I was reading old threads and came upon a few about cooking disasters, which were alternately hilarious and cringeworthy. I have not had too many cooking mishaps yet. Nothing on the scale of disaster, either; sometimes what I made was inedible or strange-looking, but usually not too problematic. The biggest mistakes I have made so far were the mashed potatoes that turned out utterly flavorless and the exploded baked potato. With the former, I still have no idea what went wrong. As for the latter, I was baking potatoes for baked stuffed potatoes one day and forgot to poke the potatoes with a fork before I put them in the oven. Two potatoes survived, but the third exploded, leaving its entire contents all over the oven. I was amazed that one potato could produce so much potato shrapnel.
Anyone have any amusing or horrifying tales of cooking gone wrong to relate?
A couple weeks ago, I was making rolls. Mixed the dough Friday, rolled it out and let it rest Saturday. When they went into the oven, the rack on which they were placed was not in the middle of the oven, therefore I was forced to dine on roll tops only. Quite reminded me of the muffin top episode of Seinfeld.
I am a very good cook, so’s you know. But I made the most obvious rookie boner ever. And of course it was the evening I invited my grandparents to dinner in my new–my first–apartment.
I’m an experimental cook; I almost never use recipes. But my grandparents are pretty traditional. So I did the Joy of Cooking’s recipe for Coq au vin. My sisters and mother were there as well, so it was a sizable party: I’d need to double the recipe. And yes, I somehow put in about 10 times as much salt as I should have. Did the math wrong or something. In. Ed. Ib. Ull. But everyone pretended it was deeelishus.
I made lobster chowder, but didn’t realise the cream was pre-sweetened. Apparantly pre-sweetened cream is only available during the holiday season. Yech.
I mentioned this once before in some other thread. One time a few years ago, I was cooking up some tomato sauce for spaghetti. We had some home-grown dried basil in a jar on the spice rack, and I decided I would use some of that instead of the usual store-bought basil. Unfortunately, the jar was unlabeled, and I had just gotten over a head cold, so I was incapable of identifying herbs by smell. So it turned out that instead of a jar of home-grown dried basil, I had grabbed a jar of home-grown dried peppermint.
It was a very interesting sauce.
Oh, and there was one time that I managed to burn spaghetti. :smack:
I was hosting Christmas dinner for the first time about 15 years ago. The turkey smelled wonderful while it was cooking, and we are all looking forward to it. When it was time to carve it, there was NO MEAT. I started freaking out and almost cried until my husband realized I had roasted the bird breast side down.
Once we turned it over and carved it up, it turned out to be the juiciest meat I’d ever had!
I also once made peanut butter cookies, and didn’t realize until taking a bite that I had forgotten the sugar. :smack:
Girl Scout camp, mid 70’s. One of the counselors decided to cook a meal by the campfire. She set it on a rock and moved the rock over to the fire, not noticing the the rock was sandstone and that those don’t react well to fire. Then she got her camera to take a picture of the scene for future Girl Scout instruction. Just as she hit the shutter the rock and her dinner blew up.
(Pointless aside: we had an old cookbook written in the early 60’s. In addition to suggesting that a housewife who was tired of relentlessly cooking should take a break by lying on the kitchen floor for a few minutes, it claimed that the waffle was invented when a knight who’d come home from the crusades and forgotten to take off his chain mail sat on a pancake his wife was cooking.)
So, I was baking pork chops and cooking potatoes and green beans on the stove. When the pork chops were done, I took them out of the oven and set them on the stove. I was finishing up the mashed potatoes when I suddenly thought, “Why the hell are the chops still sizzling? OMG the burner is on…” BOOM!
The Pyrex baking pan I had used exploded into eleventy million tiny blue pieces. No people or cats were hurt, but we found itsy bitsy chips of glass in the kitchen and living room for at least a year.
One time I decided to impress my Ex SO with a nice dinner.
