The fecal matter left in the intestines would at least ruin the flavor, if not be - even after cooking - of highly questionable safety. One of the first things you need to do with just about any animal destined for cooking is to gut it carefully.
Oh, I understand, one would hopefully empty out a newly killed bird. But I was thinking that with Thanksgiving coming up, I’m always reading about newbies cooking their first turkey with the plastic bag full of gizzards and such still in the cavity. Not that I’ve ever done that 
- but discovering the bag o’ guts after the thing is cooked - that wouldn’t contaminate the bird, would it?
Oh, that’s different. No intestines in there, the organs are all cleaned up and sealed in plastic, plus the bag is stuffed in the neck cavity. No, that’s fine. From the post you were talking about, it sounds like they never gutted the animal in the first place.
Nope … innards include intestines. Not into duck shit flavored duck…and it is probably some sort of health hazard. But the dogs enjoyed the hell out of it!
Correct … it was just flash frozen after being plucked of feathers … apparently you need the guts inside when you hang a game bird to age :eek: then you remove the innards <yucky face>
Back before my mother was married, she lived with a family in Italy. They summered at a castle in the mountains, and for the youngest son’s birthday, my mother volunteered (or was volunteered; I forget which) to make the birthday cake. The cook made sure she had all of the ingredients she needed, fired up the wood-burning stove and left her to it. The ingredients were brought up to the castle weekly in labeled paper bags. It appears that although my mother read and spoke Italian well enough, there were certain gaps in her vocabulary of which she was not aware. After putting the cake into the oven, she had a sudden feeling that something was not entirely right. Tasting the “sugar,” she discovered that she had put a cup of salt into the cake. She quickly made another cake, but by the time it was put into the oven, it was far too hot. After a while, she checked on the second cake’s progress to see that it was beginning to smoke. Hastily pulling it out of the oven, she realized that although the outer part of the cake was burnt, the middle remained liquid.
Being the resourceful type that she is, she cut the burnt outer part off, dug out the raw middle, and served it as a Bundt cake. No one suspected what had gone on until she sheepishly confessed it later.
On of my coworkers screwed up Ramen noodles. She bought her cup of noodles and went over to the coffee machines to put hot water in. She put French Vanilla cappuccino instead. :smack: She threw it out, we all had a heartly laugh at her expense, and she bought a new one. I jokingly warned “Now H be sure you put water in it, not cappuccino.” She smiled, went over the machines, and put French Vanilla cappuccino in the cup. She ended up eating a hot dog.
I’ve done this.
And this.
Funny thing though - both incidences happened with filling for whoopie pies. AND, they happened about 6 years apart.
The first one (misreading the amount) happened the first time I made them. I had never had one before. Actually, I had never even seen one before. So, I misread the amount of shortening. I may have never seen a whoopie pie before, and I may not have known how it was supposed to taste, but I could tell by the look that something was horribly wrong. I checked over the recipe, realized my mistake, bought a new can of shortening and started again.
The second time was just last week. I used shortening to somewhat fix my mistake. While my filling wasn’t as thick as it should have been, it at least wasn’t a thin glaze.
In my defense, I have never taken a cooking class and I didn’t learn from anyone. My mother is a very bad cook and avoids it at all costs. I have never actually seen my father eat anything besides raw fruit and cheddar cheese (I don’t see him much).
I’d love to take a baking class to learn all this stuff. It might make experimenting possible.
Oh, I also cooked the giblets once. I was 10 and it was my first turkey. I have come close to doing it again but have always caught myself.
Parents are away, I’m maybe 15, so I’ll cook for myself! Put on baked beans to cook the way it said on the can - place can in boiling water for a few minutes, open and serve. An hour later I’m deeply engrossed in a book in my room downstairs when I hear WHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMP - as the ad almost says “oh my god, the beans!”.
The kitchen was covered - nay, coated - with scaldingly hot baked bean sauce on every single surface regardless of orientation. The day we left the house 10 years later the ceiling still had a somewhat orange cast to it, which oddly but luckily, no-one but me seemed to notice.
A few years later I’m living in an all-male shared house. One of my cohabitants was an, um, original cook. For example he once made a spaghetti bolognese sauce and thought he’d add a touch of the exotic. He’d heard about duck l’orange so added some interesting flavouring; Orange Tang. He wasn’t big on detail so didn’t really stir it in very much. Nothing brings tears to your throat like biting into a solid lump of powdered dehydrated citric acid and sugar. After we’d scraped our faces off the inside of our skulls and rid the plates of the more egregious lumps, the remainder wasn’t half bad - it was completely dreadful.
Another famous occasion was when he made a casserole that called for a reasonable amount of garlic. So he threw in the requisite number of cloves - not, not bulbs, it was another of my friends who made that mistake - cooked and served. There was a powerful run on the meagre household supply of toothpicks and floss as we endeavoured to rid our interdentine interstices of the garlic paper that now infested the dish; he had apparently reasoned that you didn’t need to peel potatoes or apples if you were going to cook them, so why bother to peel garlic?
The time I screwed up Chex Mix comes to mind. Chex baked with butter, Worcestershire sauce, and seasonings? Sublime. Chex baked with butter, soy sauce, and seasonings? Not so good.
My only defense is that my Mom stores both in the fridge, and they were right next to each other. Next time, grab the black cap, not the red.
This isn’t so much a cooking mistake, unless you consider my entering into the deal a cooking mistake. In which case, fair enough.
