This thread has cheered me up a great deal. The thing that worries me is that I am getting hungry.
I’m a fairly good cook and have become one by means of a large amount of trial and error.
For starters there was the stir fry incident in college. I invited a couple of young ladies to join me for a meal and we stir fried some chicken and vegetables. No problem until one of them asked me how many of the dried red chili peppers to chop and add to the mix. I, not realizing just how hot those mothers are, shrugged and said, oh, three or four should be fine. We all managed to eat a little of the stuff while tears ran down our faces and I lived off the remainder for about a week by diluting it over and over with more vegetables and rice until it at least didn’t make my nose run.
Then there was the chocolate haystack incident, although in my defense that was more my housemates’ doing than mine. They were all stoned and decided to make those chocolate covered chow mein noodles. The only problem was that, of course, we didn’t have any of the right kind of chocolate so one of them got the idea to use cocoa instead. I figured she might know what she was doing so I went along with it. The resulting sludge looked like a bowl of mud (I refused to even taste it) and sat in the living room for about two months getting fuzzy before somebody finally got up the courage to pick it up and toss it.
Then there were the sweet and sour pigs in a blanket. Yeah, those worked. :rolleyes:
In the category of “disaster, but recovered”, did I ever tell you guys about the one time when I made cookies?
It was when I was still new to having my own apartment, and I was feeling very domestic, so I decided to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Nothing fancy, just the recipe off the back of the bag. But for some reason, I decided to only make a half batch. No problem, until I got to the baking soda, and accidentally added the full recipe amount. Well, too late to fix it, I figured. I’ll just bake up one trayful and see how they come out.
Of course, they were horribly bitter. OK, I figure, that makes sense. Baking soda is a base, and bases are bitter. Obviously, I thought, what I need to do is neutralize the base (I’ve since been informed that this is not the way most cooks think). So, I open the refrigerator, and look around. No vinegar. Remember, I said I was new to my apartment. I hadn’t yet stocked up completely. No lemon juice. No sour cream. Spaghetti sauce, but no way in Hell was I adding that.
But what’s this? A jar of pickles! Aha! So I measured out a teaspoon of pickle juice, and mixed it in with the rest of the dough. And they came out just fine.
When I was a teenager, my best friend and I decided we would bake some brownies. However, neither of us had the best short-term memory (I still don’t). So, while we were mixing up the ingredients, we forgot to add the eggs.
We put the mixture in the oven, and discovered that, when you don’t add eggs to brownies, they still look like uncooked batter at the end of the baking time.
I insist to this day that she was the one who had the idea to add the eggs then. She probably insists it was my idea. Either way, we added the eggs to the hot baking pan and tried to stir them into the mix.
Me: The eggs are frying in the pan!
Her: Stir faster!
When my mom came home later, she asked if we had been baking “a yummy chocolate dessert”, saying that’s what it smelled like. I truthfully answered no…
Ok, I’ve got one, more of an entertaining one than disastrous.
I decided to make ras gulla - Indian cheese balls. They are little round cheese balls in a sweet syrup. Well, I was brave and decided to make the cheese by hand.
Cheese-making is obviously a very hard skill. I don’t know what I didn’t do, but it didn’t “gel”. The cheese wouldn’t stay together.
I managed to make it stick, with a little water, and made the balls, put the balls in the syrup, and started the heat up. (You’re supposed to boil them in there).
Well you all know what happened. The cheese fell apart into granules, and floated on the top of the water. SO, instead of cheese balls, I had Minced Sweet Cheese in Syrup. :smack:
I tasted it, it tasted fine. But obviously no one would eat it!
When I was a young whippersnapper I used to drink coffee, with lots of sugar. I was over at a friends house and they told me to grab a cup if I wanted one. So I go into the kitchen, pour myself a cup, and look around for the sugar. There it is, so I add my two big heaping teaspoons of sugar, and stir it up. Let me take a big gulp of this stuff, it smells so good. Yech-tooie. Come to find out, that “sugar bowl” was used to store salt.
In an early-morning haze (curse you, 9 AM classes!), I once accidentally filled my coffee filter (not a machine, just a drippy thing you put over the mug) with chai tea powder instead of coffee grounds. Surprised the hell out of me. :smack:
My sister and some friends (all engineering majors, read into that what you will) were trying to bake cookies once. The first tray did not turn out right at all. They tried messing around with the recipe, adding more and more flour, etc. Eventually they realized that they were using powdered sugar, not flower. My sister actually sliced her hand open on one of the ‘sugar-butter-and-chocolate-chips-Things’, trying to scrape it off the pan.
