there are few day-to-day experiences more disappointing than ruining food.

I just took a dirty bowl out of the sink, drained my pasta, then mindlessly dumped the pasta into the dirty bowl. I'd make more, but that was the last of it, and it's 2am...

It's funny how many primitive buttons this pushes:

- wasted time

- wasted money

- wasted food

- expectations of a delicious meal shattered

- it's your own fault

- and you're still hungry...

In reality, it's not a big deal, I can just go to the store or order a Pizza, but millions of years of evolution / survival instinct kick in to make you feel like shit. Nature's way of saying "hey, food is scarce, and hunting is hard, you should avoid fucking this up in the future".

You get a mini version of this whenever you drop the last delicious spoonful of ice cream down the front of your shirt instead of into your waiting mouth. It's always the last spoonful, isn't it? You know it's gonna be so good... you over-anticipate -- a brief moment of lapsed concentration -- and suddenly the spoon tilts just a bit too much, you bite metal, and that last ice cream covered chocolate brownie chunk rolls onto the floor. So disappointing...

no I think it speaks more to the fact that you're alienated from your species nature; if you were a caveman you'd eat that cave-pasta out of the dirty bowl, and lick that cave-ice-cream straight off the top of the mammoth droppings...well, I know I would...

How dirty is the dirty bowl? I'd probably eat it anyways, maybe leave the bottom pasta.

The caveman equivalent would be losing the food in a fire, spilling water, maybe even failing to catch an animal..., or having some other predator/tribe snatch it, etc. Loss of food is the feeling, how it's lost is not the point.

I know what you mean. Recently my friend was talking about this amazing pizza he'd bought all afternoon and then he cooked it and dropped it in the corridor, probably the least-cleaned area of the house since there isn't even a light in there so you can't see how dirty it is. The pizza had hair all over it and looked like sick on toast but he ate most of  it with this sad look on his face

  On 9/9/2011 at 8:25 AM, chaosmachine said:

I just took a dirty bowl out of the sink, drained my pasta, then mindlessly dumped the pasta into the dirty bowl. I'd make more, but that was the last of it, and it's 2am...

  On 9/9/2011 at 8:25 AM, chaosmachine said:

In reality, it's not a big deal, I can just go to the store or order a Pizza

what magic land do you live in where you can order a pizza or go to a store at 2am?! surely you must be off your tits on space dust perpetually due to the wonder of being able to do such a thing!

The magical stoner land of Canada, where the pizza chains are open til 3am. Also, we have 24h supermarkets...

couldn't you have boiled it up and rinsed it with more boiling water? i might have done that. depends how mucky the bowl was.

rinse (CLEAN) the pasta under tap, submerge in boiling water (or just the sauce, but maybe for your peace of mind, boiling water would be best) and then eat it

edit:

  On 9/9/2011 at 11:28 AM, keltoi said:

couldn't you have boiled it up and rinsed it with more boiling water? i might have done that. depends how mucky the bowl was.

or that i suppose

edit 2: this could easily be in the first world problems thread innit

Exactly just boil the pasta again for a few minutes. I don't know how many times I've cremated a pizza in the oven. I have to say there are far far worse things than wasting food ... that shit don't even register on 1 out of 100 of human misery.

I totally know that feeling. I have oversalted many dishes and just been gutted at having this lovely-looking but inedible pile of stuff in front of me.

i hate ruining food - it seriously almost makes me cry with frustration - like you've just cooked the most awesome roast dinner with all the trimmings then drop it all on the floor carrying it to the table to eat...absolutely heartbreaking.

That's not ruining food! Brush that shit off! Spit-shine it, blow on it, rinse it under water!

Ruining food is having the cap to your Italian seasoning spices fall off and accidentally dumping 1/2 cup of it into your soup.

  On 9/9/2011 at 11:09 AM, Coalbucket PI said:

I know what you mean. Recently my friend was talking about this amazing pizza he'd bought all afternoon and then he cooked it and dropped it in the corridor, probably the least-cleaned area of the house since there isn't even a light in there so you can't see how dirty it is. The pizza had hair all over it and looked like sick on toast but he ate most of it with this sad look on his face

sometimes you just gotta eat it. one day at work i dropped a bowl of pasta upside-down onto a bare sub-floor - on a demolition site - in the pouring rain, but i had no money and no other food, so i picked up what i could and ate it, like a homeless fuckin boss. there were a few wood splinters, chunks of drywall, mortar and lead(?) paint chips i had to be on the lookout for, but i survived and eating that cold greasy crusty slop was better than being malnourished all day.

"if you can eat ass... chow down!"

  On 9/9/2011 at 4:39 PM, encey said:

That's not ruining food! Brush that shit off! Spit-shine it, blow on it, rinse it under water!

 

Ruining food is having the cap to your Italian seasoning spices fall off and accidentally dumping 1/2 cup of it into your soup.

yeah, i know what you mean but it's not often i ruin food like that although the other day I was making up some basic sauce for pasta (tomatoes, onion, garlic, sausage) and on tasting it in the early stages was disappointed to discover it basically tasted of nothing but burnt onion - which was odd as I'd not burnt any onions at all whilst constructing it, and after having (lightly) fried the onions & garlic in olive oil, then took out the pieces of onion & garlic specifically so they didn't get burned whilst i fried the meat in the oniony/garlicy oil... anyway, upshot of it all was that i threw the whole lot away straight out of the pan and had hamburgers instead.

about a week ago, I was making rice a roni mexican style rice... when I put the amount of water the directions told me in the pot, my sons started to act up and I scolded them for about a minute. when i went back I mindlessly put the same amount of water in the pot again. the rice sucked when i was done and everyone was pissed off!

put about 5 times too much pepper in my jalepeno shrimp cream pasta. totally fucked it up. and yes, it really left a mark on my night.

OH... we went to the beach a few weekends ago. and we bought some sub sandwiches from the market and threw them in the ice chest still in the plastic container. when I wanted to eat the sandwich on the beach, I opened the chest and there was a little bit of water in the container and the bottom peace of bread was really soggy and I let out a pretty angry "SON OF A BITCH!" and a couple of people around us heard me and probably thought I was talking to my kids... I grabbed the top half of the sandwich which was not touched by the water, folded it and ate it that way... I was still a little pissed off that the bottom half of the sandwich was soggy.

Eww yeah, that's the grossest, soggy sammich bread. Fuck that!

wet bread is maddening

soggy bottoms suck