Worst culinary disasters

[Quantum Butterfly]

Or, Things That Go Bump In The Oven

My mom, like many moms out there, likes to do things to leftovers. This time, the leftover item in question was a badly overcooked leg of lamb (Mom couldn't find her meat thermometer when cooking it.) So she got the brilliant idea to make it into a meat pie sort of thing. Alarm bells immediately went off in my head.

"Meat pie?" I inquired warily.

"Yeah. I'll cook it up in the slow cooker with plenty of carrots and potatoes and things, and tomorrow we can bake it up with some biscuits on top."

Ohhh-kay. Mom's success rate with the slow cooker is about 50-50. This goes down drastically when the intended product is anything like a stew or soup. This already sounded ominous, but she would not be swayed. Into the slow cooker went the lamb, along with various vegetables, canned broth and probably some other stuff, where it bubbled most of last Sunday.

Monday night we were spared the Lamb Slop, as Mom had to work late. She suggested that Dad, Quantum Sister or I cook it up; after one look at the congealed mess in the fridge, the verdict was a unanimous no.

Thus came Tuesday night, and this time Mom was home to cook her creation. It smelled as bad as it looked, and the smell only got worse as it cooked. I thanked Og that I am 20 years old and therefore not obliged to eat whatever is provided; I can make my own food if that's what I want to do. All too soon it was done, and Quantum Sister, being braver or more desperate (or both) actually took a bowlful. After one bite, she turned to me and said, "QB, you're not gonna like this." I thanked her sincerely for the warning. Mom sort of scowled, took a bowl to my grandma, and returned with a bowl of her own.

The look on Mom's face as she tried a bite of her creation was absolutely priceless. Evidently it was worse than I thought. Mom isn't fussy, so a dish has to be pretty darn bad if SHE won't eat it. After a few bites, she and Quantum Sister decided to do what I had planned on all along; find something else to eat. Dad was warned away from the Lamb Slop, and we fed it to the dogs for the next couple nights. They loved it.

Anyone else feel like sharing a Culinary Disaster story? Tell, tell!

[Quantum Butterfly]

Oops... my apologies for the double post If a mod would delete the duplicate, I would be much obliged.

[vertigo]

When I was 12 I baked a birthday cake for my mother while she was out. Unfortunately we ran out of flour - but as luck would have it there was another bag way back in the pantry.

Turns out it was Rye flour. Who knew?

So we all had iced chocolate rye bread for her birthday. The best part was trying not to break the candles as I forced them into the "crust".

Good times....

[Little Nemo]

I had a co-worker who had just bought an ice cream maker. He was also reknowned for his love of spicy food. So as a joke I passed along a recipe for jalapeno sherbet I had.

He actually made it. In the spirit of adventure, I gave it a try. The conversation went like this:

"This is ... interesting."
"Is it good?"
"I'm going to stand on interesting."
"Interesting?"
"Yes...interesting."
"Anything else?"
"How about different?"
"Different how?"
"Well I usually like ice cream. But this is different."

[BrotherCadfael]

My maternal grandmother was a heavenly cook. We all loved to have dinner at her house, which we did every holiday, and sometimes in-between.

My paternal grandmother, on the other hand...

She boiled hot dogs. I know this is occasionally done, but these were low-quality dogs, and Nana would boil them to the point where they were slimy and falling apart.

She once made an apple pie, ran out of apples, and tried to make it up with grapefruit. Not a good combination.

She once took some leftover steak, ground it up, and made a meat spread for sandwiches. Again, she ran short, so she stretched it with peanut butter. Crunchy peanut butter.

When we went to visit her (she lived quite a distance away, so a visit was usually a multi-day affair), the first thing we did after leaving her house was to find a restaurant.

[lorene]

My mother was truly an awful cook and I think that part of this was due to some resentment at having to cook at all. She would rush through things and serve up the results with a grimace and a warning that we were to eat what she put in front of us. One of the standouts that my sister and I still talk about was a typical Saturday lunch of soup and grilled cheese. She would use condensed soup but couldn't be bothered to actually measure out the can of water to add to it, so she would invariably just throw in too little water, so the result was really thick, icky soup. The grilled cheese would also be a hurried affair, cooked over a too-high flame, so that the outside of the sandwiches would be burnt and the inside still cold and not melted at all.

Then, there is the infamous Christmas of 1996, the last time we allowed her to cook a dinner. Why? The 3 cases of food poisoning which broke out. My sister was spared, but only because she refused to eat anything but the potatoes.