When I first moved into my last apartment, my roommate and I made a deal in which we’d cook meals together. We agreed that he would cook the meat dish and I would do all of the sides. I went shopping and bought enough veggies and breads and whatever to last us a week. Every night I dutifully prepared exquisite sides. I didn’t just boil potatoes. I did some serious painstaking cooking.
My roommate found a delicious recipe for chicken that was cooked in a crock pot. He prepared it Sunday night and put it in the fridge. Monday morning he started the slow cooking process which lasted a good 10 hours. It came out pretty good. The leftovers went in the fridge.
Tuesday morning it all went back in the crock pot for another 10 hours. That night it was a little dry. It went back into the fridge.
Wednesday morning… Well, you get the picture. By Friday that chicken had slow cooked for 50 non-contiguous hours. The texture by that point was… interesting.
We never cooked together again.
I’m repeating a story I already shared in another thread -
Situation - Cold and icy early December + 1 large dog (named Bubba) too lazy to walk down the steps of the deck + 1 convenient electric smoker sitting on the deck (shaped sorta like a fire hydrant)
Weeks later Christmas eve day - One prime beef brisket in the smoker
Result - 1 smoked brisket steamed in dog pee.
Lucky we had a honey ham in the fridge and a local BBQ place open with takeout brisket.
Even Bubba wouldn’t take a bite of the brisket.
My ex-wife was, at the time, vegetarian. It was her first Christmas with my family in England, and Mum wanted to try to make sure she was included in everything. She proudly told me and my wife how she had specially gone out to get vegetarian mincemeat to make mince pies with so everyone could have some.
This was very sweet of her, but was somewhat lessened by the fact that at the time she was rubbing lard into the flour to make the pastry for said pies. She now utterly denies this ever happened.
My big mistake was last night, in relying on a packaged spice mix and not taste-testing it first. I had bought some pre-mixed Indian dish spice mixes for lazy days when I didn’t feel like working out on the mortar and pestle, and liked them, if finding them a bit hot. We had two packets left, of the same type and one I hadn’t tried; the packet said they were intended as a spice mix for chicken tikka masala. I’m a vegetarian, but checked the ingredients, and it was a blend of maybe a dozen spices plus other things, and was all right for me to eat. I wilted some fresh spinach over heat and pureed it, cooked up some vegetables and potatoes. Then I mixed everything together with part of the packet of spice mix, cooked some rice, and served the veggie mix over rice.
I really should have put a tiny bit into a small sample of the food first, but I liked the other varieties a lot. And it smelled good!
All I could taste was clove. It was awful. I double-checked the ingredients list and that was one of the very last ingredients - apparently it was still too much. Maybe they didn’t mix that part of the batch that well. I threw the rest out. 
Back in the days when I was a student but living on my own, I found myself destitute and without anything really edible in the kitchen. All I had was rice. I figured that I could make that and then add whatever spices I had on hand to make it more palatable. I couldn’t tell you what I added, but it was probably something like paprika, mustard, BBQ sauce, garlic powder, pickle juice…
Each addition just made it worse, and I was looking for that one magical ingredient that would suddenly turn it into a lobster dinner. At some point I think I came to my senses and decided it was not going to get any better. It was an odd shade of green and smelled like the inside of a dead goat soaked in shoe stink. It tasted far worse. I ended up throwing it out after maybe two bites.
Thank god my roommate came home and loaned (sorry, borrowed) me a dollar for a slice of pizza.
Sorry for the hijack, but HUH?
For some reason, I absolutely cannot be trusted to cook Rice Krispies treats. I like to consider myself a good cook. I make a mean lava cake, have concocted my own good (if I do say so myself) sambhar recipe and can make onion kulcha. But I can’t for the life of me make Rice Krispies that don’t taste and feel like burnt hockey pucks.
The first time I tried, I forgot to take the marshmallows off the heat, so they turned dark brown, then, before I could even get the Rice Krispies in, they solidified into this disgusting brown mass. The second time I tried, I used marshmallow creme to make it easier with similar results. The third time I tried… Well, you get the idea. I’ve made them successfully once and my family still doesn’t believe I made them myself. Mind you, these things have, what, three ingredients? Four?
The only other dish I’ve ever had to throw out was a big pot of butter chicken that I over-fenugreeked. There’s a big difference between four tablespoons and four teaspoons.
There’s a Pit thread complaining about people saying things like “Can you borrow me a dollar?” or “Can I loan a dollar from you?” Apparently this type of thing is running rampant in Minnesota. I suspect the zombie hoards are behind it.
Or maybe the duck’s executioner/defeatherer had been reading underground comics:
Freewheelin’ Franklin: “The stuffing! What did you stuff the turkey with?”
Fat Freddy: “Oh, I didn’t have to stuff it. It wasn’t empty…”
Oh, my God! I had to read through that twice before I believed it. I still can’t quite believe it. Laurel and Hardy?
Thank you. I didn’t know that, and I’m sure I would’ve made the same mistake sooner or later.
Did you ever come up for a recipe for them? They sound delicious.
The same thing happened to me, recently. I had a bunch of chicken leg quarters that I’d bought on sale, so I spent a Saturday making stock. The water was getting a little low, so I poured in some more to cover the chicken and brought it back up to a simmer. Then my fiance and I went into the other room to watch a show on my computer. About half an hour later, we opened the door to find our apartment FILLED with thick smoke. I had turned the heat up under the stock after adding the water, but I’d forgotten to turn it back down once it started simmering. We spent the rest of the day airing the apartment out and trying to clear our lungs.
When I told the story to my best friend the next day, she informed me that my fiance and I could not continue with our engagement, as I’d just failed at being a wife. 