Wait a moment… you degenerated Americans use spray instead of smearing regular butter on the sides of the cake pan?
shakes head
I ll have to think of moving to the US… that sounds brilliant 
dodgy
Cooking…
I am a boil in the bag cook…
I “buy” my food, but I dont cook it. I just throw it on the oven and wait till I am sure it is dead…
Anyways:
This summer boyfriend and me had the brilliant idea to make rice.
So mom had told me how to make rice thousands of times - 3 cups of water for each cup of rice.
Well… I was mashed… I had no exact memory of that.
My boyfriend didnt believe me that there should be more water than rice in there anyways…
We pretended the rice was good…
but it wasnt dead yet…
dodgy
In my ignorant youth I bought a chub of ground turkey. It had the texture of tuna so I mixed it with mayo, chopped onion and sweet relish and made a sandwich. Bite, munch, munch… oh thweet Jethuth, thith ithn’t cooked.
It’s worse than that…you can even buy Baker’s Joy, which takes the place of grease and flour…all in one spray-can!
For gits and shiggles I tried making the Top Secret Recipe version of Taco Bell’s ground beef mix.
Too bad I misread the teaspoon of salt as a tablespoon. That was some salty meat! Fortunately I was cooking for myself (like I’d serve TB to a guest!) at the time and promptly ate the blame.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHHA
oh jeeeeeeeezzzzzzuuuuuuuuussssss…ROTF…
well the contents of my nose are all over the monitor now…thank you very much!!!
I CANNOT get the visual of this to go away…
A favorite family story …
My dad is notoriously one of those “lives in his own world” types so we never know what he is going to do next. Combine this with very poor eyesight, and it’s a never-ending wealth of wacky mix-ups for dear old Dad.
When he and my mom were young marrieds with a newborn (yours truly) they took a little overnight trip to visit my mom’s sister. After the visit, Dad mentioned to Mom that he really liked the toothpaste that Aunt Pam had at their house, and could Mom think about buying that brand?
Well Mom is baffled. It is so unlike Dad to have a preference for something like toothpaste. She calls her sister, who identifies this glorious toothpaste as plain old Crest. This is what Mom already buys. So she investigates further.
It turns out that Dad has been grabbing the first thing he sees that looks like a tube of toothpaste when he brushes his teeth – he has been brushing his teeth with baby diaper rash cream! Repeatedly! That’s the part that still gets me. I can see grabbing the wrong tube once, but to keep doing it??
My sister made her first frozen pizzia. I could smell hot paper when I walked into the kitchen. I opened the oven, and there was the pizzia cooking on the cardboard.
My other sister and brother were making a boxed cheese cake. The turned the mixer on high, and didn’t hold the bowl. They stood about five feet back, and the bowl started to flop around. Chocolate filling all over the kitchen, and I had the camera. The filing was on the ceiling and curtains. It’s a great picture to bring out of the photo album.
Sometime in late middle school or early high school, I got it in my head to make fudge from scratch. Now, I’d never actually eaten fudge, so I wasn’t really sure what it would look or taste like.
While shopping for ingredients, I asked my dad, “is sweetened condensed milk the same as evaporated milk?”
“Uh . . . yeah, I think so,” he replied, so I bought the sweetened condensed milk.
I was all proud of myself for making fudge from scratch, so I showed it off to my parents as soon as it was done. Boy howdy, did I get some strange looks. It turns out that fudge isn’t supposed to be nearly black and as granular as wet sand.
It did, however, taste chocolaty and sweet. To this day, my younger bro, Rincwind, prefers boo-boo fudge to the regular sort.
My dear, late Great Aunt was a wonderful woman but sadly, not much of a cook. I discovered this at an early age when, at a family picnic, she put the hot dog buns on the grill to toast…still in their plastic bag. Well, one Christmas when I was in my early teens, my Aunt decided to make a rum cake for our holiday dinner. I tried my piece but it made my eyes water. Turned out she had misread the recipe and doubled the amount of rum in the glaze. I couldn’t eat the rest of my slice but luckily my Grandmother, a dour and taciturn lady who never expressed much interest in anything that I ever saw, had taken a sudden liking to the cake and finished my piece… and my sister’s piece, and my brother’s piece, and my Mother’s piece… well, you get the idea. Ere long, my solemn Grandmother is actually starting to giggle. She then progressed to full-out laughter at practically everything for the rest of the evening. In all my life, that was the happiest I had ever seen my Grandmother.
I volunteerer to make dessert for 24 people for a party I was attending. I had decided on chocolate mousse but didn’t have 24 appropriate ramekins to hold it, so devised what I thought was a very clever plan.
I intended to melt bittersweet chocolate and dip the bottoms of small balloons in it, thereby creating edible chocolate dishes to hold the mousse once the chocolate was hard. What I didn’t know was that the temperature of the choc on those first few balloons was sufficient to POP the balloons.