Yikes, I could go on all day.

[FairyChatMom]

Dunno if this was my worst, but it was truly the most memorable. I wanted to make a meatloaf. I didn't have any breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs. I did have corn flakes.

Do yourself a favor - don't try this at home.

I did eat all of it eventually, because I was a poor student. But it was not good. At all.

[MadPoet]

I once tried to make a microwave rice bowl, but apprently did something wrong, as when I opened the microwave door, the mass inside started moving towards me.

Apparently the rice caught fire and turned into some carbon goo.

Did not eat.

[Grelby]

Well. There was that time I made cornbread but forgot the sugar and baking powder. Cornmeal is BLAND stuff. It literally has almost no flavor. Managed to eat this dense, cornmeal pancake with lots of honey.

Recently, I tried making a quesadilla-type thing with a couple flower tortillas, cheddar cheese, lettuce and mushrooms. The mushrooms were my big mistake. For some reason, the mushrooms were disgusting. Never again.

[ivylass]

Not me, but my son. He tried to make brownies from scratch, bless his heart.

Only instead of using flour, he used some stuff he found in a bag on the counter. It was white, with pictures of bakers on it. He didn't notice it was powdered sugar.

He also didn't mix the eggs very well, and he used a jelly roll pan instead of a 9 x 12 baking dish. We got a very thin, crunchy brown substance with streaky egg yolks through it.

Since then, he's turned into a halfway decent cook for an almost 14 year old. As I told him, the recipe is the rule, not a guideline.

[NinjaChick]

A clove of garlic is much bigger than a bulb. If a recipe calls for three bulbs of garlic, and you want lots of garlic, putting in 4 cloves will be very...garlicky.

Many years ago, my father was making brownies for a family gathering. He makes really, really good brownies - tons of added in M&M's, peanut-butter chips, chocolate chips, frosting on top...they're good.

Our oven was going kinda fritzy, though. So dad (the evervescent engineering geek) broke out a high-tech digital thermometer meant for things like this, I s'pose. He had the thermometer set on degrees [i]celcius[i]. Not Farinheit, as the recipe expected.

Heh. We got some interesting...things. The inside of each little cube was still liquidy. The ones on the edge of the pan truly required someone putting nearly all their weight on a butcher knife to cut them. Once you got them cut, they were actually pretty good - sort of like a hard candy, really.

Or I could tell about when I blew up a kitchen with a jar of applesauce, but that's a li'l bit involved...

[Tansu]

(psst - cloves and bulbs are the other way about - a clove is the little thing and a bulb is a whole head of garlic)

I've actually blocked out the memory of my worst culinary disasters. There was something with turkey meat where the meat went dry and the sauce was watery and vile, but I can't remember what the hell I was aiming at. And of course there were the fried onion rings that I tried to reheat in the microwave. They caught fire and melted the microwaveable container they were in.

Oh, and there was that time that the cream separated when I was making ice-cream, and ended up with milk ice with lots of droplets of butter in it. I managed to rescue that, kind of, by melting it, taking the butter off and using it to make a cake.

[UrbanChic]

JuanitaTech is a spectacularly fabulous cook. She can do no wrong in the kitchen. She's got the Midas touch and folks come from far and wide just to sample the wondrous creations that originate from her kitchen.

Bearing that in mind, I once started assembling the ingredients for what would inevitably turn out to be a delicious meatloaf. When it came time to add a bit of ketchup, I discovered the only ketchup I had in the kitchen was some green Heinz ketchup I'd purchased for the kids. I had no choice and used it.

The resulting dish looked like it had a bad case of motion sickness.

[Dijon Warlock]

My worst one thus far (knock wood) hasn't been too awful, but it did end up in the garbage rather than my stomach.

Dish of the evening: lasagna.

Intended ingredient: frozen chopped spinach.

What comes in a very similar package and is also green: frozen chopped broccoli.

Hey, I was an optimist. I thought, "How bad can it be?"

Bad.

[Orange Skinner]

I didn't make it, but my very elderly cousin did.

It was Christmas, three years ago, and we assigned her somethign simple to make. You know, on account of her being my very elderly cousin. She was going to make a Jell-O in the shape of a Christmas Tree. Okay, no promblem.

Wrong. Halfway through, she had a momentary lapse of reason and throught she was making....A COLE SLAW. She proceeded to add cabbage, mayonnaise, the works, to the Tree Mold that was just beginning to turn into a mature Jell-O mold.

