Share your memorable cooking disasters

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

This one’s not mine, but, while backpacking this summer, it was the first time any of us had cooked (other than our 2 instructors). One of the first nights, two of the guys are making potato and cheese soup. Easy, right? You know that garlic-bulb-vs-clove mix-up? :eek: Soup with chunks of garlic. Literally. It was…interesting.

My worst mistake: NinjaMom is off for the weekend of NinjaDad’s b-day. I get nominated to make him a cake. I made him a layer cake. it was my first time cooking anything more complex than ramen or easy-mac. It was from a mix, but yes, I did it! It was perfect! Until I tried to get it out of the pan. I’m not sure what happened, but about a third of it kind of crumbled out of the middle, and everything else was firmly affixed to the pan.

Oh, and there’s the time my dad was making brownies, had to use an external digital thermometer, and got celsius and farenheit mixed up. We don’t like to talk about that anymore.

Oh yeah, and the time that my mom managed to bake the smoke detector. As in, turn the oven on with the smoke-detector inside of it and wander off. That was a good one to explain… :rolleyes:

22

You’re hungover and you’re making ravioli?? I’m not worthy.

23

Ah the dance of the Thankgiving turkey! Couple of years ago I was roasting a big BIG ol’ turkey, because I likes me turkey sammiches. My regular roaster is too small, more for portly chickens, so I bought a disposable pan. I’d never used one before so when I went to remove it from the oven it buckled and I panicked. Juice was dribbling everywhere, I was jumping around the kitchen trying to find a safe, clear place to set the damned bird down. The more I searched, the more the pan buckled, more dribbling. My damned cats get into the act, so now my panic enfeebled mind has to contend with hurdling cats as I now am cradeling the sizzling turkey in my arms. Drenched with turkey juice from the waist down, finally I give up and dump the behemoth in the sink. Stepping back to catch my breath and assess damages, I promptly slip and fall on my butt in the lake of gravy-that-could-have-been. Sure I had my turkey sammiches, but every single one tasted bitter thanks to chagrin over my tango with the turkey.

24

Oh, man. There was the time I tried to make sugar cookies. I don’t know what I did wrong, but I ended up with a sticky, melty looking pan of disgustingly buttery, soggy, sweet nastiness. Talk about your complete failure.

And the time I made cornbread, but forgot the sugar and baking powder. Unleavened cornbread is like lead. And unsweetened cornbread is really, really, REALLY bland. As in, it had practically no flavor. I managed to get it down by smearing honey all over it.

I also once made a yellow cake for my mom on her birthday that tasted more like cornbread with a funky aftertaste.

When I get cooking right, it’s pretty good, but when I fail, I fail spectacularly.

25

Not all disasters end up with inedible food. The more I tell this, the more old I’ll feel:

In our new house we got a brand newfangled Microwave oven. It came with a cookbook.

My teenaged self decides to make brownies.

Dija know there’s a difference between Cocoa power and Quick Instant Coco? Instead of moist brownies, I’d get goo.

I didn’t know there was a difference, and didn’t know it for the first FOUR attempts at microwave brownies from that cookbook.

It made for great icecream syrup tho’.

26

The first time I made Indian food, I put whole spices in a pan with oil on the stove, then turned my back while I was chopping up onions and garlic. Of course, by the time I was done, the spices had been burnt black. I decided to proceed with the receipe anyway.

So my first curry was flavored with ashes. Fortunately, I’ve gotten better at it.

27

It’s a tie between the time I had to go to the ER to get my foot stitched up after a spaghetti making incident, and the Turkey Meatloaf Muffins.

Hmmm…okay I guess the foot thing was more memorable, but the Turkey Meatloaf Muffins was more traumatic.

28

I come from a proud Southern tradition…one with gravy and biscuits as a near staple. As my So is of northern Episcopalian extraction, she can’t make good gravy…

So one Saturday morning while she was working, I had a real hankering for some real bisquits and gravy. The oven baked biscuits were no problem, although they cannot begin to approach those cooked by my aunts in skillets. But the gravy…wow!

