This is an idea I’m stealing from Theresa, who takes it from Karin:

Cooking Disasters that Were and Were Not

A few years after we were married, in the Triassic period (c’mon, I’m not so old as to remember the Jurassic), and long before we had kids of our own, we were baby-sitting for our niece.

I can’t remember the exact reason we were there, but her folks were out of town, so we stayed at their house. This was a weekend thing, from Friday to Sunday, and Saturday morning I woke up early with our niece and decided I’d try and do something nice.

I would make pancakes. From scratch.

And, I did. I combined eggs, flour, a little sugar, and baking powder. Only I had a little problem. My sister in-law loved to cook. Loved loved loved it. And she had these big rubbermaid containers full of ingredients. But — they weren’t labeled. I, especially at the time, have a hard time telling baking powder from baking soda from arsenic. I’m just pretty much all male (and not in a good, Emeril sorta way) in the kitchen. So I took my best guess with some of the ingredients, and I made pancakes.

And I cooked them perfectly, not burned or anything. And served them with butter and syrup. And my poor niece, who was probably three or four at the most, took one bite and sat there silently, staring at her plate, chewing very slowly. Finally, after a couple minutes, she said carefully “I don’t like these.”

I was working on the next batch at the stove and stopped in mid-flip. Okay, I figured, kids can be finicky. Probably wants more syrup. So I took a bite of a pancake.

Oh. My. God. These were the worst pancakes I have ever tasted.

“Okay, hon, we can have cereal or toast or something.” Something I didn’t have to mix from scratch. I poured the remaining batter down the drain and scooped the finished “pancakes” (whatever they really were) into the dog dish.

The dog never even took a bite, she just sniffed and then gave me probably the same look that Caesar gave Brutus, and walked away. They were that bad.