When she realized what she'd done, she brought it to Christmas Dinner anyway. Everyone thought it was a vegtable dip. It was definitely not a vegtable dip. It was a giant Christmas Cole Slaw Jell-O Jiggler. Anguish. Tears.

[Motorgirl]

Macaroni & Cheese

Fiance wanted Macaroni and Cheese, not the boxed kind, but the kind his aunt made, which he swore was the best macaroni and cheese EVER. He didn't have the recipe for it, and he couldn't seem to remember to call her & get it, so I had him tell me what he remembered about it: elbow macaroni, american cheese, milk & flour.

So I set off to the store to get the ingredients thinking: Harumph! I'm a good cook. American cheese? How plebian! I'm going to be gourment and make maraconi & cheese that's even better than his aunt's because I know how to use high quality ingredients. Blah blah blah, more snobby blathering...

So I ended up with havarti, gruyere and one other cheese, melted it, mixed it with some whole milk & a little flour, and a little dry mustard for zip. Well, it was grainy, the cheeses didn't melt together properly. I've melted cheeses together before and been successful, so I decide that it was just a fluke, and since I'm mixing it with macaroni and baking it, no biggie, it will all turn out OK.

It didn't - the end result was lumpy, with a sandy mouthfeel and the blandest thing I've ever tasted in my life. The next weekend he called his aunt, got her recipe and we made it - it is the best mac-n-cheese ever - he wasn't lying.

[Harriet the Spry]

It involved beef liver, milk and prunes. It was an actual recipe, and I figured, since it was actually published in a cookbook, it couldn't be as bad as it sounds. It was at least as bad as it sounds. I took the entire thing outside the apartment dumpster at night in the middle of winter.

[Mirth]

I love my paternal grandmother, but the woman can not cook. Part of the problem is that she does not believe in throwing anything away-- no matter how green and furry. Also she had a strict rule of cleaning your plate. The only saving grace was that you didn't have to put anything on your plate.

I remember spending the night with her one weekend. After skipping dinner and breakfast, I was starving by lunchtime the second day. To my amazement, my grandmother served nachos for lunch. 'Nachos!', I thought. Just chips and cheese. It was edible and mana from heaven to my hungry little body. I took a huge plateful and after one bite was horrified to discover that hiding under the cheese was sliced squash. That was the last time I ever put more than a teaspoon of food on my plate when visiting my grandmother.

[BadBaby]

My mother is an excellent cook and even better baker so in all her years she's had only two real failures. The first was a batch of black eyed peas. She decided to spice them up a bit with some sort of salsa mixed right in. It was tasty even though it was on the edge heat-wise. We froze it and then re-heated it a month or so later. Holy Beelzebub it was hot! The leftovers were worse, I don't think my dad was kidding when he said he had blisters on his tongue. There was still a bunch left when Mom decided to toss it, fearing a nuclar meltdown if re-heated another time.

Her second boo-boo was a tuna casserole. Normally her tuna 'wiggle' is excellent-- I hate the stuff normally but look forward to hers. Problem was, this one time, she didn't check to see if the milk was okay before adding it to the other ingredients. It smelled fine when it was placed on the table, so my dad put a big forkful in his mouth and then just about died. Choking, coughing, gasping, spitting, it was horrible to watch. Funny too.

Then there's my sister who is a terrible cook. Only person I know who makes solid soup. She puts dry pasta into the soup and is always confuzzled why there's never enough liquid and the pasta is crunchy inside.

Me, I made a ganache once that refused to set up, so the cake was not so much enrobed as lying in a puddle of soft, truffle-like chocolate.

[Ferris]

Not mine, but a student flatmate’s – tinned salmon bolognaise. Here’s what the judges said:

Visual appeal: “Not impressed with either the peculiar grey colour, or the vomit-like consistency.” 0/10.

Aroma: “Strong and acidic – definitely off-putting.” 1/10.

Texture: “Remarkably watery, with distinctive grittiness.” 1/10.

Taste: “A battery-acid tartness overpowers any subtle nuances that this dish once aspired to. Any garlic, basil or other herb or seasoning that may be present is utterly redundant. The tomato appears to have been treated with industrial dry-cleaning solvents prior to inclusion, and the salmon replaced with the contents of a vacuum cleaner’s dust bag.” 0/10.