It was one of those…“I think I need more milk”…“Now I need more flour”…more milk, more flour…and more stirring. Lots of stirring.

To this day, my two sons ( who were quite young at the time) will fall over laughing at the gravy that resulted. They are old enough to understand that grey is a color and that some foods must be cut with knives, so I don’t see what is so funny.

I won’t even mention the eggplant casserole that my wife cooked as her first meal after we were married…after all, we are still married.

29

BadBaby, I just wanted to say how funny I thought your “turkey dance” post was!

30

I once tried to make a recipe for vegetarian potato keftedes. I was having lots of trouble getting them to stay together, so I just kept adding more flour…and more… and more…

They basically ended up as fried chunks of flour with no flavor whatsoever. Ugh.

31

I remember my SO and I were broke and bored, and had a hankering for shrimp fried rice…so we thought we’d just go buy some white rice, frozen peas, eggs, soy sauce, and shrimp. Neither one of us knew how to make fried rice, so my SO just boiled it in a pot with some oil, and then scrambled an egg and put it in there with the defrosted peas.

Dumped half a bottle of soy sauce over it, and then the shrimp. Baby shrimp. Peeled, raw, unseasoned baby shrimp.

“How do you know when shrimp is done?”

“Um…I don’t know…when it’s chicken, it’s when the juices run clear, I think.”

“Does shrimp have juice?”

“Um…these do, I think. They’re kind of…runny?”

“Just leave 'em in there on low for awhile.”

The end result was a huge pot of mushy, wet, extremely salty rice. Thick with tiny, soggy shrimp, and strands of hard, overcooked egg. The thing smelled like the back dock of a seafood restaurant after a long, hot summer day.

And if I’d ever licked such a dock, I’m sure the taste would be about par.

And we were so broke we had to eat it.

Just the thought of it, lo these four years later, makes me shiver.

32

These are the toaster tongs I mentioned earlier.

Yesterday I tried to make a side dish involving grated courgette (zucchini), garlic and cream. What I ended up with was a mush of courgette and curdled yoghurt, with little bits of odd-tasting garlic. Somehow the garlic didn’t brown and ended up tasting half-uncooked and tinny. I left the whole thing on too long, it turned to pap, and I absentmindedly used yoghurt instead of cream. I have had this dish done properly, years ago, and I’ve never been able to figure out how to make it without knobbing it up somewhere along the line. It seems so easy!

33

Ok, this one is long but I think that it will amuse. This happened to me whilst working in an industrial kitchen.

I was the grill dude, working over an open flame grill. The grill area was separated from the sauté station by a low tile wall (for heat reasons). I was brining an 2 liter wine bottle which we had filled with olive oil past the tile wall, but was holding it a little too low.

The result was that the bottom of the bottle was neatly clipped off, depositing 2 liters of oil on the open flame. This created a fireball that set of the chemical fire extinguishers for the whole kitchen, causing us to have to close, throw all of our food away and start cleaning.

To make matters worse, it seems that there was a creosote buildup in the chimney that caught fire, resulting in a visit from the fire department. Weeeeeeee!

34

I’ve mentioned my experiment at making sugar free fudge in an earlier thread. That wasn’t really a disaster because it tasted okay, just a little sticky.

35

Nice thread - I’ve got an experience from Friday night.

I invited my sister and her husband over to my relatively new apartment to dine with my boyfriend and I. I was just going to make a simple meal - some chicken breasts cooked in cream of chicken soup (it’s good!), some veggies, stuffing, and rice. Very Midwestern.

First things first: while pouring the soup onto the chicken, I lost my grip on my sturdy Pyrex mixing bowl, which resulted in violent breakage of my baking dish. The bowl went sailing merrily down the hall and into the living room, but, upon recovery, was found to be miraculously unharmed. I realized that the chicken was unsalvagable, since it contained tiny glass shards, so a volunteer went to pick up some more chicken.

