Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

I’ll be honest, it took me a bit to think through this prompt. I, personally, alone, have not had any baking or cooking fails that I would count as “epic”.

I do, however, have one with my siblings for a family holiday meal.

Some brief background: while my brother has not been diagnosed (to my knowledge) with any sort of gluten sensitivity, he has noted that he feels better when he doesn’t have any gluten products and made the choice to go gluten free.

So, every family meal we have typically has some gluten free component, which in general is easier than you think. This has been going on for several years at this point and is part of my family’s new normal.

One Thanksgiving my sister and I were trying to follow an instant pot mac n cheese recipe using gluten free rice-based macaroni. She said she had made it before, and I had no reason to doubt her, so I followed her lead.

We measured everything out, and placed the pasta and liquids (I think it was a combination of water and milk, but I could be misremembering the milk part) into the instant pot. She hit some buttons, started the timer, and went to work on some other dishes while we waited.

It can’t have been more than 10 minutes, MAYBE 15 at the most, and the noodles should have been done and ready for us to add the sauce ingredients. Unfortunately, we  made a mistake somewhere, and when my sister went to vent the instant pot it started spitting a milky liquid (maybe that’s why I thought milk was involved) which caused us to panic a little and carefully throw a towel over it to prevent the hot liquid from getting everywhere.

As soon as the spitting stopped, we opened the lid. The pasta was still swimming in water. My sister said it should be fine and that we just needed to drain them, so she got a large spoon to try and get some out to check that the noodles were cooked appropriately before moving to the sink. To our horrible surprise we found that the noodles basically collapsed and rapidly turned into a mush. My sister quickly dug in to see if she could find any noodles that survived, but she only made it worse. She mixed the rice pasta macaroni too much, which in its current state didn’t take much at all, and the whole thing turned into a hot, sticky, homogeneous mass.

We looked at each other in mild shock and disbelief before we started laughing at the absolute disaster. We immediately wrote it off as a failure and played with it for a couple seconds. I tried poking it with my finger and it was almost like Oobleck the way it stuck to me.

As it cooled down and solidified more, I noticed the change in firmness and bounciness was almost like what I had seen in those videos of people making mochi. Then it dawned on me why. Mochi is made with rice flour, and as I had mentioned earlier the box of gluten free pasta was rice based.

We more or less made instant pot mochi.