In another student-related story, I probably helped to avert a culinary disaster when a different flatmate wanted to confirm that his piece of chicken was still “ok to put in his stir-fry”. Two of us managed to persuade him that once chicken has progressed from grey to dark red and in fact shows a certain green tinge, it had certainly passed its ‘Best Before’ date, even though he “thought he’d only had it on the shelf about a week”.

[ShibbOleth]

I'm actually a fairly good cook, but sometimes things go awry. One such occasion was, sadly, for a Christmas dinner where my father and I decided to cook a prime rib. I'd never done one, mainly for budgetary reasons, and he bought a beautiful, 10 lb prime rib. We cooked it per some instructions for a recipe we had. Sadly, we followed the recipe to the T (note to Ivylass: your rule is for baking, not cooking; in cooking it's the other way around), and cooked for exactly the minutes alotted. Okay, in fairness, we missed one crucial part of the recipe: it called for a ribroast with the ribs still attached. So the time for cooking was off by a couple of hours. We all love good beef cooked rare (for prime rib. Most other meats should be no more than medium rare). Sadly, this gorgeous, expensive cut of meat was cooked well done. And inedible in that form. It did make for spectacular tacos the next night, so it was a total loss. We had the side dishes for the main course for that Christmas.

[lauramarlane]

The garlic bulb is the big thing, the clove is the little thing. If only I had known that when I made my first lasagna and garlic bread. The lasagna called for four cloves, the bread three. For many years after that the smell of garlic made me nauseous--fortunately I've overcome that in recent years, but the memory of that mess lingers on!

[Rabid_Squirrel]

HA! FairyChatMom, I see your meatloaf and see you a softball sized scotched egg. Had a flatmate who would make the bloody things using sausage meat and cornflakes instead of mince and breadcrumbs. At least he didn't subsitute the egg.

Or the time when we asked another flatmate when is dinner going to be cooked.
FM: "Oh, when the pasta's boiled"
Me: "When did you put it on?"
FM: "Oh, about half an hour ago"

[Rabid_Squirrel]

It should read "I see your meatloaf and raise you a softball sized scotched egg"

[pepperlandgirl]

My husband loves plain white rice. I can't stand it. So he tries to be thougtful and make gravy or sauce to along with it when he makes dinner.
One memorable time he mixed chicken broth, apple juice, and brandy.
I told him not to worry about making gravy anymore.

[Ms Macphisto]

I thankfully missed out on this one, but a friend of mine decided he was going to make his own chai tea. Unfortunately, while the recipe called for cloves, he didn't know what cloves are. So he decided to throw in a couple of cloves of garlic. The result has become legendary. My father also has a similar story from his student days. One of his roommates decided to make spaghetti sauce but didn't know what kind of seasoning to use. He chose allspice, since spaghetti sauce has all sorts of spices in it.

The only thing I've made that's been completely inedible was shortly after I moved into my own place. I didn't realise how long you have to cook dried beans to make them edible, and I (stupidly) didn't bother checking how they were doing before draining the water and adding them to the rest of the dish. I think I nearly chipped a tooth.

[thatDDperson]

I started cooking when I was nine. by the time I was 12, I pretty much had the basics down. My sister (18 months older) couldn't stand the idea that I could do something she couldn't, and watched me for a few days, then announced that SHE was going to cook dinner.

Roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans. Sounds fairly easy?

No salt, no pepper, no milk, butter or anything else. Burned meat, raw inside, instant mashed potato flakes and hot water, and canned green beans with nothing done to them but heat applied.

We took a few moments to doctor up the potatoes and beans, then sliced, seasoned and broiled the meat, and made Fake You Out Gravy (where there are no pan drippings, you just make a roux and fake it) and pulled it off, but it was touch and go for a few moments there.

Two days later she attempted a 7 minute frosting that necessitated repainting the kitchen.

[meyer]

When I was about 12 I was making ginger snaps. I had made them before, but for some reason I screwed up and put in garlic instead of ginger.

There are many things that garlic can be fabulous in. Needless to say, cookies are not amoung them.

[gotpasswords]

Many many years ago in my family, a birthday party tradition was making ice cream with a hand-cranked ice cream maker. As luck happened, on my birthday, we had a disaster.

Normally with the hand-crank things, the cranking gets progressively harder as the ice cream mixture succumbs to the cold of the rock salt and ice and freezes. This particular batch wasn't getting harder to turn. Eventually, curiosity led us to open the thing up. Inside the tank was two gallons of chocolate brine.

The old tank had rust spots on the outside and the hard rock salt and ice mix scraped its way through the tank and mixed in with what would have been delicious chocolate ice cream.

