sweated onion looks like when it's done?

If you've never had anyone explain what it looks like or you've never been able to watch anyone cook properly from scratch then you're not going to know what to do.

My mums friend used to run a playgroup in an inner city when I was small, she used to do cooking with the children and asked the mums to bring in pastry so that the kids could make jam tarts one day. Most of the mums brought in bought, shortcrust pastry, it's the easiest thing in the world to make if you know how to, when you think these families were almost all on benefits, so living on the poverty line this was an expense they really couldn't afford.

They didn't know how to make anything as basic as pastry, they bought all of their food ready made, in the end she did cooking classes for the mums and most of it was really basic stuff.

I got a phone call one day from a number I didn't recognize, so I didn't answer the phone. I googled the number, and it turned up one result - the resume of a "professional actor" who, among his credits, included a stint on "Worst Cooks of America". Sometimes, reality tv ain't reality, baby...

You can also mess up recipes by messing with them. I made an Emeril recipe for garlic studded pot roast. I wanted to use up the rest of the head of garlic I had, so the recipe called for I think 6 cloves, and I had 8 or 10 or something like that. Figuring it'd be no big deal because garlic is pretty much always good with red meat, I used 'em all.

WRECKED THAT MESS. Oh, it was bad. Pretty much all you could taste was garlic. Ugh...and it overcooked a little bit anyway, so it got a little bit of that metallic twang that garlic gets when you overcook it. Disaster.

I'd made that recipe other times though, and it was amazing. So when I tell that story, I always tell people that the moral is that Emeril doesn't play - if he says a quarter of a teaspoon of this, and an eighth of a teaspoon of that, he MEANS a quarter of a teaspoon of this and an eighth of a teaspoon of that.

So between the combination that what you're seeing on tv isn't reality, and people that get over confident and play with recipes when they shouldn't, people can cook that bad, sure.

I see what you mean. I am usually a person who makes a recipe exactly how it is the first time, except for the recipe in this thread. I also know that Rachael Ray says she loves garlic and she sweats it through her pours. We don't want to keep away vampires and the neighbors too so we don't use as much garlic as she says. There are other things that she makes that we feel are to much of a good thing so we use less. They still taste good, we just don't overdo it for us.

As for the Emeril recipe, I would have gone w/what he said. To much garlic, unless you are Rachael Ray, is not a good thing in my opinion. Especially if you aren't alone and won't be seeing people until the next day. Sometimes I like to experiment but not to often. I always say don't mess w/a good thing.

I also get what you mean about sweating out onions but if I didn't know what I was supposed to do w/something in a recipe, I wouldn't make that one or look it up. We used to have a cookbook that had a glossary of cooking terms. No photos, but it told you exactly what something was supposed to look like or do. I loved it! We don't have that cookbook anymore as my mom donated it to our library but it was a good one. We also have an encyclopedia of cookbooks from A-Z and that is also a valuable resource. I use it all the time!

I made this for supper and it was amazing! There was one tiny problem though. Not enough sauce. The pasta absorbed it all I think. I added more cream as I had some left over but I don't think it was enough. Next time I will add 2 cups. I also think instead of heavy cream, I will use light cream. It gets thick anyway. Everyone loved it, it had veggies in it and it tasted really good. We even have leftovers! One thing I did was sautee the mushrooms before I threw them in. I put the peas, cooked pasta and mushrooms in at the end and let them get warm. I will so be making this again. A woman I know sends in recipes called TNT, which is Tried and True. I can say that about this.

You can make this and know it tastes good. Just do what I did and add the other stuff at the end. Oh yeah, it didn't need to cook for a whole 7 - 9 hours. I think 6 was all I cooked it. I really like when a recipe turns out well.