My mother used to toss a frozen cut up chicken in the oven in the morning before going to work, set it on time bake, starting about three hours before she got home to make sure the chicken had been reduced to rocks.
My wife has ruined numerous dishes, too many to remember. She can follow explicit instructions if she’s been shown how do it before, so once she made a lasagna after I had previously showed her step by step how to do it. Came out fine. But we had some friends over for dinner that night, they began to compliment me on the lasagna and I told them she had made it. They looked like I just told them they’d eaten rat poison.
My wife is an okay cook, but once she cooked a (Chinese) turtle soup that made our entire house smell like the reptile house at the zoo. She couldn’t bear to eat a single bite, and yet she couldn’t stand the thought of “wasting it” so it stayed in our fridge for months before she finally gave up on it. Oy.
My dad used to make us basic breakfast sometimes on weekends. Sometimes he’d get fancy, and would sprinkle garlic powder and food coloring into the scrambled eggs. They came out puce-gray, and tasted about as good as they looked.
My wife once decided she was going to make lasagna her own way.
I had ricotta cheese, she was unfamiliar with it and thought it was FETA CHEESE. So she figured she needed to compensate for the saltness by adding sugar, so she tried to brown the ricotta in cookeen(crisco basically) along with copious amounts of sugar.
Then used ketchup instead of tomato sauce.
The resulting dish was classified as a crime against humanity in 76 countries.
My dad is slightly infamous for making unusual substitutions. It’s not always terrible if he can stick to one sub per recipe but sometimes things get away from us. The one that always gets shared is the time that he wanted to make a fruit smoothie and he figured he needed dairy, a fruit and a crunchy so he poured milk, plums and fruit loops into the blender and pureed it up. I believe everyone went out for ice cream instead, that night.
Deployed with a Seabee team. We all took turns cooking for a week at a time, but when it came around to one guy’s turn, he tried to beg off, saying he only knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches. “Hey, that’s okay, man. We’ll eat them!”
So off he goes to the kitchen. Within a few minutes, I smell something burning and see smoke coming from the kitchen. I go in there and the guy has all four burners glowing cherry red, and a sandwich sitting directly on each burner smoking like mad. Then he couldn’t get them off because they stuck to the burner. Yum.
Not nearly as bad as that, but when I was a kid, my mom would make grilled cheese sandwiches by putting a slice of Velveeta between two slices of Wonder Bread and then microwaving it for a minute. I wish I were kidding.
Yeah, I used to buy the chubs of ground beef, too. These days I buy ground chuck, though I don’t mix it with ground round. It really does make a difference. My husband still goes to the chubs automatically, and then I remind him that the chuck tastes a heck of a lot better, and is considerably less fatty.
I did this when I was single and cooking for just me, so the rest of the world was spared. I wanted a meatloaf one night, but I didn’t have any breadcrumbs. However, I did have cornflakes. I like cornflakes, so why not?
I’ll tell you why not - using cornflakes as a binder in meatloaf is disgusting. Period. End of discussion. Do not try this at home - you’ll waste perfectly good ground beef and perfectly good cornflakes.
I’m not a great cook, but I do OK and no one has died of food poisoning yet, so there’s that. And I absolutely refuse to make any recipe that has cream-of-anything soup in it, just because. I’ll make my own cream sauce and chop up my own veggies as needed, but I refuse to use gloppy, overly salted soup products when I cook. It’s my one kitchen snobbery.
Not my relative–the tale is that of a friend’s daughter.
She’s part of a group that gets together regularly for potluck, and she hosted the most recent round. When the guests were ready to leave, there was an untouched pie sitting there. The person who brought the pie told the hostess to take it to her next work gathering (the next day) and pass it off as if she had made it.
When she opened the box, the name of the bakery was stenciled all around the crust–thus proving that the person who brought it had not in fact made the pie.
Yeah, I’m a bit surprised, too. I would have guessed it would work, so it’s good to know, although I think it would have been pretty desperate circumstances in which corn flakes are the only binder-like substance in the house. For example, oatmeal works great. Even cooked potatoes (and I assume potato flakes, too, but I’ve never tried.)
Long time ago, I was at a friend’s (he was about 25) and he had a “cooking for dummies” book. I look into it and there were such recipes as grilled steak or hard boiled egg. Asking him, I discovered that he really didn’t know how to “cook” an egg, or plain rice, or a steak. I was floored :eek: I don’t know how you can manage to live for 25 years without at least having seen someone put an egg in water or a steak in a frying pan.
No fun anecdote apart from that, I’m no cook.