Did I mention this was my birthday party? And that I was about ten at the time? Unburdened with the knowledge of what brine tastes like, I grabbed a spoon and took a tast of what was supposed to be my birthday ice cream. <urk!>

[Little Nemo]

My friend's wife has the blandest taste buds I've ever encountered. She won't eat anything the least bit "exotic" including Chinese, Mexican, Italian, BBQ, etc. The most exotic food she'll eat is Pizza Hut pizza. In factg, she told me she had never eaten pizza until my friend bought her a slice when they were on a date in their twenties.

But my friend says she's a wild woman in comparison to her parents. As mentioned above they wouldn't even eat pizza because they thought it was too ethnic. Which was why I was surprised when I heard they used to have tacos.

Then I heard their recipe for tacos. Buy a box of store brand premade taco shells. Buy a package of ground beef. Fry beef until brown. Insert beef in taco shell. Consume.

No spices. No salsa or pico de galla. No guacamole or sour cream. No cheese. No lettuce or tomato. No salt or pepper. No ketchup or mustard. Nothing. Ground beef in a corn meal shell.

[Flowerchild]

Okay, once when I was about 13, I decided to make cookies, now mind you I was a pretty good cook, I could make what my mom made, which was pretty much alot.

Anyway, I wanted to make choco chip cookies and got the recipe out of our big betty crocker cook book. only we didnt have baking soda or baking powder, and the redipe called for both, but the amount was so small i figured no one would notice. The resulting cookies were bricks, with chocolaty chunks.th only one who would even look at them was my dad, who ate the whole batch, mind you he would have eaten a dead cat if you called it a cookie.

[Spacegirl]

Originally posted by Motorgirl
Macaroni & Cheese

The next weekend he called his aunt, got her recipe and we made it - it is the best mac-n-cheese ever - he wasn't lying.

Motorgirl, I love mac and cheese, would it be possible to e-mail you to get that recipe?

[Cicero]

I once had to cook tripe. I was longing for it. And lo and behold I found it on sale at the butchers. But you had to buy 2 kilograms (5 pounds) of it. So, I bought all this tripe and took it home. Does anyone realise how much tripe there is in 2 kg (tripe for uninitiated is sheeps stomachs, or guts).

I carried this upstairs and boiled it. I didn't realise the longer you boiled it the toughter (and smellier) it got. By mid afternoon, flies were leaving fresh dog shit to come to my kitchen. It was at that time I knew I had a disaster.

What to do? I buried it all in the back yard. Apart from it raining it still stunk. And something dug it up- I suspect we have a hyena in Australia. And nobody knows why.

[Motorgirl]

Originally posted by BluMoon
Motorgirl, I love mac and cheese, would it be possible to e-mail you to get that recipe?

Definitely - check my profile.

[Ferret Herder]

Originally posted by Mirth
To my amazement, my grandmother served nachos for lunch. 'Nachos!', I thought. Just chips and cheese. It was edible and mana from heaven to my hungry little body. I took a huge plateful and after one bite was horrified to discover that hiding under the cheese was sliced squash. That was the last time I ever put more than a teaspoon of food on my plate when visiting my grandmother.

This reminds me of what my sister told me, about a friend of hers whose mom made chocolate chip cookies with zucchini in them (to be healthy and use up the produce in their garden), to the extent that he thought all chocolate chip cookies were like that and avoided them from anyone else. It was only when he was an adult and grudgingly tried one that his girlfriend made that he realized his mom was the weird one.

JulKatBo: I did that once as well when making vegetarian chili, which really disappointed me since it tasted like it would have been good otherwise.

I also made a tofu stirfry using the tofu from the "juice-box" packaging - ew, it was mushy and tasteless. Trust me on this, only use that for tofu "scrambled eggs", pumpkin pie, and other soft things. If you want it to be chewy, get the tofu that comes in a deep dish filled with water and covered with plastic.

I made a curried chickpeas with spinach dish a few months back, following the cookbook's recipe. I couldn't stand more than a couple forkfuls, and threw the rest out. It tasted vile and slimy; I have no idea if that was a mistake on my part or how the recipe was written, but I don't intend to try it again to see.

[DeVena]

My aunt, Lord love her, has been transplanted from Boston to Florida. And now thinks she can cook southern food. She can not. Trust me on this. She can't cook any other food either, but Dear God! The things she's done to innocent food! I wrote a cookbook that all my aunts contributed to and I sold copies to my friends - Home Cooking Recipes. As I sold each book, I explained to read Auntie's recipes for comic value, never actually try them.

