Inspired by this thread … what meals have you really really screwed up; and how, if possible, did you rescue them?
I distincly remember deciding to make five meat loaf loaves at once and not putting anything other than egg and breadcrumbs in any of them - and not figuring it out until they were cooked.
I pretty much ended up breaking them into little pieces and refrying them with seasoning, adding them to spaghetti sauce, etc, for a long time.
I once made a pork dish from a recipe a friend gave me. It was “twice cooked pork” and called for (as you might guess) cooking the pork - in oil - for a minute or two, letting it cool, then cooking it again in the oil.
The tidbits of meat looked pretty much done after the first trip through the oil, but the instructions said twice so I did.
The pork was inedible. Not “so-so”. Not “unappetizing”. We literally could not chew it - it was blackened the whole way through.
No salvaging that stuff. I fixed it by calling Domino’s for pizza.
Then there was the time I forgot to double all the ingredients for toll house cookies. I doubled everything but the baking powder. The cookies tasted OK, but my father described them as having the consistency of hardtack.
Ha. I have a great story.
I love ras gulla, which are sweetened cheese balls. Only, since they’re hard to make, very few places sell/serve them, and if they do, they’re crappy. So I thought I’d make them.
It was the first time I ever tried to make cheese and I read it out of a book. So I made it, and it seemed to come out OK. I hung it in the cheese cloth, then when it was ready, removed it, and made the balls out of it.
Then I started boiling the syrup. And I put the cheese balls into the syrup. About 30 seconds after I’d put the last one in, the first one started to crumble. Then the next, and the next.
Soon they had all crumbled, and I was left with a floating crumbly sweet cheese mixture. It tasted good, but looked totally unappetizing.
Right on schedule, my SO comes home, takes one look at it, and proceeds to look at me like I have three heads.
I’ve since gotten much better at making cheese and actually am quite good now, having learned some tricks. Hmm…should make some this weekend, actually.
When I was seventeen, my aunt had me watch her house and kids while she was in Aruba. (The kids were teenagers themselves.) When the day arrived for her to come home, I decided to bake her a cake, and by gum, it wasn’t going to be one of those out-of-the-box cakes-- I was going to make it from scratch.
Something went horribly awry, but to this day, I do not know what it was. The cake batter didn’t taste right-- after one taste, the kids flatly refused to lick the spoon after I had finished mixing it. (And I had left extra batter in the bowl as a treat!) We decided, though, that things often taste different after they’re cooked and voted to proceed with the baking.
Perhaps I had the oven too hot, because the edges of the cake burned, while the inside remained gooey. Consulting with the other kids, we decided to take out the cake, and trim away the burned parts, and caution people not to eat the raw parts. But time was running short-- we decided to put the cake in the freezer to cool it quickly so that we could put the frosting on it.
This led to complete structural collapse. When we opened the freezer, we saw that the center of the cake had a huge sag in the middle. Not to worry, I assured them-- we’ll fill it with blue icing and say it’s a representation of the beach!
My aunt was delighted when she saw the cake and praised our inventive decoration of it. We all waited eagerly to see her reaction after the first bite. Her eyes widened. She chewed slowly, and swallowed with what appeared to be great difficulty. “It’s very interesting!” she said, and God love her, ate a whole piece. I was serving it-- I didn’t try it until she had already finished. When I did, I knew how kind she truly was.
Well, my mom once served us chili beans over spaghetti, because she thought the can said chili WITH beans. That was a little bland.
Once, when camping, I thought I’d cook the spaghetti noodles right in the tomato sauce, thus saving the washing of another pot. The noodles thickened the sauce dramatically until it was one horrible, inedible congealed mess. I left it in the skillet on the picnic table overnight, and woke to see a couple of ravens trying to breakfast from it. It was so dense that they couldn’t chip off a chunk with their beaks. They eventually gave up and flew away. I didn’t see that any raccoons or bears made an attempt on it overnight, either.
Oh man - I did this - boyfriend of the time, ate half a plate before I sat down with my fork. I was making dinner at his parent’s house, the first meal I’d ever cooked for him; I bought the main ingredients especially - and they didn’t have all the spices I wanted, they had them all in [spice]-Salt form.
I just seasoned as always, and the accumulated salt caused me to choke. We went out for KFC instead.
My mom came back from a trip to England with some real English Porridge, which she happily made and served to my dad I one Sunday. We each took a bit. Bit on the salty side. But we wanted to be nice, so we tried to remedy it.
We each casually reached for the sugar bowl, poured in a couple spoonfuls, and mixed it in. We took another bite.
And spat it out. Her face fell, and she tried a bite.
And spat it out.
We checked the sugar bowl. Sure enough, it had been refilled with salt somehow. Wrong bag, apparently. 
This one is both a Broke and Broken meal.
I needed to feed 3 hungry kids and had little food and no money. I searched around and found enough bits of stuff to make a casserole – noodles, can of soup, 5 corn kernels… Then I managed to burn it. But I remembered reading that peanut butter would counter-act burnt taste. So I stirred some in. It tasted even worse than you might imagine!
Baking powder and baking soda are not interchangeable. I’ve screwed up a couple of recipes that way.
Also, if you’re halving a cookie recipe, and you remember to halve everything except for the butter, you don’t get edible cookies.
I once, by following the recipe, burned the living crap out of a poor innocent tuna steak. I thought I’d actually ruined my pan, it was so burned. My boyfriend ate every single little bite of it, swears he liked it, and said “it tastes chargrilled!” I honestly believe his family must live off of Cheese-Whiz and stale bread or something, because I’ve never produced a culinary disaster so bad he wouldn’t eat it and like it. He thinks I’m a marvelous cook.
Picture two college undergrads, sharing an apartment. Picture finals week…
It seemed like such a good idea to try to keep things simple and quick by making rice-cheese-vegetable goop for dinner.
It was going to be our first time cooking together. I had given the standard warning a few weeks earlier that the kitchen and I don’t get along (to say the least). We found a nice white fish recipe off of some website and decided to give it a go.
We went to the store and bought the appropriate amounts of all the ingredients. I double-checked everything to try to stave off the inevitable disaster that would result from me trying to be one with the kitchen. Everything looked fine. It wasn’t fine.
We prepared the raw fish as directed, set it in the oven to bake for the appropriate amount of time, set the table, played at domestic bliss. (Hah!) The timer chimed and dinner was served.
I knew something was wrong. The fish pieces looked rubbery and undercooked. My fear of bacteria leading to death or disease kept me from trying anything we’d cooked. I just knew.
He took one bite. He had a strange expression on his face. He ran to the sliding door, opened it, took long strides across the deck and vomited.
His roommate laughed. I think we did DQ that night.
I think the slabs of fish we bought were too thick. The recipe didn’t mention anything about that, just stating something like ‘8 oz. white fish, breaded in…’. Sawing them to half their width never occured to me.
I don’t think I ever attempted cooking anything new for him again. We ate a lot of spaghetti and fish sticks while we were living together.
I was lazy today foodwise and got a frozen spaghetti meal to nuke. I like spaghetti a lot but I don’t know how to make a good bolognaise sauce* so occasionally I treat myself to some frozen stuff.
So I got it home and nuked it and added some parmesan and stirred it all up and was just about to take a HUGE forkful when i noticed something odd. A black speck. And another one. And there’ s a big one! The corner of the container was broken and bits had got mixed up with my delicious-smelling pasta. A very broken meal. Sigh.
*theoretically i know, it’s just i always fail the practical.
Jar of pre-made sauce and browned hamburger is always a good bet.
My worst cooking fiasco was one summer when I decided to make salsa. My grandmother had given me several gorgeous tomatoes so I thought that would be the perfect use for them. I chopped onion, cilantrio, and garlic, put it all together, and when I tried it something seemed strange, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.
I took some over to my dad (who will eat and like almost anything )and he said, “Ugh, this is the worst salsa I’ve ever had. You put too much garlic in it!” I quickly figured out that I had put in four bulbs of garlic instead of just four of the little segments. I couldn’t eat or smell garlic for a long time after that, and I still can’t eat cilantro. Ick. :smack:
Thanks but i don’t really like the pre-made jar sauces. They always taste too acidic for me. I do actually know how to make bolognaise sauce it’s just i don’t think it tastes as nice as the sauces everyone else makes so i never bother lol
When I was 12 my cousin and I decided to make cookies for her family. We followed the Tollhouse recipe, but obviously something went awry. We baked the cookies for the requisite minutes, and they were still raw in the middle. Baked 'em again for 10 minutes, no improvement. We baked those cookies for 90 minutes: The edges eventually burned, but the centers never cooked.
I still don’t know what we did . . .
Tuna croquettes
One can tuna, one cup pancake mix.
Add enough mayonaise to moisten.
Drop rounded teaspoonfuls onto hot teflon skillet.
Goes well with a six pack.
When I was 19 or so, I decided to make a couple of pumpkin pies for my family. Forgot to put the sugar in. Pumpkin pies are inedible without sugar. So we discovered.
A friend of my Dad’s had gone fishing and gave him one of the salmon he caught. I looked in the cookbook, which said to bake x number of minutes per inch of thickness. I checked the salmon after the required number of minutes was up only to discover that it wasn’t all the way cooked yet. Bet we let it bake another 20 minutes and the center wasn’t all the way done even then. We were hungry and the side dishes were getting cold so we ate the parts of the salmon that were done. Still don’t know what happened there.
[hijack]
Y’know, Anaamika, when I was a small child my father invited an Indian work colleague and his wife over to dinner, and they brought these nameless round sweet things that were completely different from anything I’d ever tasted before. It’s one of those taste memories that has lingered with me all my life; I don’t remember either of their faces, but those little syrupy balls have stayed with me. This must be them! I’ll have to make them sometime. Thanks for the recipe.
[/hijack]
My story involves a sweet potato pie attempt. I’m not exactly sure what went wrong, but I think that what I thought were sweet potatoes weren’t. They were some other root vegetable. The pie filling turned out sort of greenish gray, stringy, not sweet, and basically completely disgusting in every way. Into the trash it went. I actually started a thread here about it at the time, asking for ideas about what the hell I’d just made. (Turnips? Surely I didn’t make a turnip pie?!)