Damn, this thread is a hoot!
I too enjoyed BadBaby 's Thanksgiving Turkey Tango, but my favorite is wolfman 's rather pained description of the Southwest Fetuccini gone horribly wrong. Couldn’t breathe for a few minutes there.
I was making pierogies (potato and cheese filled dumplings) and wasn’t paying attention to what kind of flour I’d made the noodle from. When the gigantic, gooey, puffy mass expanded from the stock pot I suddenly realized that I’d used self-rising flour. Oops.
Flatmate’s cooking tips:
- Pasta is OK if boiled for 30 minutes. We like pasta-soup.
- Boiled mince can be an acceptable meal if flavoured with 5 drops of Wostershire sauce.
- To cook expensive chicken breast, place under grill with no seasoning for 50 minutes.
- Smoke coming out of the oven is an accepted sign that the chick is cooking nicely. Ignore smoke alarm and politely answer the fully kitted out firemen who knock on the door.
[/sarcasm]
ROTFLMAO*
Me too!
I have:
Made gravy thick enough to be cut with a knife a nd fork
Caught numerous Pop-Tarts™on fire in the toaster
Burned rice to the bottom of a pan so hard I had to soak the pan in warm water for 24 hrs to get the rice to come off
Attempted to make fried onion strings that, once in the oil,decided to glom together and came out as a huge hunk of fried onion stuff
Made onion rings that, once placed in hot oil to fry,have lost all their coating so I ended up with fried onion rings with no coating…YUK
My most memorable though, was once in HS when my mom asked me to make meatloaf. Simple, you’d think.I combined the ground beef,beaten egg,onion,chopped celery and bread crumbs together but I couldn’t find any ketchup for the glaze.What to do what to do?Instead of using ketchup for the glaze on top,I use Bullseye Barbecue sauce. I was no longer allowed to make meatloaf after that.
IDBB
Back when I was eighteen, my aunt went to the Jamaica for a couple of weeks, and hired me to baby-sit her kids and take care of the house while she was gone. All went very well, until the day Auntie was due to arrive home.
I had never baked before, but I, and the kids, thought it would be nice to bake her a “Welcome Home” cake. I followed the directions on the box carefully, and waited for the cake to cool before icing it. Unfortulately, the after a few spatula-fulls of icing were swiped on top, the top layer of cake peeled back to reveal a gooey center. No problem, I thought, I’ll just pop it back in the oven, and later, glue the “flap” down with icing. Much like the Battle of Waterloo to Napoleon, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The icing melted off the bulging cake, and burned on the oven floor. The house stank of acrid smoke. The fire alarms blared, and had to be taken outside. We waited tensely, watching the clock.
Finally, a test with a bamboo kebob skewer (which was the idea of the 9-year old daughter who vaguely thought that you must poke a cake with something wood to test its doneness) revealed that it was ready.
Time was running short. I needed to cool the cake quickly in order to finish icing it before Auntie arrived. Putting our heads together, we decided to put the cake in the freezer. (This time, I remembered Cecil’s beer-can-cools-more-quickly-in-the-freezer column from the first * Straight Dope * book.) While the cake was chilling, we opened the windows to fan out the stink.
When I opened the freezer door, we all groaned. The cake had developed a massive crater in the middle, as if it had been punched. So, we decided to use food coloring to make some of the icing blue, and fill the crater with it. We smeared yellow all around the edges of the crater, and made “trees” which were brown blobs, topped with small green blobs.
“It’s Jamaica!” we told Auntie when presenting her with the cake. God bless her, she ate a slice, and told us it was delicious. Her husband ruined our pleasure in a job well done, however, when not knowing the significance, he took a bite, spat it out, and barked, “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to this cake?!”
But, have any of you ever burnt water? I have, twice. And I can ruin a perfectly good box of mac and cheese. (I was banned from making mac and cheese for about 6 months.)
The hubby usually does the cooking these days, early in our marriage, after an attempt at being June Cleaver and having the results, which really weren’t bad, insulted, (okay my pride and ego were shattered) I cut back on the cooking and let him take over. He’s an inventive and good cook though he tends to cook steak too long and if I don’t keep an eye on him gets happy with too many spices. I’m the sous chef.
I wanted to make pasta with flaked fish last year. The idea wasn’t far-fetched, I’d seen a recipe somewhere and it seemed simple enough. Hubby was ridiculing it before it even got to the disaster stage. I had fish mush in olive oil, the fish just wouldn’t flake. I eventually worked out that I had the wrong kid of fish and that I should have cooked it first or just gone with the salmon.
Hee-hee! You’re not my wife, are you, catnoe? 
I do most of our family’s cooking, I learned to cook at a fairly early age, due to the grim necessity of avoiding my mother’s cooking. Her method for cooking a grilled cheese sandwich was:
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Put sandwich on hot skillet.
