The problem is that your statement had nothing to do with the kind of stories the OP was asking for and was simply an act of thread-shitting.
One of my friends once tried to make a pizza with ketchup instead of tomato sauce. Yeah, that sucked. It doesn’t work on spaghetti either.
A guy I know carries around a water bottle with him, which is usually filled with water. Except when he goes out drinking. Then he will fill it with Jack and Coke, or vodka and Pepsi. He has a story about coming home from a night out drinking, decided he was hungry, and made some easy mac. When he went to add the water he used his bottle which is usually filled with water. He says that easy mac is no good with alcohol and soda.
That’s nothing. When I was 5, I was given one of those ‘make your own McDonald hamburger kits,’ or whatever they were called. Thing is, while the final product looked like a burger, it actually consisted of ingredients used to make a cake. So it was like a hamburger cupcake. Anyways, we didn’t have the ingredients to make the ketchup, so my dad had the brilliant idea adding actual ketchup to the burger.
That was the worst cupcake I ever had,
You cannot make Welsh Rarebit with swiss cheese and extra-sharp chedder cheese.
I am embarrassed to even admit that I tried this. It took an hour of soaking and 15 minutes to scrape it out of the pot.
holds up right hand, left hand on Joy of Cooking I swear I will follow the recipe when making a dish for the first time. So help me Og.
As a kid I tried making those round chocolate no-bake cookies one day while my mom was at work.
I mixed Nestle Quik, peanut butter, honey, half a bottle of Caro syrup, and cornflakes all together. It turned to goo in the fridge. So I put the goo on a cookie sheet and baked it. It turned to glass.
I made chicken curry with vanilla yogurt once, instead of plain yogurt. (In my defense, I don’t actually eat yogurt, I just use it for cooking now and again, and I was thinking “how different can it be?”)
Um, yeah. Very very different. Think chicken in dessert sauce :smack:
My grandmother used to make me instant oatmeal that she served with boiled chocolate milk. It’s not as yummy as it sounds.
And by the way, didn’t the strugglings and the sufferings of the little girl accomplish anything? It’s not macaroni and cheese,
IT’S KRAFT CHEESE & MACARONI!
My worst was making PB cookies from a mix (I was 8 or so). The directions said to add 1 tablespoon of water, and I added a cup instead. Ick.
My cooking disaster story isn’t mine, it’s my ex’s.
She once tried to make minestrone soup in our crock pot.
She threw everything in and let it sit all day.
She used a pound of ground turkey, but didn’t break it up. It just sunk to the bottom and cooked in a lump.
But the worst part was the macaroni. Do you know what happens to macaroni when it sits in a crock pot all day. It disintegrates. We had hot starch soup. Yum.
Another Kraft comment:
If you don’t have milk and/or butter, you can try sour cream. It’s not everyone’s idea of delicious, but some of us like it. Of course, I usually skip the butter, myself, so you might want to take that into consideration.
I was once at a friend’s house, and he was all excited about making mushroom stroganoff for us. He’d bought all the ingredients earlier in the day, and was just getting around to making the sauce, when he realized he couldn’t find the sour cream anywhere (much less in the fridge, where he’d put it).
Eventually his roommate wandered in, and said, “Oh, yeah–I was hungry, so I ate it.”
“ALL OF IT?” my friend squeaked. “PLAIN?”
The roommate shrugged. “Uh, yeah?”
So, no sour cream, and everything else was cooked and ready for assembly. We tried to think of a substitute: something fatty, tangy, with a semisolid structure and creamy color that could substitute.
We were both trying to think of a substitute, but I confess I was the one who suggested mayonnaise. I thought it was brilliance.
Oh how wrong I was.
Then there was the time in New Orleans where I and some friends were staying in a rented bungalow, and we were jonesing for a home-cooked meal. Or semihomecooked, anyway. So we went to a corner market and bought a bunch of ingredients, including corn-bread mix.
But we got back to the apartment and realized the mix called for added sugar, which we did not have. “I know!” I said. “Let’s substitute Coke for the water–it’s got sugar in it, right?”
I thought it was a brilliant substitution, and persisted in spite of the horrified mockery my friends foisted on me.
In this case, I prevailed: it was delicious.
The worst I’ve heard of, though, is a friend’s mother, who legendarily invented the world’s worst recipe:
Tuna muffins.