Allspice and apples in meatloaf (kinda weird but not too bad) and she doesn't like ketchup - but she used cocktail sauce instead. Apples, horseradish and allspice should NEVER be in the same dish. EVER! Then there's the vegi-cheez casserole (made with cheez whiz) that if you run out of corn, just substitute pinapple. And her giblet gravy recipe - just reading it is enough. She's just got this thing about allspice. It's just wrong!

[ladydisco]

Hmm...there was the time last Thanksgiving when my sister and I overbasted the turkey, and it fell apart into a disgusting pile of limp meat and bones (tasted good though). We took a picture of it for posterity.

Then last Christmas, we reheated some corn/veggie mix in the oven and left it too long.

Oh, and lastly, at the same Christmas dinner as the Corn Incident, I made skor bars and didn't grease the pan. Nothing in the toolbox was able to get it out.

[dantheman]

Many of these tales are absolute howlers! I love this thread.

Here's mine. I had been living on my own a short time, and I decided I was going to make chocolate chip cookies. Never mind that it was 10 pm on a weeknight, I was hungry!

I had a bag of the instant mix - make the little dough balls, put them on the sheet, bake away.

So I put them in the oven and set my timer for 9 minutes. (The instructions had said 9-12, IIRC.)

So I'm in the other room on the computer, and every now and then I hear a click. Mind you, this is the first time I had used the oven itself - had barely used the stove, for that matter. I take a look at it, see nothing, and sit back down.


BEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

Apparently, we were under nuclear attack. Instinctively, I duck and cover, head between legs. The clanging continues.

Oh, my. It's the smoke alarm. I'd forgotten about it.

It's very late at night. Now I'm petrified that some irate neighbor (apartment complex!) will be pounding on the door, demanding a pound of flesh instead of a pound of butter, or something. I'm getting scared.

I go back into the kitchen. Smoke is pouring out of one of the burners. I flick the overhead fan on and turn the oven off. I peek inside. Oooh, smoke. Gray, gray, and more gray, very gray. I decide it would be better to let them cool for a moment in the oven with the heat off. And as if to vindicate my decision, the alarm abruptly ceases.

Whew, I say. Let me sit for a minute. I know those cookies are not worth saving, but I'm not opening that oven until I'm sure we're smoke free.

As I sit, the alarm resumes. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

I cannot convey how loud this was. Picture a bus or subway train. It's packed, and everyone on board is talking on a cell phone. You know how those people are. No, wait. Picture a convention of talk-show hosts, each trying to out-blather the other.

Still not quite loud enough. Ozzy, Metallica, and a jet plane would have been auditorially dwarfed by this noise.

So I run back into the kitchen. Now, my goal is to turn the blasted alarm off. I first open a window or two to get any remaining smoke out. Then I look at the alarm. It's on the ceiling.

Now, again, this is my first place away from home. At home - and perhaps this is true of most homes - the smoke detector was this little thing you disabled by removing the batteries.

But this one was hard wired into the ceiling. But I didn't quite know that at the time. First, I jumped up, smacking it. "Stop!!" I yelled, disrespecful of the Alarm Gods. "Dammit, cut it out!"

It didn't work. The alarm continued, mocking me.

This is when I made my final, near-fatal mistake. I reached up and pulled the alarm down, intending to get to the battery compartment.

This, then, is when I discovered that the alarm was hard wired. I wrenched it down from the grasp of the ceiling, and suddenly found myself awash in a pristine spray of sparks.

And then, darkness.

"Uh oh," I mumbled into the inky depths of the kitchen. "This is not good." The depths did not answer, but I thought I heard giggling.

Turns out the dislodging of the alarm shorted a circuit or two. The bedroom and bath were fine, but the entire front portion of the apartment was not.

I called maintenance - luckily, we had a 24-hour service - and they came out in about 20 minutes. The guy went into the electrical closet, which we're not permitted to enter, and flipped the switch.

"I think I know what caused the blackout," I said to him, and he followed me into the kitchen.

They fixed the ceiling, which had no small amount of plaster missing, and the alarm. No charge.

And the cookies were burnt.

I disowned the oven from thence on, and used it only rarely in the two years before I moved to my current place. It traumatized me something fierce.