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Go to the living room and watch TV until you smell smoke.
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Return to kitchen and flip sandwich over.
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Repeat step 2 …
She freely admits to the above. But she claims not to remember the following exchange, for which I have thus never received a satisfactory explanation. It happened very late on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, as I was returning home after my senior Prom and the after-prom party I had allegedly been at. (And nobody can prove otherwise!) My mother had stayed up waiting for me, spending the time preparing food for a church potluck scheduled for Sunday afternoon …
Me: (Passing through kitchen.) Mmmm-deviled eggs! I love those!
Mom: (From the next room.) Don’t eat any-they’re for the church lunch tomorrow!
Me: (Heading up the stairs to my bedroom.) OK.
Mom: And anyway, they’re burnt.
That night, I decided I really didn’t want to know. Curiosity got the better of me later, and I asked my mom how she managed to burn deviled eggs, but she has always denied saying that, so I never found out …
(I brought my fiancee home our first Thanksgiving together. My mother was musing about what we should do for Thanksgiving dinner, and my fiancee (well-warned about my mother’s cooking) innocently suggested we have it catered. “Yes! Good idea!” said I, my father, my sister, and my mother, virtually in unison …)
Well, there was the time that I set the oven on fire…
And the time I left an egg on the stove to boil, forgot about it, left the house and came back to find the egg had exploded…
And the time I made a cake with olive oil…
And the many spatulas I had to throw away because I left them in the pan too long and they melted in half where they rested on the pan’s edge…
But I can’t really think of anything memorable.
It’s the end of a long harrowing work week. You and four other camping buddies drive up to the camp ground all in separate RV’s.
While “setting up” libations flow freely. A gumbo, a huge gumbo, is begun and the spirits really begin to flow. (As any Cajun wll attest to it is impossible to cook a Gumbo at night, under the stars, with good friends and family gathered around and dancing to Cajun and Zydeco music and not have a beer in one hand).
But on this particular Friday night I had one too many and this combined with the lateness of the hour, the end of the week, poor lighting, etc. directed my hand to the Dove dishwashing detergent instead of the Tabasco Hot Sauce!!!
Needless to say the telling and retelling of this story has “grown” this tale to legendary proportions in my immediate social milieu.
Oh, come on, you can’t leave it like that!
My son once made brownies using powdered sugar instead of flour. He also didn’t beat the egg properly, so we got this crunchy brown stuff with streaks of yellow through it.
Oh, and UK dopers…what is mince? Is that some sort of spice?
I once added grape jelly to white rice (for some sweet without the sour!)
Don’t do that.
Obviously I’m not in the UK but the only use of mince I know of as a noun is “finely chopped (something)”. Or are you thinking of mincemeat?
My favorite story was a group effort. It was my senior year of college, and we all decided to partake in a friend’s room. Sure, he was the Head Resident of the largest freshman hall on campus, but we were all of age, so it was sorta, almost, kinda legal (not really at all, but Senioritis had improved our rationalization skills a lot!)
6 or so of us were well into a heated match of homeade beerpong (did I mention that we were idiots?) and we got SUPER hungry. What could be better in the dead of night than deviled eggs? Exactly. We put on the water and dropped the eggs in and I was setting up for a championship toss when- EEK, clangings and ringings and flashing lights beset us on all sides!!!
The fire alarm went off just after we dropped a dozen eggs in boiling water- great- we filed outside, not one of us thinking of the poor eggs, to see what in tarnation was going on. It was an unplanned drill, so our host was in charge of coordinating with the fire department and accounting 200-odd freshman, and he was wasted! All humor in that aside, after about 15 minutes we started to freak out 'cause somebody remembered the eggs…We wondered how much trouble we could get in if a real fire started because of us, but the firemen were already in the building…
Thankfully, disaster was avoided, nasty-rock-hard-gray eggs on the other hand, were not. Very gray.
Mince = ground beef
When my mom was little, her mother went out to the backyard and selected a chicken to make for dinner. But it seems Grandma didn’t quite get the job done she she wrung the poor thing’s neck. So she, thinking it was already dead, plunged it into a pot of boiling water so she could pluck it.
Live chickens don’t appreciate that, apparently. The bird freaked out and started flapping all over the kitchen, scaring the wits out of my mom and Grandma.
How I wish I could have witnessed this myself… 
When my mom was little, her mother went out to the backyard and selected a chicken to make for dinner. But it seems Grandma didn’t quite get the job done she she wrung the poor thing’s neck. So she, thinking it was already dead, plunged it into a pot of boiling water so she could pluck it.
Live chickens don’t appreciate that, apparently. The bird freaked out and started flapping all over the kitchen, scaring the wits out of my mom and Grandma.
How I wish I could have witnessed this myself…