Recover from Eight Cooking Disasters

It’s 6:45 p.m., the guests are due in 15 minutes, and the carrots you’d cooked using that fancy recipe look like limp little symbols of failure. Real Simple has eight ideas for fixing food that, usually through neglect or distracted cooking, goes awry, including a few common ones like mushy potatoes, crumbly cake and flavorless tomatoes. You can help disguise those carrots, by the way, if you sprinkle some pepper and parmesan on them. For our more culinary-minded readers—what last-minute fixes have you used to salvage dinner parties or just fancy dinners? Share your recipe hacks in the comments.