I’d think plain cornflakes wouldn’t make that big a difference, but sugar-coated cornflakes? Yeah, that might not work so well.
“All Things Considered” has a running piece on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, where they go to the Butterball Hotline office and talk to the home economists who staff the phone bank (and now answer online questions). One thing that’s consistent is that most people would think that the callers are mostly bachelors, college students, etc. but that’s not the case. It’s mostly middle-aged women who have never roasted a whole turkey before, and are embarrassed to admit to their husbands, guests, etc. that they have a question.
My own personal favorite? “I know you’re supposed to thaw a turkey in cold water, but the sink is full, so I put it in the toilet. How often should I flush it?” :smack: You can’t make things like that up.
Using corn flakes in meatloaf is not too unusual.Plenty of recipes on the net with it, and I’m pretty sure a cookbook growing up had it. Or maybe it was even on the back of the cornflakes box.
My worst disaster was making fresh crabcakes from crabs we’d caught and steamed and picked that very morning. Over 2 pounds of delicious, delicious Chesapeake Bay crabmeat! I had a recipe calling for baking powder, but used baking soda. Damn things tasted like alka-seltzer. Unsalvageable.
Not mine, but my MIL, she’s actually a good cook. However, one time she had us over, she was making homemade pizza. She put her rolled out crust in the oven to precook it. When she opened the oven to check, it had puffed up like a huge pillow.
I’ve brought home bags of groceries in the distant past where the smelly fabric softener sheet box was pressed up against a box of food (can’t remember just what kind of food it was anymore) and the perfumey soapy odor completely permeated the food, despite it being in an inner bag inside its box. I had to throw it away. Your siblings might be in the clear.
When I was a kid, like six years old, I thought I’d “improve” the milk we were going to have with dinner. There was only a little left, so my mom had poured it out into glasses for us to make sure it was evenly divided. I “improved” it by adding the juice from the jar of maraschino cherries to each glass. It tasted awful.
I was punished by having to drink all four glasses.
My first job was at Perkins, which is known for pancakes, and they hired a guy from Saudi Arabia who was in the U.S. for the summer and he was bored. He spoke good English, but couldn’t read it, and one day, while mixing up the batter, he dumped the whole bag of powdered food coloring into the mixing bowl, instead of the teaspoonful or so that was part of the recipe. :eek: Those pancakes were the color of those orange triangles you see on the back of farm equipment, and probably tasted about as good; I definitely remember that they shattered when thrown on the floor.
And our idiot manager made us serve them. :smack: The restaurant closed not long afterwards.
Thanksgiving screw-ups are kind of a tradition in our family. Like the time my wife put cinnamon instead of black pepper in the turkey gravy. Or the time she decided at the last minute that I should make mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes, except that I had never tried to make mashed cauliflower before, and she couldn’t find the recipe that she had seen online.
I have a blueberry muffin recipe that I make so often that I barely even look at the recipe anymore. Except maybe I should, instead of trying to do it from memory. One time, I forgot to put in the baking powder, so they came out looking like hockey pucks. Another time I forgot to put the sugar in. They looked OK when they came out of the oven (except not as brown as usual) but when I took a bite I thought “Yuck, these are awfully salty.” Then I figured out why.
Yeah, I’m actually a little surprised that it turned out awful. Those flavors seem to go well together and I seem to find a number of maraschino cherry milk type recipes on the net, including this maraschino cherry shake.
Start another thread specifically, and post the recipe and I will see what I can do with it. It may simply be that the recipe is not to your taste. I have made a fair number of pre-historic, ROman, Medieval, REnaissance and COlonial recipes [food history is somewhat of a hobby with me] and sometimes it is simply that the macaroni and cheese recipe you grew up with is just enough differnt from faire macrouns that you simply don’t like them.
That sounds amazing.
mrAru once decided to make chocolate cake, but forgot to put in leavening and came up with a rectangular, thin brownish sheet that he claims was amazingly like hull coating material from a submarine. I do know the dog wouldn’t even try it after sniffing it, and she was a real garbage hound. [we didn’t get the lid clamped down tightly enough, she was happily licking the chicken drippins off but leafing the non-cake.]
Chemically, baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) doesn’t really lose potency in a matter of months past some random expiry date (if at all). Maybe you meant baking powder, which does lose potency over time. I’ve got baking soda here that’s over 20 years old that still reacts strongly to vinegar.