It happens to the best of us sooner or later. You spend ages sweating over a wonderful meal for your guests and then, at the last minute, something goes horribly wrong. Maybe it’s your fault (you burnt the pastry), maybe it’s their fault (they forgot to mention they were bringing her mother who’s visiting this week), maybe it’s no one’s fault (the oven is on the blink).
Whatever the cause, right now you just want to know how to remedy it without anyone else noticing. So here are some quick suggestions to help you.
Assuming you’ve tried standing it in hot water, palette knife round the edge, that sort of thing:
• Sometimes the container is dispensible and you can make a policy decision to sacrifice the tupperware.
• Slice the thing up and serve it differently from the way you’d intended.
• Make a bit of a mess turning it out and then hide this under slices of lemon or whipped cream or whatever is appropriate.
If you have time, turn the whole thing out and try again with more gelatine or whatever setting agent you’re using. If you haven’t time for this, serve the dish up sloppy or runny but make it look intentional. Pour it into individual ramekins to serve, or present your raspberry mousse as raspberry soup (put it in a tureen and garnish it and your guests are guaranteed to believe it was intentional).
You need to be confident here and make out it’s supposed to look like this. After all, the taste isn’t going to be affected. So just serve your steamed pudding as ‘Sussex flat cake’ and sound convincing. Unrisen foods can be a bit stodgy so serve it with something light such as whipped cream (whipping it makes it look as if it was deliberate).
There are various options depending on how burnt the thing is:
• Discard just the burnt bits and bulk out the rest. For example leave the burnt bits of curry in the bottom of the pan and serve extra rice to make up for it.
• Beef up the taste of the accompaniments to singed food. For example, overly-browned chicken pieces might taste great with caramelised onions.
• Cut off the burnt edges of a cake and ice it to hide the fact.
• Scrape off burnt surfaces of hard foods like crusty bread with a grater.
Chef’s tip
If you burn pastry really badly, remove it completely and serve what’s underneath in some other way. Replace the lid of a steak and kidney pie with sliced potatoes, or the top of an apple pie with whipped cream or meringue.
It’s going to taste fine; this is just a presentation issue. If the collapse is minimal, hide it with some kind of garnish. If it’s substantial, find another way to present it – in individual dishes, chopped up, in a pancake – whatever works and you have the ingredients and equipment for.
If custards and sauces curdle, you can generally pass them through a fine sieve or put them in the blender to remix. For cakes and sponges just keep going and it won’t show in the finished cake.
Chef’s tip
To salvage a split Hollandaise or mayonnaise sauce, start again with fresh egg yolks in the bowl and gradually add the curdled mixture as you would the butter or oil. If you’ve used your last egg, substitute it with a spoonful of boiling water instead.
• Use a microwave if you have one.
• Cook it anyway. Just make sure it’s well cooked through. You’ll get tougher meat but at least it will be ready on time.
• Speed up the defrosting by putting the thing in something waterproof, such as a plastic bag, and putting it under running cold water.
• Put it in front of a cold electric fan (no, I don’t know why it should work either). Stand it on a metal tray as this will conduct heat better.
• Cut it into smaller pieces which will thaw out quicker.
• Serve it frozen. This isn’t a good move with raw meat, but a frozen mousse can reasonably be served up and called a parfait.
• Eat later.
If your meat has dried out, just make a sauce to go with it (that’s what gravy is for). If you’re stumped for how to do this fast, boil down double cream until it’s reduced to the consistency of a sauce. Add cooking juices, herbs, spices, wine or other flavours to make it tasty.
It’s such a pain when half your meal is ready and the other half isn’t cooked. Here are some ideas to help:
• Delay the start of the meal. Find something to serve as a starter to make it look deliberate – a packet of crisps or some Bombay mix. Or take a longer break between main course and pudding (it will make you look very relaxed and continental).
• Put whatever you can in a low oven to keep warm. Put butter on vegetables to stop them drying out.
• Speed up the thing that isn’t ready if you can. For example, take the broccoli off the heat, remove the stems and then put it back on to finish cooking.
• Abandon it. Difficult with the main course, but a side vegetable that won’t play ball won’t be missed by anyone but you.
It’s gone off, the children ate it without asking, you forgot to buy it… whatever the reason, what do you do when a vital part of your meal isn’t there? One of these ideas may help:
• If the meat is uneatable, serve the same sauce with pasta instead.
• If the potatoes have gone squishy, serve rice instead.
• If one vegetable in your casserole or sauce is mouldy, just replace it with something else.
• If the main flavouring is missing – say the kids ate the chocolate for the mousse – make a lemon mousse instead.
• If you can’t make pastry or crumble because you’re out of flour, use a different topping, or even none at all.
Ideally just delay the meal. But if one of your lunch guests has to rush off and catch a train or something, start by accepting that you have to change the menu. Then cook the meat or fish or whatever it is in smaller pieces. That will be much quicker. You can either put them in the oven like that, or design a new dish that involves grilling or sautéeing.
There are two basic options when you have four chicken breasts between five of you, or six prepared desserts in ramekin dishes and a seventh person arrives without warning:
• Chop it up – for example, four chicken breasts, each cut into five strips, will serve five people nicely.
• Pool it – pour those desserts into a one large dish and serve from that. If it looks a mess, cover it with whipped cream or some kind of garnish.
Some foods are just famously difficult to get right. Potatoes and rice are the two most obvious examples of this. Here are a few tips on how to cope when they go wrong.
• Beat them with a wooden spoon. If that doesn’t work, push them through a sieve. If they go cold, reheat them in the serving dish in the oven, with a little butter on the top.
• Alternatively, fry up some onions and add a sprinkling of rosemary. Put the whole lot through the blender with the potato. It won’t remove all the lumps, but it won’t show because the onion will be intentionally lumpy too.
Put a bit of butter in with them. It will burn slightly and add colour. Obviously move them up to the top of a hot oven if you can, too. Failing all that, take them out of the oven and deep fry them to finish them off.
Just mash them instead. If you’re boiling them in their skins, squish them with the back of a spoon and serve them as ‘crushed potatoes’.
These are those potatoes you slice, cover in either stock or cream, and bake in the oven. You might add onions or cheese. For some reason they frequently take five times longer to cook than your recipe says. If this happens (and you don’t have a microwave) drain off any excess liquid and sauté them in a frying pan. Any stray traces of cream or cheese will brown nicely.
For how to cook rice so it doesn’t burn or stick, see here. However, if it’s too late for that:
• Try to salvage sticky rice by putting it in a colander and pouring boiling water through it.
• Failing that, form it into balls (with a beaten egg if necessary) and fry them. Deep fry them if you have the wherewithal. Then serve them on the side as rice balls.
• If the rice is burnt, lay a slice of bread on top of it in the pan. Put a tight fitting lid on the pan and leave for 10 minutes. The bread should absorb much of the burnt taste. Now spoon out the rice that’s OK very carefully, discarding anything borderline as it will taste burnt.