Take two! I decided, since I was now missing one baking dish, to use my trusty 1970s-vintage eletric skillet to do the chicken. It is a fine and trustworthy piece of machinery. It looks like this, except much older and without the decorative vegetables. Anyway, once I had that running, and the microwave, and the rice cooker, I immediately blew a fuse. Since I live in an apartment where all of the circuit breakers are kept…elsewhere, I had to excuse myself and run outside to the other side of the building to restore power.

Upon my return, I plugged in my skillet at another location and continued cooking. And blew a fuse. Again.

After returning, I continued cooking until my sister’s husband accidentally brushed against a button on my carbon monoxide detector, which set it off. It’s loud - I nearly stabbed myself in the eye with a spatula.

Eventually, we ate, and it was good. And educational! Now I know where my circuit breaker is!

36

Yes, even if it is just a bunch of guys camping, it is possible to put too much bourbon in a stew.

37

I once made the official hockey puck of the NHL in my oven. Tasted like burning and charring with a subtle hint of ginger snap.

38

Well, there was the time we used an “old fashioned” recipie to make sugar cookies. It called for lard, not butter or Crisco. Amazingly enough, my friend’s mother had lard in the fridge. It was not real fresh though, and until you’ve had iced, bacon flavored sugar cookies, you haven’t lived…

One Thanksgiving, the gas in the stove ran out in the middle of cooking the turkey. Since we had a wood burning stove, and my mother is an inventive sort, she rigged a sort of reflector oven. Have to admit that the turkey took a lot longer, but it did get cooked. And mom basted the hell out of that thing, so it wouldn’t be dry. Everything else got finished in the microwave or on top of the wood stove.

Last but not least, my mom tells a story about growing up on the water in Hampton, VA. She and her brother would go crabbing for dinner, and their mom would toss them in the boiling water alive. One rather energetic crab managed to spring out of the water, scuttle under the radiator where they couldn’t get him, and promptly die. Her brother is the only one who saw it happen, but didn’t say anything. After a while, they could smell the dead crab, but couldn’t figure out where he had come from.

39

Well, there was the time we used an “old fashioned” recipie to make sugar cookies. It called for lard, not butter or Crisco. Amazingly enough, my friend’s mother had lard in the fridge. It was not real fresh though, and until you’ve had iced, bacon flavored sugar cookies, you haven’t lived…

One Thanksgiving, the gas in the stove ran out in the middle of cooking the turkey. Since we had a wood burning stove, and my mother is an inventive sort, she rigged a sort of reflector oven. Have to admit that the turkey took a lot longer, but it did get cooked. And mom basted the hell out of that thing, so it wouldn’t be dry. Everything else got finished in the microwave or on top of the wood stove.

Last but not least, my mom tells a story about growing up on the water in Hampton, VA. She and her brother would go crabbing for dinner, and their mom would toss them in the boiling water alive. One rather energetic crab managed to spring out of the water, scuttle under the radiator where they couldn’t get him, and promptly die. Her brother is the only one who saw it happen, but didn’t say anything. After a while, they could smell the dead crab, but couldn’t figure out where he had come from.

And BadBaby, I had tears streaming down my face picturing the “turkey tango”. Thanks.

40

Ahh, the cookie incidents,I have 3 of them.

  1. I thought, wont it be fun to make sugar cookies while mom is at work! I can suprise her with hot coffee and fressh cookies.
    recipe calls for crisco, okay we have crisco…but is it supposed to be pink and cracked like that?oh well, cant be that old. Those suckers were the 2nd nastiest things I ever ate. never use 2 year old crisco to make cookies.

  2. you know those cookies that come in rolls, and all you do is cut them and bake them?I actually ruined those once, I was about to put them in, I turned on the oven, oops,the knob came off, oh well,just shove it back on. Turns out that he piece under the knob was set at 550 while the knob only said 300. they actually ignited, I was shamed for months.

3.Choclate chip cookies from scratch, everythings going fine…until I get to the crisco AGAIN, it wasnt smelly, discolored, or strangely textured at all, yes the crap was years old, how was i supposed to know? It looked new. But thats not all, it seemed that i over looked the baking soda, cookies with stale crisco and no baking sod is the nastiest thing I ever eaten