Some cooking and seasoning missteps can be salvaged

The colleague sounded desperate.

“Food emergency…” the ominous email was titled.

Turns out the “emergency” was a batch of overly spicy chili that he knew he dare not serve for fear of burning out his diners’ mouths.

He wanted to know: Was there anything he could do to tame the heat?

After a sympathetic grimace, I fired off a quick response, as I do for most readers who call or email me to ask for help.

Serve it with lots of sour cream, I told him. Or, add more of everything else (water and/or tomatoes or tomato sauce, meat, beans, etc.)

Then I wondered if I might be missing something.

Both my suggestions were on target, I learned from a quick Internet search; all dairy products, not just sour cream, do cut heat. But there are at least two other possible fixes:

• Squeeze the juice of a couple of limes into the chili; acid helps to neutralize heat.

• Add half a can (or more) of crushed pineapple; the strong seasonings will mask the pineapple taste, while the pineapple will help to tame the heat.

Both of these ideas came from ehow.com.

Another website suggests serving the doomed chili as a sauce over rice, pasta or mashed potatoes.

Every home cook – even those of us who typically follow recipes to a T – is sometimes faced with having to fix a kitchen mishap.

Let’s explore a few common ones:

• Too-salty food: No, throwing in a raw potato to absorb the salt won’t work. (I know, darn.) So what to do?

If it’s soup, remove some of the liquid and replace it with plain water or unsalted broth. Likewise, if it’s a pasta or rice dish, remove some of the pasta or rice and replace it with the plain version (not ideal if the starch is mixed with a lot of other ingredients or if other seasonings are in play).

Adding a bit of lemon juice, apparently, also can help balance out the flavor.

• Vegetables cooked (inadvertently, of course) to mush: This one’s easy. Just throw the veggie into the blender or food processor with a little butter and turn it into a lovely puree. Stir in some broth to make it a cream soup.

Another idea: Mash up the vegetables and add 1/2 cup (or whatever you need) of broth, along with herbs and garlic. Then blend like soup and freeze the mixture in ice cube trays. Voila – small vegetable bouillon cubes to drop into soup as a flavor boost.

• Mushy/sticky rice: If it’s not too far gone, rinse it with cold water and separate the grains with your fingers. Or, turn it into fried rice with eggs, veggies and soy sauce.

• Overbeaten egg whites: I don’t think I’ve ever achieved this, but I’ve come close. If your overbeaten egg whites have separated into dry little curdled clumps, you need to act fast. Add another unbeaten white (one for every two over-whisked whites), continuing just until a smooth consistency returns. Then use immediately.

• Cake that falls apart/cheesecake that cracks: Dessert issues like these are easy to rescue. Turn the cake into a parfait or trifle, layering pieces with whipped cream or pudding and fresh fruit. Cover that unsightly cheesecake crack with chocolate sauce, whipped cream or sour cream or a pretty fruit topping.

Knowing I was putting this idea in my column, the spicy-chili colleague posed a few more real-life food conundrums, including this one:

• Overgrilled meat: Sure, you can just cut off the burnt/crisp parts. But to remoisten the dried-out meat, cover it with hot chicken or beef broth and let it sit a bit.

Some kitchen catastrophes, alas, simply cannot be fixed: gluey mashed potatoes (you didn’t use the food processor, did you?) and burnt foods, for example. To my knowledge, no one has yet discovered a way to effectively remove that awful scorched taste from a dish (as you know if you’ve ever scraped a burnt piece of toast).

If you find yourself in such a predicament, just toss the food, chock it up to the imperfect nature of life and order takeout.