# Great Cooking Disasters Of Our Time

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-cooking-disasters-of-our-time/514722>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [October 22, 2009, 9:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-cooking-disasters-of-our-time/514722 "2009-10-22T09:58:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![PapSett](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecc23a/32.png) [@PapSett](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PapSett)\
**Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-cooking-disasters-of-our-time/514722/81 "2009-10-29T13:55:50Z")

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Some years ago, I was fixing frozen pizzas for my dad and myself. I went to great pains adding ingrediants, all of our favorite stuff, each fixed exactly as we liked them. They were truly masterpieces.

I put them in the oven and waited… anticipating each bite. There would be plenty of leftovers for work lunches and snacks.

Then the oven started smoking.

I had forgotten to take them off the cardboard circles. :smack:

The crusts had thawed and melded to the cardboard, impossible to scrape off. I was just lucky the cardboard didn’t catch fire.

My carefully created pizzas went into the trash, and Dad and I had Captain D’s fish for dinner.

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**Author:** ![pipper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c2a13f/32.png) [@pipper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pipper)\
**Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-cooking-disasters-of-our-time/514722/82 "2009-10-29T17:01:23Z")

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Another Boy Scout camping cooking disaster: The sole dinner dish on this mutiday trip was to be Mac and cheese with sausage mixed in. After waiting about a half hour with no results, some folks started asking “how much longer?” “A few minutes,” was the reply. After a few more inquiries and another half hour of no food, I wandered by to check on the progress. Our future Chef Trotter had thrown everything into a pot of boiling water: noodles, cheese powder, milk, butter and sausage- it was all happily boiling away in about two gallons of water. The hold up? “I may have done it wrong, but I’m just waiting for the water to boil off, so the sauce thickens.”

Macaroni noodles bits that are 30 seconds away from disintegrating back into their flour molecules served with sausage that has had all the flavor boiled out of it, does not make for a happy bunch of campers.

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**Author:** ![rockle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/73ab20/32.png) [@rockle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rockle)\
**Post date:** [October 29, 2009, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-cooking-disasters-of-our-time/514722/83 "2009-10-29T17:30:15Z")

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I usually do okay – never really wrecked anything, although I have made dishes that I wouldn’t eat, like the one time I made _arroz con pollo_ and nearly burned the roof of my mouth clean off, because I wasn’t used to cumin – but it is my great embarrassment that _I absolutely cannot cook a soft-boiled egg_. And I don’t know why. No matter what I set the egg timer for, I can’t get my two- (or six-, or seventy-five-, or whatever) minute eggs to turn out right. And I _love_ me some soft-boiled eggs.

(I soothed broken, battered soul by getting a dedicated cookie-cutter that I use for making toad-in-the-hole, though.)

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