[ivylass]

Originally posted by ShibbOleth
(note to Ivylass: your rule is for baking, not cooking; in cooking it's the other way around

Actually, when my son is cooking, he needs to follow the recipe exactly. He doesn't have enough knowledge to experiment yet. I narrowly prevented him from experimenting with the chicken breasts one evening.

He wanted to use cinnamon and cloves instead of garlic and onion powder.

[DeVena]

OK this is gross, but hey, I was 14 at the time, vain and refused to wear my glasses...

I was assigned making a sausage casserole for my Mom's family reunion. OK no problem - We all cook a lot, and she was right downstairs in her office if there was anything freaky. Sausage casserole is sausage, macaroni, onions and peppers in a tomato sauce topped with cheese. Quite tasty. And the recipe called for ground black pepper, which we were out of. So, I find an old can of paprika, and a quick shout down to Mom approves it for use, but it's not as spicy as black pepper so use a tablespoon rather than a teaspoon of it.

Now I didn't ask WHY it wasn't as spicy... Turns out that this can of paprika was old... quite old... we're talking Eisenhower-era here. Mom only used it for the occassional deviled egg. So I shake and shake and barely any paprika comes out. I pry the lid off and the paprika is solid but about a tablespoon of it. I chisel the paprika out and mush it up a bit and mix it into my vat of sausage casserole. I see little specks and dots in the mix and just figure that's what paprika looks like. And being the good girl I was, I put the container in Mom's purse to buy more.

At the reunion, the casserole didn't go over very well. Those little specks? Well, actually they were bugs. Dessicated weevils actually. Figured it out by the remains in the can. So here we are - with about 150 relatives all bringing their best food. And we brought insects in tomato sauce.

Mom made me always wear my glasses after that.

[dantheman]

Originally posted by DeVena
At the reunion, the casserole didn't go over very well. Those little specks? Well, actually they were bugs. Dessicated weevils actually. Figured it out by the remains in the can. So here we are - with about 150 relatives all bringing their best food. And we brought insects in tomato sauce.

Hey..... I've seen that commercial!

[CRorex]

I'm very scared reading this thread.

1) Mac and cheese is made using BUTTER.

2) A garlic bulb is made up of many cloves.

3) Temperature and cooking time is not optional.

pepperlandgirl you can do wonderful with pork, apple cider, schallots and a splash of rum.


I had a problem with a bad batch of icecream (my mom actually made it) but it seperated out and we had butter

That being said...

I make GOD AWFUL hamburgers.

I can do greek, italian, japanese, chinese, and random other dishes. I make delicious cakes from scratch, I'm a pretty decent bartender.

But if I have to cook a hamburger. It'll be a rubbery, dry, chewey piece of felch.

[Wolfgrrl]

Originally posted by Little Nemo
I had a co-worker who had just bought an ice cream maker. He was also reknowned for his love of spicy food. So as a joke I passed along a recipe for jalapeno sherbet I had.

He actually made it. In the spirit of adventure, I gave it a try. The conversation went like this:

"This is ... interesting."
"Is it good?"
"I'm going to stand on interesting."
"Interesting?"
"Yes...interesting."
"Anything else?"
"How about different?"
"Different how?"
"Well I usually like ice cream. But this is different."

Oooh, there's a Mexican restaurant around the corner from my former apartment that serves a tequila, lime, and serrano chile sorbet that's just to die for. Maybe it helps that I've usually had a couple of margaritas by the time I get to it, but I love the stuff.

I've never really had any culinary disasters that I can think of - made a few things that I didn't like as much as I thought I would when I read the recipe, but nothing that truly frightened or disgusted me. However, I've eaten a few courtesy of other people:

Last summer my grandma made something akin to Quantum Butterfly's mom's Lamb Slop, only it was chicken and came out of a box - tinned chicken stew and instant biscuit mix. It wasn't as bad as I'd expected, but I wouldn't go out of my way to have it again.

My mom once made an oregano loaf - was supposed to be meatloaf but the shaker top fell off the oregano, and even after she picked out as much as she could it was still the prevailing flavor. Fortunately I don't like meatloaf so she'd already set aside some plain hamburger for me. I also have a running joke about her Cajun Blackened blueberry pancakes.

Nothing tops a guy I dated back in my mid-20s... he didn't cook much, and his freezer was empty except for a tray of ice cubes. Moldy ice cubes. After seeing that, I made sure we never ate at his place again.

[Quantum Butterfly]

This is great! I've had so many laughs reading this... and having screwed up in the kitchen myself a number of times, I can empathize. I'm laughing with you, not at you!

