My grandmother was infamous for being a terrible cook. This was the woman who tried to make macaroni and cheese by cooking American cheese in a pan (it turned black), red eye gravy with coffee grounds (you use coffee), and meatloaf with Cheerios (not crushed, whole).
I can be a pretty good cook, but I’ve had some spectacular flops. In seventh grade, I wanted to make fudge. I’d never had fudge before, but it sounded cool. I got the recipe off the label of a jar of marshmallow stuff and went grocery shopping with my dad. I don’t know what possessed him, because he should have known better, but when I couldn’t find a can of evaporated, I asked him if sweetened condensed milk was the same thing.
He said yes.
What I made was not fudge. It was more like chocolatey asphalt brittle. We named it boo-boo fudge. Even when I had mastered fudge making, my younger brother would occasionally ask for boo-boo fudge.
I believe I’ve tasted your wife’s lasagna. A couple years ago, my boyfriend’s family had a crisis and people from the church and the neighborhood were bringing food. A lovely church lady dropped off a delicious looking lasagna. It was the perfect time as their was a house full of people ready to eat lunch. I was cutting it into squares and got a bit of sauce on my finger. That one lick was so sweet, I had to take a bite to see what was going on. It honestly tasted like lasagna flavored cake. Some people prefer a sweeter marinara, but this had to venture into the addition of CUPS of sugar. My boyfriend and his father both tried it to make sure it wasn’t me. They gagged and I scraped it in the garbage. We made sure to thank the “cook,” as it was a generous thought.
I didn’t have a disaster, but a minor mishap. I learned to double check if the recipe says “Tsp” or “Tbsp” because that can make a big difference. Especially when it’s calling for black pepper. :smack:
What I made wasn’t technically a flop, because it tasted extremely good. I made Steak and Guinness pie, and it turned out wonderfully. But I didn’t want to buy a whole six-pack of Guinness just for 3/4 cup of beer, so I instead bought a single large bottle of Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout. It worked fabulously in the gravy, but I couldn’t figure out why I had bad insomnia that night.
It turns out that this particular beer is made with real coffee. I didn’t know; I thought the name was just poetic license. There are no bicycle tires in Fat Tire Ale or chickens in Old Speckled Hen, after all.
I still have a dinner’s worth of that stew with stout gravy in the freezer. I’ll have to skip my espresso on the day I defrost and serve it, I guess.
Sounds like what I did the first time I attempted to make pulled pork bbq, at 22. I roasted a really big hunk o pig for maybe 90 minutes. I was like, that’s a long time to cook something, right? When I went to pull it apart I ended up having to use a knife to cut up pink pork into chunks. Luckily simmering it in the sauce cooked it the rest of the way, and it turned out ok. I’m sort of embarassed to say how long it took me to figure out the error of my ways.
As a young lad, I once tried to make bread from scratch. I didn’t look up the recipe, figuring I could wing it. I put together flour, water, and I heard bread needed egg, so I cracked an egg into it and made a ball of dough. I remembered also that you needed yeast to make it rise, but since I wasn’t going for any fancy pants bread, I figured a non-rising bread is good enough.
Put the ball of dough into a small oven and waited. In retrospect, I should have known something was wrong when all I had was hot dough after a long time, but I thought it was simply because I didn’t use special bread coloring. I took a slice of cheese, ripped it up into shreds, and put it on top of the dough. Cheesy bread! Or so I thought
Eventually I gave up. There was no saving it. It was a block of hard dough with cheese on top that tasted like doughy cheese. I don’t even think the middle was done.
Three slabs of ribs, and three different rubs. Simple idea was to use one rub per slab. My father, wanting to be helpful, put all three rubs on each slab. KC, Lemon pepper, and Old Hickory do NOT taste good mixed together.
In Jr. High School we learned how to make omelettes. I became quite proficient at it and was requested to make them at various holiday brunches. One time, I outdid myself. The omelettes turned out perfectly fluffy and perfectly folded over. My Dad took one bite and his face told the story. It was not good. It was not my fault. My Mom had put leftover eggnog in an empty milk carton and I used this “milk” in my recipe. Bless her heart (and we all know what that means,) she said it was “interesting,” (and we all know what that means.) How often is this story brought up? A lot.
Also (wanting to make something exotic for my boss, for whom I had the hots…we later married, then divorced…not related to this food disaster,) once I made a dip from yucca. We ended up making little sculptures out of it after supper; and they probably still exist somewhere to this day. Future archaeological digs will be most confusing if they’re ever unearthed.
I never use these abbreviations when I write out a recipe now - the potential for disaster is too great.
I had an interesting food disaster-by-proxy incident last night. One of my youtube videos is a tutorial on making a really simple loaf of bread.
Someone was complaining in the comments that their loaf came out sticky and heavy - turned out they had substitiuted all the white flour for wholewheat. Obviously, you can make lovely bread from wholewheat flour, but not really by taking a white bread recipe and changing the main ingredient.
Anyway, as the conversation continued, the person said “I set the microwave to ‘cake’ setting…”
I’m sorry… Microwave? You tried to bake bread in a microwave? And it came out sticky and heavy? Yeah. You can’t do that - it just won’t work.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a microwave with a “cake” setting.
I have a friend [name removed for MY safety] who made a mistake with a recipe, for possibly cupcakes, when it called for “eggwhite.”
Well, what part of an egg is white . . .
Luckily their mother caught them before they got too far and they just had to toss it all out instead up ending up with a horribly crunchy mess to eat.
One year I made fruity-nutty pumpkin bread to be baked in coffee cans. For some reason, I set aside a small bowl of batter and stirred the dried fruit and nuts in (probably to let them sit and soften up before baking). So, yeah, I was in a rush and filled up the coffee cans with batter. After they were in the oven for about 10 minutes, imagine my surprise to find that small bowl sitting on the kitchen table…:smack:
This wasn’t a disaster as the plain bread was edible, but all the good stuff was left out.
An engineer friend tried to bake cookies in a toaster (not a toaster oven). He’d seen commercials for bake-and-serve cookies which showed them cooking in an oven in fast motion, and assumed it would work just as well in a toaster, vertically.
You reminded me of one - I was making cookies, and as I measured out the cookies onto the tray, they seemed sticker than usual, but the batter doesn’t always seem the same from time to time, so no big deal. After I put the cookies in the oven, I saw the cup of flour on the cupboard that was supposed to go in them. :smack: I took them out, scraped them back into the bowl, added the flour, and proceeded. They weren’t too bad.
My biggest cooking disaster has been naively trying to frost a cake right out of the oven. My frosting wasn’t stiff enough to begin with but completely melted into grossness and the cake turned into a soggy mess. Lesson learned: never attempt to make a birthday cake “last-minute”.
Lesson learned: never attempt to make a birthday cake “last-minute”.