So, I’m making homemade chicken-vegetable soup in someone elses’ kitchen. It’s almost done and I give it a taste–hmmm, needs salt. Find a salt shaker filled with a white crystaline powder and shake some in.
Still needs salt. Shake some more. Still needs salt. Shake some more. etc.
Must be enough by now–serve it.
Host; “It needs salt.” I hand her the shaker. “You didn’t use this did you? It’s pure MSG!”
I’m allergic to MSG.
She still thinks it was my fault for not asking if the white crystaline powder in the salt shaker was actually salt.
Worst gaff that was my fault?
I wanted to make homemade ice cream just like I had as a kid for a bunch of friends. I confused condensed milk for evaporated. You wouldn’t think it would be that different, but 20 years later my teeth still hurt to think of it.
Mr. Cotta got hungry one night in college and tried to heat up a chicken pot pie. This was before microwaves and he had no access to an oven of any sort so he stripped the insulation off a lamp’s wires and tried to electrocute the pot pie into doneness.
Sometime later, when they got the dorm’s electricity back online. . .
Let me just say that Mac & Cheese is not good made with Zima.
I didn’t cook this, but years ago, we went as a family to Williamsburg. It was August and hot as hell. I was just pregnant with my third and was thirsty, constantly.
We went to Ye Olde Inne for lunch. Ye Olde Inne does not believe in such plebian modern accotrements as packets of sugar/sugar substitute. There were various dishes of white/beige granulated substances in the center of Ye Olde Creaky Table. I was so thirsty, the minute Ye Olde Dish of Iced Tea came, I dumped 2 large teaspoons of the brownish granules into my tea and chugged. I figured it was Ye Olde Not Fully Processed Browne Sugar.
It was not.
It was something akin to rock salt.
I almost tossed Ye Cookies at the table…
Ye Olde Maidservant got me more tea, once she had stopped laughing.
Back in the Pleistocene when I first moved out of the dorms into a house with 3 other guys, I was named the house cook because I had some rudimentary skill. One night I was busily making fried rice. Now, we all loved lots of soy sauce in our fried rice, so I grabbed the bottle out of the fridge and started merrily dumping it into the mix. Served things up, and we each gained a look of bafflement as we took our first bites. Eventually, we figured out that I had grabbed the Worcestershire sauce instead of the soy sauce. :smack:
Then, of course, there was the Gravy Incident. A bunch of us gathered for a turkey feast in the general vicinity of Thanksgiving. As things were almost ready, we bachelors quickly came to the conclusion that no one was really comfortable making gravy. I was appointed, and proceeded to stir in milk, then flour, more milk, more flour, accompanied by occasional advice. Finally, we had what we declared to be gravy and settled in to our feast. It was good, but when we went to clean up, the half of the gravy that remained slid down the tilted pan in a solid block. :eek:
Much more recently, I was baking bread to use for Thanksgiving stuffing. I misread and used tablespoons of salt instead of teaspoons. The resulting bread was a shrivelled lump in the bottom of the bread machine. Incredibly dense, incredibly salty, and utterly inedible.
My favourite cooking disasters were not my own - they came from my Foods And Nutrition class in grade 9.
While making cookies, our teacher showed us the water displacement thingy for measuring butter. One group, not containing the brightest students in the school, added the water in with the butter. You’d expect the cookies to spread out across the sheet and burn, and they did. But that’s not it. They kept spreading across the sheet, then off the sheet, then onto the burner below where they started an oven fire.
Another time, we made pizza. Same group as above grabs the canister with the white powdery stuff while making the pizza crust. Somehow, no one noticed it was flour, not icing sugar. I kind of regret not trying a piece - I’m sure it was awful, but I’ll always want to know how awful.
As for my own kitchen disasters, let’s just say, just because I keep the balsamic vinegar and soy sauce in separate places to avoid confusion, doesn’t mean my roommate has the same idea. Tamari pasta sauce… ugh.
Ack. That made no sense. Switch ‘flour’ and ‘icing sugar’ in above.