The Slob BlogBecause slobs need love too!

If you happen to forget one or all of the ingredients in a dish, or you find some entirely new and creative way to ruin it, there are several recovery steps you can take.

1. Rename the dish immediately!  You can’t very well call something “Meringue Pie” if you’ve forgotten to buy eggs.  Call it “Lemon Pudding” instead or “Lemon Flan”.
2. Add sugar.  Almost everything tastes better when it is sweet, and sweet foods are easier to forgive for being bad.
3. Add toppings.  Toppings such as whipped cream, chives, cinnamon, sprinkles, sour cream, cheese crumbles etc. can help a sad and ugly dish look festive.  If you’ve really messed up, use enough toppings to cover the dish entirely.
4. Add rice.  It’s amazing how many foods taste great mixed with rice.  It’s probably because rice doesn’t really taste like anything.  Rice even shows up in deserts, so don’t worry.  If you are short on ingredients, just add rice, and you’ll turn a couple cups of mush into a whole bowlful of dinner.
5. Use creative presentation.  Sometimes recipes don’t yield as much as we expect them to.  This is generally due to an agregious measuring error.  The trick to dealing with this situation is going gourmet.  Spend a little extra time arranging the small portion of food on each guest’s plate.  Add a sprig of parsley.  Parsley makes everything look prettier.  If the guests are convinced the food in front of them is “gourmet” they will be happy to be sent home starving.  They would normally pay through the nose to starve like that, and you have given them the opportunity to do it for free.
6. Go spicy.  The spicier the food, the harder it is to tell what it tastes like.  No one will know that you made a mistake, and they’ll be too busy drinking water and fanning themselves to care.
7. Change the place of origin.  If you say the recipe you tried is from your aunt in Long Island, guests will be much more appalled by its disgusting flavor than if it comes from New Guinea, or Zimbabwe, or Bangladesh.  People expect foreign foods to taste strange and have questionable palatability.

With the holiday season well under way,  slobs everywhere are making the ill-advised decision to host their own holiday parties.  Chances are, things won’t go so well, and only the strongest, most self-assured slobs will survive.  Just remember to smile, stay confident, and act like every disastrous mishap was exactly what you had been planning all along.  Just to reassure you that these holidays, too, shall pass, I’ll share a few personal accounts of social slobbery gone wrong.

A big part of what makes us slobs, is our disinterest in details.  We simply don’t have time for them, especially if they involve something we dislike doing…like cooking or cleaning.  Unfortunately, cooking for guests is all about paying attention to details.  It’s just that recipes are full of steps, and as slobs, we naturally find ourselves skipping steps without even noticing we’re doing it, or we may reinterpret the task to suit our own laziness and mood.

When my boyfriend and I were first dating, I wanted to impress him with a delicious pasta dinner.  Really this just involved buying premade ravioli with bottled spaghetti sauce and boiling it all in a pot.  I managed to fully cook the pasta, add the sauce, and transfer it all into a plastic Tupperware container.  Unfortunately, I set the container down on the burner I had just used to cook the pasta.

The container began to melt immediately, turning its bottom into gooey strings of plastic that were indistinguishable from the mozzarella cheese already in the dish.  My boyfriend sweetly ate every last bite, plastic and all, lying to me the whole time about how delicious it was.  I’m still surprised he didn’t die…or sue.  So let that be a lesson to you lovely slobs out there.  It pays to find a man who’s a good liar and who’s willing to risk death in exchange for sex.  Unfortunately, these days my boyfriend has discovered that it’s a lot MORE fun to ruthlessly mock me for my culinary incompetence.

Slobicity must run in my family.  My dad famously served a salad at a dinner party, and offered it to guest to toss.  As she tossed the greens, out flew the plastic pouch of salad toppings that came with the mix.  It hadn’t occurred to my dad that he’d have to unwrap or open anything.

He also made a dish that I can only assume was called “Chicken with Garlic Cloves.”  When my dad saw the word “cloves,” I guess decided that was all the information he needed.  The final disgusting dish was coated in the strong and offputting taste of cloves spice and may or may not have had any garlic in it at all.

My mom is no better.  She made a stew for my dad, when they were first married, that was supposed to include a hot chili pepper.  She mistakenly added a can of chilis instead, and my dad has had a slight lisp ever since.

As a slob, you’re a natural risk-taker, so I’m sure these stories haven’t discouraged you.  Just be prepared for the unexpected, and plan your emergency escape route just in case.

For more ways to cope with a social slob’s worst-case-scenario, check out these 7 Tricks for Fixing a Ruined Dish