I made the chicken & put it in the oven, no problem there. Then I say to myself “Self, wouldn’t it be nice to have fried potatoes”? So I cut up some potatoes. Now, the only problem is the kitchen is total crap. Four roommates, and it looks like pigs live there. No wonder Jeff Foxworthy says the first singles apartment we live in is the nearest most of us come to being homeless… I grabbed an unlabeled bottle of cooking oil, dumped it all over my pan of potatoes, and turned up the heat. Soon a strange smell began emerging from the pan. I had mistakenly poured Pine-Sol (or some generic equivalent) Into my potatoes.
If this weren’t bad enough, afterI had cut up ANOTHER batch of potatoes & had them cooking in a pan (one that had cooking oil in it, thank you very much) I also had a pan of fried apples on the stove. I knocked the handle of the potato pan, the potatoes flew gracefully up into the air, & landed SPLAT! all over the kitchen floor.
As I was cleaning them up, I hit the pan handle of the fried apples, & they joined their tubular brethren all over the floor.
I cried.
David bless him cleaned up the mess, & I cut up a THIRD batch of potatoes, nuked some more apples in the microwave. & had everything ready by the time the chicken was done.
I can’t mention the words Pine Sol to anyone who knows this story without getting ribbed for it.
I was making us each a nice frozen pizza… only I never just fix a frozen pizza… I dress them up- added extra cheese, pepperoni, black olives… whatever we like, and always end up with pizzas better than you can get at any restaurant. We liked different things on them, so we each got our own and ate on them for days.
I made the 2 pizza masterpieces up and popped them in the oven; when they looked done to golden perfection, I got them out, into plates to cut and serve.
Only… the pizza cutter would *not *cut thruogh the crust.
Or, more precisely… through the cardboard circles I had left under the crusts. :smack: The pizzas were both effectively melded to the cardboard.
If I remember right, we had Captain D’s that night.
First time I ever made gravy was for a Christmas dinner for my girlfriend and some other friends, at the ripe old age of 22. Not knowing the first thing about how to do this, I called my mother (The Gravy Master) and asked for instructions. One of her directions was to “use an equal amount of drippings and flour” to make the roux, then add water until gravy forms.
What she neglected to tell me was that I shouldn’t use ALL the drippings in the pan. I was also unaware that roux should be browned a bit. The end result was a very large pan filled to the brim with a pale substance that resembled thick wallpaper paste both in color, texture and taste. I swear that the first couple quarts of water I dumped into that mound of flour and grease disappeared instantly. Everyone was polite, of course, but it was ghastly. When I went back into the kitchen after dinner, I tried to take the serving spoon out of the gravy pan, but the gloop had hardened around the spoon. I have a photo somewhere of me holding the entire pan up by the spoon handle.
I tried to recreate TGIF’s “Jack Daniels” sauce several years ago by using actual Jack Daniels, brown sugar and other various ingredients cooked up in a saucepan.
When that stuff came to a boil, I soon found out, that what I actually came up with was something more similar to tear tear gas than JD sauce. The aroma was so vile it took a good couple of hours with the vent on before I could go back into the kitchen.
I took a Japanese cooking class for foreigners in Tokyo a few years back. We were making Onigiri, which are triangular rice balls with various fillings inside. The directions called for you to dip your hands in salt before shaping the rice ball. Unfortunately, the ingredient table wasn’t very well marked (as in not labeled at all), and I brought sugar back to my group instead of salt. We didn’t notice until we bit into the food…
Sweet rice around tuna salad is pretty disgusting, I must say. But I did think the sweetened rice around the ume boshi (sour pickled plum) was quite nice!
I put too much garlic into the fried spinach tonight and it ended up smelling like fart. The garlic was from a bottle of pre-chopped garlic, which is pretty foul to begin with (Well the previous brand I used wasn’t as bad). My other wonderful creations include the chicken that was burnt on the outside but uncooked on the inside and the avocado-egg mash that made me want to hurl afterwards.
My flatmates say I have the touch of death when it comes to cooking. Sort of like the midas touch in reverse.
I did exactly the same thing, with exactly the same result…
My contribution was the freezing of habaneros. I used to buy a bunch, chop them in the food processor, and freeze them in an ice cube tray. One day the freezer needed organizing before they would fit, so I put the full tray in the fridge to wait. My 3 year old walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge door, and took a big scoop out with his little fingers from the ice cube tray, then ate it.