I’ve never been one for chopped liver but I love brunschweiger, go figure.
My latest cooking failure involved a meatloaf. Yes, meatloaf, one of the simplest and most idiot-proof meals available. It actually tasted pretty good but was very crumbly on the plate. It barely held together at all. Since half the fun of meatloaf is tomorrow’s meatloaf sandwich, it just wasn’t going to do.
I tried to make crispy oven sweet potato fries. One recipe said that the secret was after you bake them to turn the oven down to 200 for 20 minutes to dry them out. That makes logical sense, but it didn’t make the fries crisp. I suspect that the only way to get them crisp is a deep fryer but I’d rather just bake them.
Add a little more milk, some grated cheddar cheese and dill - delicious potato soup! 
I get it! I get it!
I never would have gotten it if I hadn’t finally started reading Pratchett, and I never would have tried Pratchett if I hadn’t read about him here.
Well instead it can be tomorrow’s pasta with meat sauce. That’s what usually happens to my leftover meatloaf.
Well, last night’s marinated pork chops were overcooked and kind of tough. Too bad, because the flavor was phenomenal. I always forget how fast they cook.
Certainly nothing wrong with that, I’ve done it many times before. What I ended up doing though was mashing it up and mixing it with chopped onions, cooked long grain rice, a couple of eggs and some parm cheese and using it as a filling for stuffed peppers. Bake them with a little marinara and it makes a nice lunch.
Once overcooked a carbonara sauce…the egg turned scrambled instead of the creamy sauce it’s supposed to be along with the pancetta in this classic Roman dish.
Total disaster…
I always struggle against overcooking pork. I like good beef rare, but I am conditioned to think that pork needs more thorough cooking. The best pork tenderloin I ever made was delicious only because I mistakenly undercooked it.
The dogs woulda LOVED it. 
My cat woulda BURIED it.
My daughter had a birthday recently and I had a new shaped cake pan. It’s like a giant cupcake. (this one: Nordicware cupcake pan ) I used the recipe that came with the pan assuming the recipe would make the appropriate amount of batter.
The batter tasted lovely, btw. I poured it in the pan and then put the pan in the pre-heated oven. Unfortunately, the pan has two sides, the bottom side and the top that looks like the top of a frosted cupcake and comes to a point. Pretty soon I smelled some awful burning sugar smell from my oven. The batter was over running the pan because I had filled it too full and the cute little pointed side was sitting with the point not supported so the pan was leaning and dumping even more batter down to the bottom of my now very smelly oven.
I threw a quarter sheet cookie sheet under it and the running batter issue was solved. So now I had to figure out how long to bake an over filled cup cake pan. I guessed wrong and under baked by 5 minutes. Most of the time that wouldn’t be an issue but a cupcake shaped cake is very tall and narrow. The base section was a bit wimpy with a sort of hollowish section in the top. I hollowed a bit more out to make more room for the filling. Bad idea. When I put the cute top on the base the whole cake collapsed into a lovely chocolate, Bavarian cream, frosting’ed mess.
It was ugly. It was also very good. And luckily it was the trial run of the cake and not the one I was making for her party.
Just a few weeks ago I started some beef stew in the crock pot, let it cook for a while, thought it looked like it hadn’t combined well, let it cook longer… then fell asleep.
While it didn’t burn, exactly, it ended up with a homogeneous color that no food should have.
Don’t know if it’s just for regular potatoes, but my understanding is to get them crisp, you have to soak out the excess starch, dry them with a paper towel, and then double cook them, the second time at a higher temperature.
One of our favorite home-cooked dishes is a salmon recipe from the America’s Test Kitchen cookbook. It’s got a glaze made from brown sugar, coarse-ground mustard, garlic, and apple cider vinegar. I also still remember a restaurant at which I ate (and absolutely loved) salmon with a raspberry-mustard sauce.
So, I’m thinking, salmon with sweet sauces can certainly be awesome. What else could we try for a change from our usual brown sugar etc. recipe? Well, we have a new jar of honey- why don’t we check the ol’ internet for salmon recipes with a honey glaze. Could happen, right? Let’s see… score! A bunch of them! I think I’ll try… this one.
The shocking results: it tasted like fish with honey on it. Blech. Fail.
I’ve been making variations of potato curry for…ugh…the last two months? Mostly it has turned out well (but sometimes enough is enough!) Anyway, the last variation called for ghee. Luckily, the local Sainsbury’s sold ghee. In large cans. Far larger than I needed. They also said that the ghee should be used within a few days of opening. I decided that wasn’t happening, and used some other random oil, figuring I didn’t care if it was accurate-tasting.
That wasn’t the end of the mistakes, though! I added too much water when boiling the potatoes with the spices (my doubling of the internet recipe was somewhat iffy–how large is a “medium potato” anyway?) and the yogurt I added at the end didn’t blend in with the oily water. 
It was still edible, and I’m finishing it because I’m a poor university student, but that’s why I started another thread asking dopers for recipes.
Oh, and I also almost set the kitchen of a rented house on fire when I decided to make homemade flan. Apparently the time it takes between “all sugar melted” and “sugar is burning” is a lot shorter than I suspected. Also, it’s very hard to think when you’re holding a pan of 400 degree sticky liquid that needs to be poured into the little flan containers RIGHT NOW. The only virtue of that experiment was that it showed me why untried recipes are best not left for 10pm. At least it wasn’t drunk cooking.
I made a big pot of chili last week and when it was ready I found it tasted kind of bland. So I added some red pepper and sazon to liven it up. It tasted better after that but it kept giving me heartburn everytime I ate a bowl.
I found this site the other day which is hilarious : www.cookingfails.com, it sounds just like me. I poached eggs the other day and when I cut into them they were so undercooked all the egg white ran out all over my breakfast. It was gross, it made me gag.
I was making an Indian dish based off of chickpeas and the top literally came off the salt shaker as I was adding salt… there was only about half again as much salt as there was supposed to be, but, wow, was that inedible.
I made this recipe for Indian vegetable curry in the crock pot a couple of months ago, and I followed the instructions exactly. It smelled so good, but it is the blandest thing I’ve ever tasted. I then tried adding more chili powder, curry powder, salt, etc., but it made no difference.