I think only three exploded, but I smelled like chocolate for days.
When I was about 8 or so my father decided that he was going to help mom out and get us off to school in the morning.
We used to keep an old glass skippy peanut butter jar full of cinnamon and sugar for our toast.
Actually we used to keep lots of different things in those little jars. Including plaster of paris that my dad had just used to patch a whole somewhere in the kitchen and placed on the counter.
He put the bread in the toaster to toast, pulled the jar of cinnamon and sugar down and set it right next to the other jar.
My mom came out to see how things were going and help him distribute the toast. She noticed that it looked different and looked at the two jars on the counter.
I still remember them both running at us and yelling don’t eat that!
Now for one of my goofs.
My first time with a bbq grill. First of all I didn’t get the coals hot until 7pm or so, and then when I put the burgers on they crumbled.
Now everytime I invite my family over for a cook out they ask if I am going to start at noon, and should they bring their own bowls for the burgers.
I have since become a much better cook when it comes to the grill. In the summer almost everything goes on it anymore.
so many memories- the turkey I didn’t know to take the plastic bags with the innards out of…the baby’s diaper rash ointment on the toothbrush- (it tastes awful and, in for once product accuracy. lasts forever, apparently - wait_ I think it’s finally gone from my mouth) the double the amount of sugar in the pumpkin pie for my Eurpoean friend who had previously complained everything american was TOO sweet. The first time my middle son made coffe for us in the morning, but only could find the coffee which was on the stove- in the jar we dumped the grease and coffee grounds into.
Sigh. Good times.
Oh, and the coffee I dropped into the pizza dough I was making to impress my father with what a good cook I had become…
I won’t even mention the dorm room mishaps of my husband and his equally hapless kitchen pals- the (oil-packed) tuna straight out of the can onto the bread- the hamburger just poured into the pan, apparently in the belief that it would shape itself- the time my then still future husband decided to juggle the only food we had for days - eggs. He’s not such a good juggler.
Been married twenty years now; I keep him as far from the kitchen as I dare. He does the dishes, wrongly, but I don’t have to eat them.
There was the time I deleted the data files out from under a running Sybase server. I knew jack about database administration at the time, so in a panic I called Sybase. “What version are you using?” the rep asked. After looking it up, I told her. “Oh, we don’t support that version any more.” I told her I was asking a non-version specific questions, but noooo. God I hate robots.
Anyway, she could have told me in 10 seconds the answer - much less time than it took to tell me she was sorry she couldn’t help. I had to learn how to back up a database, back it up, shut it down and restart it (“Hey! My data is missing!”) and restore the data. But, didn’t lose anything except a days work and a pair of underwear.
Oh, looks like mostly cooking accidents in this thread. Hmmm - how about Shrimp and Grapefruit cocktail? With canned grapefruit? Ultranasty.
A little more than a year ago my sister, mother, grandmother and I got together for our 2nd annual Christmas cookie bakeoff. One of the cookies we make every year is date balls: sugar and butter and chopped dates (duh) and … um … other stuff blended with Rice Crispies and rolled into balls then sugar then coconut.
Well, last year my mother pitched a holy fit cos she had picked up the cheery ‘Christmas’ version of Rice Crispies - the version with the occasional, larger red or green ‘crispie’. The sugar and stuff was already cooked so we went ahead and used the holiday crispies, but it just wasn’t the same.
This year we opened the box of Rice Crispies and were relieved to find that she had NOT bought the holiday crispies. Oh, no…
No. This year she bought the OLYMPIC crispies, the ones with the slightly larger red and blue star crispies 
Yeah, like we’re gonna let her live that one down
On Monday I decided to make a fire. After I got it going, it occurred to me that it was possible that the vent to the chimney was closed, due to the fact that smoke was invading my living room. I stood watching scraps of burning newspaper fly up over the mantel for a couple of minutes, before deciding maybe now was a good time to put a stop to this. I went into the kitchen, filled a pot with water, throw it on the fire, and repeated this process until eventually the fire died down. By this time, the smoke hurt your eyes and throat even from ground level. I decided to gather my cats and escape. My cats had other plans. They decided now was the perfect time to play hide and seek. All four of them are grey, as was the smoke. It took me forever to locate them, but I finally did and we all spent a relaxing day in the laundry room while the house aired out.
Hey Persephone how did that cake turn out? I have never heard of it.
Kricket: The cake is quite yummy, and really freakin’ easy. And I successfully got all the garlic-flavored Pam from the pan.
BornDodgy: The whole point of this cake (and all the cakes in the recipe book it came from) is ease of preparation. Thus, cooking spray. However, had I not already had my own non-flavored cooking spray, I would have been quite ready to use the old standby butter & flour method. Although I always seem to use too much flour when I do that, and when I try to tap it out, it ends up all over the floor, the kids, the dog…:eek:
Someone want to explain to her what some folk use Crisco for? :eek: