As a young’un on a Boy Scout camping trip, I tried to make spaghetti. At age 12, it’s important to know that you need to bring the water to a boil before adding your pasta.
My roommate decide to make some Ramen one night. Got the pan, put it on the stove, turned on the heat, went back to the computer, and forgot all about:
Putting water in the pot;
leaving an empty non-stick pot on a stovetop burner on HIGH.
Stoopid roommate. :mad:
This past Thanksgiving, I decided to make pumpkin bread. Looking at the recipe showed me that one can of pumpkin was equal to two and a half times the recipe I had.
I suck at math. Pumpkin ensued.
Hah! I did the exact same thing with a pumpkin bread recipe a couple years ago. I had twice as much “wet” ingredients as I needed, and ended up freezing half of it, thinking I’d use it later. I ended up throwing it away when I moved a year later.
I learned the hard way this past Christmas that a Cuisinart is not a suitable tool with which to make mashed potatoes. It’s great if you need garlic-flavored wallpaper paste, however.
My ex put some chicken into a pan of hot oil and went to lie down for a while, I woke him up when I came home five hours later. The chicken bones were cooked. I threw it out, pan and all.
My lasagna recipe calls for layers of mozzarella cheese slices. You know those thin pieces of paper used to separate slices of cheese? Once I didn’t notice them.
It was challenging, but we ate it anyway, picking around the layers of paper.
I think the real downfall had something to do with the baking powder. The loaves baked, and they looked almost right, but each loaf weighed about ten pounds. I wrapped one up and used it for a doorstop later that day.
**tiltypig ** wins. That’s gross.
I’m glad you had a house and ex to come home to. Wow.
Once I made Tollhouse cookies without adding flour. :eek: I saved them, though. I poured all the melty chocolate goo into the missing flour, dropped them onto a clean cookie sheet, and had chocolate cookies!
Once I made a chicken and rice casserole (that I made all the time in the oven) in a crockpot. The chicken came out like jerky, and the rice was a huge burnt-on-the-bottom gelatinous mess. Truly gross. We ate out that night.
I made broccoli soup following a recipe exactly, (yeah right) - and it came out watery and salty and icky.
I’ve had a few disasters, but most of the time my stuff is edible, when not spectacular!
I made pancakes.
I didn’t use enough liquid, so the batter ended up being more gloppy than runny, so the pancakes didn’t end up flat.
also, I didn’t use enough oil, so they stuck to the bottom of the pan.
And I had the heat turned up too high, so they burned almost immediately.
I ended up with a mess of not-flat pancakes that were scorched on the outside and still raw inside.
I took pictures of them because I thought it was funny.
I once made eggs benedict for a girl, and got so caught up in dividing my attention between being suave, taking care not to break the hollandaise, and timing everything just right that when the muffins were toasted, the sauce was ready, and the ham and tomato was lightly roasted, I released that I’d completely forgotten to poach the eggs. :smack:
I guess it turned out relatively alright in the end, but of course none of the other elements benefited from waiting those extra minutes, and the fact that I’ve overlooked the damned eggs was completely mortifying.
As for completely unsalvageable – one time I made a luvverly french canadian pea soup that I’d made a hundred times before. I was just about to head out the door for the night, but and it seemed to me that my soup was a bit more watery than was ideal – so I figured I’d improvise. I’d already turned the stove off, and I threw a handful of rice into the pot to absorb the extra water.
What I hadn’t counted on was the bacterial culture that lives on rice, which is ordinarily not a problem when you, you know, boil it. I didn’t anticipate any problem leaving soup out overnight, because I do it fairly frequently.
Oh lord. I got in in the morning and you’d swear that it had been there for a week. It smelled exactly like the sort of thing that you’d expect to be puked up in a detox clinic. When the lid came off, it was like being punched in the face. I wretched while dumping it into the toilet, and somehow, no matter how much I soaked and scrubbed that pot, it retained the god-awful stink, and had to be thrown out.
My favourite horrible meal story is my parents’, though. My folks are from a tiny railroad town in New Brunswick – but my dad, when they got married, was a “man of the world,” having been to a few centers of civiliziation in the army. So he asked my mum to make something exotic for dinner – fried rice. Totally foreign concept to her, but he explained it the best he could, and she, dubiously, gave it a shot. It didn’t turn out well. My father dutifully ate an entire plateful and then gently suggested that, next time, she should cook the rice before she fried it up with the meat, eggs and vegetables.
Pea soup can do that without the rice. I was a sensitive teenager and had all my best friends in the whole wide world over to sleep the night, and we got up to a pot of soup-gone-evil the next morning. No one’s ever let me (or dad whose fault it was) forget that.
Inedible thing I made? Mmm, well we didn’t actually even try eating the leek tart I made. We got leeks. I thought, hmm, something tasty and quichey. I searched on line for a recipe and found an authentic medieval Italian (so it says, who knows…) recipe. What ho! Might as well try.
It had thick, thick pizza dough for the tart crust. So we’re already not… you know… going all light and pastryful. Which should be a word. The prosciutto at the bottom of the tart was probably very tasty. Then the leeks, in rounds. OK. Then egg, which, yes, I was pretty much thinking would be a quiche component. NO CHEESE. And very little by way of spices. I think a grate of nutmeg and a little salt and pepper.
It just looked so miserable and not tasty when I took it out of the oven that we pitched it and ordered pizza. It was not the scrumptious little something with caramelized leeks, flaky pastry and oozing cheese I’d sort of pictured making before I’d been swept away by the romance of a genuine medieval recipe. No wonder they all died young.