I just made myself a drink. Vodka into Squirt–all right all right it’s all I had available. But since soda and juice have become way too concentratey to me since I started diluting everything with soda water, and I was out of soda water, I reached into the fridge for my gallon of iced tea: i.e. 4 teabags in an ex-milkjug. Took my first sip and remembered that I also keep a gallon of coldbrew coffee in my fridge (indistuingishable; no working light). Nevermind the vodka–Squirt 'n Coffee?
:smack:
I wanted to wash my mouth out with a flamethrower. This made me nostalgic for other major cooking fuckups I will forever carry on my record:
–First apartment, grandparents for dinner, misread t salt as T salt in Joy of Cooking’s Coque au Vin (still slave to the recipe). Inedible but my g’parents swallowed with painful grins
–Left out salt (what’s with me and salt?) of big bread batch, delivered gift loaves without tasting: chewy cardboard, the best thing about which you could say was that it was reminiscent of my g’parents’ (what’s with me and g’parents?) Russian Orthodox unleavened church communion bread
–Belly-bumped oven to 450 baking stuffing for family Thanksgiving dinner: resulted in char-picotee dressing that tasted vaguely like cigarettes
Making banana bread for the first time I thought it would be a good idea to stir the batter really well to get all that banana and flour and goodies all mixed together and even. Must have stirred for like five minutes. It came out of the oven like a brick. Tried one piece and threw out the rest.
Preparing a dish that called for rubbing vegetable with salt to draw out moisture and soften it up. The only thing is I forgot to wash the salt off and inadvertently made Blood Pressure Surprise.
This last one isn’t any sort of cooking but I remember drinking a cola as a kid and my brother put soy sauce in it when I wasn’t looking. I took a sip of that and literally gagged and choked. I knew it was my brother because of his fits of giggling. And I was the one who got in trouble for almost knocking his head off.
Last spring, I harvested some wild onions (“munions,” as they’re called around here), then took to YouTube to find a recipe for them. Found a guy whose shtick is making 1700s-1800s recipes using period-specific equipment and techniques (and even costumes), and he had a wild onion recipe. So I copied his (but with Williams/Sonoma pie pan instead of a handmade stone one, electric oven instead of brick, etc.).
Everything about it was wrong. The smell, the visual presentation, the texture, the taste. Even Oliver Twist would have passed on this shit. It was that disgusting.
Munion season will be up & running in a couple of weeks, I’ll need to find another recipe soon…
Made a King Cake from a kit I bought from Amazon. Thought I’d bring it to the office last Mardi Gras. Goodness knows how long the box had been sitting in Amazon’s warehouse but the yeast must have been affected. I could not get even the slightest rise out of that thing. The filling was yummy and of course the icing is just sugar but it was hard and compressed, much like the donut you use when you have a flat tire. Most people tried it because everyone wants to find the baby, but I ended up throwing more than half of it away. So humiliating.
An ex gf of mine was not much of a cook. Nothing wrong with that, especially because I really like to cook.
One night she decided she wanted to make supper. I offered to help, but she insisted that she was going to do it all by herself.
Cream of mushroom soup. Sounds great.
Dinner time arrives, and I taste the soup. It doesn’t taste that bad, but something is very wrong.
Turns out the recipe called for white wine, and she figured white wine vinegar was close enough.
A different soup-related incident between the two of us: we made a pot of broccoli and cheese soup. It was very good, and we eagerly went back for seconds.
It didn’t taste so good though. Tasted like chemicals, for lack of a better word. Now, I had used plastic utensils successfully for 33 years at that point. But it seems, if you leave a plastic ladle in a pot of thick, hot soup, it will melt.
I made banana muffins a couple weeks ago, not realizing my baking soda expired in October. Still tasty but chewy and dense. I was at least able to save them by dicing them up and making banana muffin bread pudding.
Another banana bread mishap! I made a loaf as usual with bananas, nuts, and chocolate chips, but used the artificial baking sugar Splenda. The commercials for it showing cookies were so pretty! I thought, give it a try and cut down on calories and sugar. It was DREADFUL. Took one bite and I could just feel that artificial chemical taste in my back teeth. I spit it out and offered it to two friends, one thought it was fine, the other agreed with me it had a weird under-taste.
Many years ago, I had some chicken molé. Don’t remember who made it, but it was delicious.
So I tried making it myself. This was long pre-internet, and I had no cookbook including any recipe remotely like it; I tried making it up as I went along. It involved chicken and chocolate, right?
I no longer remember what I put in it besides chicken and chocolate; nor do I remember the type of chocolate. What I do remember is that it was the only totally inedible thing I ever made. It was awful. I couldn’t eat it. None of several other people in the house at the time would eat it. We gave it to the dog.
The dog wouldn’t eat it.
[ETA: we didn’t know yet that chocolate was bad for dogs.]
When making a pot of chicken stock, I absentmindedly put the colander in the sink and dumped in the contents of the pot, pasta-style. The stock was gone and I was left with some veggies and chicken bones with all the flavor boiled out and a steaming sink drain.
That reminds me of one from when I was a little kid. My mom’s mom was visiting and they were making a red pasta sauce. My dad, not someone I’d call a cook, ‘helped’ to thicken the sauce by stirring in more and more cornstarch… Except he had grabbed baking powder (or soda) instead. Grandma put on her smiling face and declared it fine. Naw, the whole thing was inedible.
This is hilarious. I remember my sister begging our mom to let her have chocolate on her spaghetti. My mom finally gave in but told her: “If you do this. You’re going to eat every last bite.”
So instead of just trying a little bit on her pasta to see if she would like it, she took the Hershey’s syrup bottle and just drenched her pasta in it.
She took one bite and was like: “yuck”. Mom didn’t make her eat the whole thing but she did make her take a couple of more bites to the amusement of the rest of the family.
I made a meatloaf once using crushed cornflakes instead of breakcrumbs. The only reason I ate it was because I was a poor college student and I couldn’t afford to toss it. Even ketchup couldn’t save it.
My dad’s mother was visiting, and for some reason she got her dessert (chocolate cake) while everyone else was still working through dinner.
Mom served the rest of us, and it was unanimous that the cake tasted strongly of soap and we wouldn’t eat. Grandma, determined to be a good guest and not ‘that’ mother-in-law had managed to eat almost half of hers before she was rescued.
Still no explanation of why - mom’s theory was that it had been stored next to soap, but it was a mix (Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker or somesuch) so that doesn’t make much sense.
Thinking on it, I may need to get the siblings drunk and see if someone will confess to sabotage (inadvertent or otherwise) after all these years.
Wanted to make a Buche de Noel to impress my grandparents. So the instructions said pour the cake batter onto a sheet pan line in parchment paper. i was 18. I figured Glad Wrap would do. Got the thing out of the oven, and thought, man, I guess I forgot the Glad Wrap. No, I didn’t. You can guess where it was. Chewy fucking dessert, that
I am 99% certain I’ve done this before. I can’t remember the specific incident, but your post is bringing back a memory impression, and it totally sounds like something I would do once.
I was visiting my then-girlfriend in Hungary back around 2005 around American Thanksgiving time, and my ex-pat friends were throwing a dinner party, so I volunteered (among other things) to do the pumpkin/butternut squash pie. I was looking through her mother’s kitchen for baking supplies, and I found a bit container of flour and a somewhat smaller, but still relatively large, container of sugar next to it. I mix up my lovely pie/custard ingredients, take a quick taste of the filling and … oh shit, that was salt! :smack: It just never occurred to me to check, as it seemed like a sugar sack amount of white crystalline substance, so I assumed it was sugar. (And in my kitchen, the flour and sugar are kept together, but the salt is in another cupboard.) At least I had plenty of time to make another that turned out just fine.