Daniel
When I was in college I had a roommate from Singapore. He watched me and my other roommate eat Mac N Cheese in abundance and decided he wanted to make some. SO he boiled the noodles and without even draining the noodles he added the cheese powder, milk and butter. It was very soupy disgusting looking mix. He ain’t it, claiming, unsuccessfully, that he wanted it that way.
My mom is a good country girl who always used to keep a can on the back of the stove for storing the accumulated grease from frying bacon. I was a budding cook who decided to try a recipe on my own after school one day.
Now, bacon grease = animal fat and lard = animal fat, but I am here to tell you that bacon grease /= lard.
Especially not when you are making cookies. They were very popular—with the dog.
Once, when I was a kid, I was making some kind of cookies that required brown sugar. A lot. Like 3 cups or so. My mom and step-dad were out for the day. I grabbed the first brown sugar I saw. The cookies tasted horrible. I couldn’t really figure out why. It turns out I used a Sweet-n-Low version of brown sugar that only required you to use 1/2 or 1/4 the amount of normal brown sugar. Even my mom said they were horrible.
The one that everybody in my family remembers is the Crunchy Jell-O.
Mom found a bag of marshmallows in the cupboard that had gotten old and hard. These were colored marshmallows, by the way, which made it even more of a shame to throw them out. So she thought, why not put them in Jello? The hot water will soften them up!
It didn’t.
So there we were, sitting around the table, trying to eat the Jello anyway, going crunch crunch squeak squeak as our teeth bit down on the marshmallows.
My SO has a great recipe for a German cheesecake that requires a special cheese (quark) and he drove across town to the local international food shop and got it.
He comes home, makes the cheesecake, takes it out of the oven and proudly serves it to me and a few friends we had over.
As he serves it he mutters, “Hmm…kinda flat and didn’t rise well…” and then I hear several curse words in German.
He had forgotten to add the cheese.
It was, however, a big, tasty sugar cookie of sorts.
And bwana bob, my cousins loved peanut butter, lettuce and mayo sandwiches! It grossed me out, but they probably still consider them a delicacy.
My roommate was very poor. He was hungry one night and asked if he could have the $.29 box of store brand mac and cheese that I had in the cupboard. I, of course, told him that was fine, as I knew he couldn’t get that much scratch together. Turned out we didn’t have any milk so he used sour cream. No problem right? In fact, I would think that would be really tasty.
Then, for some reason still unknown to my other roommate and myself, he got out the balsamic vinegar.
:o
Not a disaster (very tasty, in fact) but not so good for digestion, was the time that another roommate decided to make hamburger helper for the two of us. I bought meat in larger packages and I would freeze it because it was cheaper than buying it one pound at a time. She got out the meat, defrosted it and cooked up some HH. Only, instead of the one pound she was expecting there were almost three pounds of hamburger. It was really really good, but damn, we were bound up for a while after that. 
Turns out, her mother had never let her get near raw meat before and she didn’t know that it came in packages larger than a pound. She also had never seen a whole chicken (or game hen) and so was shocked when served it at a friend’s house because it looked like the animal it had come from. She also had not cut her own meat until she was 14. She’s much more sophisticated now.
Bird muffins. They are normal cornbread muffins, but have additional ingredients for the purpose of teaching an African Grey parrot with an eating disorder how to eat healthy bird food. You add whole sunflower seeds, parrot kibble, hardboiled egg, carrot, eggshell or cuttlefish bone powder, dried fruit, and whatever else you want the bird to learn to eat. Bake. The bird nibbles at the irresitable corn bread matrix and gradually learns to recognize the lumpy extras as food. It works really well.
So my boyfriend had this rescue grey parrot, and we were teaching the bird to eat parrot food, instead of the crap diet his previous owner had him on. The bird got one bird muffin a day. During finals, I would be too busy visit for a week, so I gave my man a whole bag of muffins for the duration. He put them in the freezer. Later that night, his father came home and ate the ENTIRE bag.
The next day, he told my boyfriend that I was a really nice girl, but I was the worst cook in the world.
I never understood why he didn’t stop after the first bite
When I used to eat Kraft Macaroni & Cheese regularly, about one in three boxes was completely ruined because I added 1/2 cup milk instead of 1/4 cup. For some reason I could never get that one right. I finally gave up on the stuff entirely (the microwave version just doesn’t taste the same).
In high school cooking class, one group of guys made a pie using Karo syrup instead of oil. I think they ended up having to throw out the pie dish, as the pie crust was pretty much welded to it.