That being said, Quantum Sister has been nagging me to post one of my own screwups, seeing as the OP was one of Mom's culinary disasters. So...

Back when I was but a Quantum Caterpillar, somewhere in the preteen years, I was learning the basics of baking. Our family was holding a get-together, so I offered to demonstrate my skills by making an appetizer. I found a recipe for cheese balls that looked tasty and fairly simple, and it was from a set that Mom and I had always had good luck with in the past. So I started measuring and mixing. One of the primary ingredients, as with most baked goods, was flour- 1 2/3 cup or something like that. I put in the 2/3 cup, but a momentary lapse of attention caused me to forget the remaining 1 cup.

The result was not cheese balls. They were more like cheese flops- flat and greasy. Needless to say, they were not served at the party. Quantum Sister still kids me about the cheese flops to this day.

[Ashildr]

One of the things I should have known better than to say was "How hard can it be?". I was all set to make a lovely, fluffy cake for a friend's birthday. Being a poor college student with no prior baking practice, I had never baked a cake before and only had one bowl. Started by melting the butter in the microwave and catching it when it was boiling. Added the vanilla, sugar and then the eggs.

Scrambled eggs in butter do not a good cake ingredient make. Ick, ick, ick.

[Washte]

Actually, ivylass, cinnamon and cloves are excellent with chicken. Place 1-2 cups of raw rice in a baking tray. Pour in 1.5 times as much pineapple or orange juice as rice. Place chicken on top of rice. Sprinkle with cinnamon, cloves and a wee bit of brown sugar. Dribble lightly with water to run the spices and sugar down around the meat. Plonk in the oven on 325 (GM 4-5?) for about an hour. Check to make sure chicken is thoroughly cooked. Enjoy!

My very first cooking experience is one I will never forget. At about 5-6 years old I was already begging to cook on my own. My mother's only rule was that whatever I made had to be eaten... No wasting of food.

So, I chose a very simple recipe - or so I thought. Peanut butter. How hard could it be to make peanut butter. Peanuts. Butter. Sugar. Salt. Chuck it all in a blender and add more as you go along. Boy was I wrong.

Thank the gods I hadn't made much. It was the most disgusting muck ever. No amount of jam could mask the taste. 3 sarnies later it was all gone.

My ex-MIL was a darling woman. She was in her 80's but quite active and loved to cook and experiment. One Easter we were invited to their house for supper. Expecting something interesting - perhaps duck again or summat yummy - interesting is what I got. She made pineapple spam balls. They weren't cooked either. Just ground spam and pineapple rolled into balls. There were a few other choice things as well, but these were indescibable.

Just for shits and giggles I've occasionally contemplated trying to make these on my own just to see if they were as bad as I remembered, but it frightens me to think about it.

This thread is a corker by the way!

[silenus]

Good grief...this thread is hilarious!

My contribution to the list o'disasters:

High school. "Bachelor Foods" aka "HomeEc for Jocks."

First assignment: biscuits from scratch. Baking powder, baking soda...they're the same thing, right?

They were very nice hockey pucks....

[Becky]

I love this thread!

My Dad's favorite story to tell about one of his sisters (he's the oldest of 7 kids) regards the first time that she made chocolate brownies.

Apparently their containers weren't marked very clearly. She substituted corn starch for flour. The result resembled a truck tire. That's ok ... one of his little brothers, human garbage disposal machine that he was, ate all of them anyways. Eek!

[laina_f]

I was having some people over on a chilly evening and decided to make mulled wine. This involved heating up some red wine with fruit slices and spices. I decided to make it in a crock pot so it would be ready when my guests arrived. I'm not sure why, but you cannot -- I repeat can NOT -- heat wine in a crockpot. It was vile.

[wolfman]

We'll my biggest disaster is detailed in the thread

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/...hreadid=168306

And it's too painful to think about again.

Most of my mistakes include not paying attention such as grabbing Chili powder instead of Cinnamon for coffee cake. Grabbing comet instead of kraft parmesian for pasta, and grabbing a jar of Alfredo sauce instead of blue cheese for a salad. Another time while grilling the steak I asked my roomate to grab the Garlic powder. The idiot brought Garlic salt instead. The nastiest saltiest burgers you could ever imagine. Once when I was kid I was trying to make candy canes. It took me so long to figure out how to twist and shape the first one, the rest hardened. I had one Candy cane, and one eighteen inch stick of red candy, one of white, and eight inch diameter blobs of each