This was probably about ten years ago. I was visiting my sister on December 24th. The entire family, a rather large crew, decided to go to church. They would be there for maybe 2-3 hours, and were expected to return hungry. Those of us who stayed behind, me, my father, and my niece, were expected to handle dinner.
Let’s repeat this cast of characters: A computer programmer with a minor in cookery, an electrical engineer, and a resident of the house.
The dinner was two large frozen lasagnas, one with meat and the other with veggies. I looked at the cooking directions and they seemed pretty straightforward. 350 degrees for 60 minutes. Easy. We hung out for an hour or two before starting dinner.
I popped the things into the oven and set the temperature. Something on the stove started beeping. And beeping And beeping. To say it was annoying would be an understatement. It was driving us crazy. We pressed every button on the stove in every combination we could think of. We spent an hour at it, to no avail.
Finally the family arrived home. My sister immediately went to the stove and pushed one button, and the beeping stopped. I should be clearer – she pushed a button on the OTHER stove. She had two.
So anyway I checked the lasagnas to see if they were done. Nope. Still frozen. WTF? I looked at the directions again. 350 for 60 minutes THAWED. Three times that long frozen.
But one of my first cooking memories is as a little kid, my older brother and I decided to make blueberry muffins for the family breakfast. The package had this neat picture of them, and an idea to put them inside ice cream cone cups (those flat-bottomed, bland be-mean-to-kids kind, not sugar cones). So on went the oven, in went the mix (just like the picture), and we eagerly awaited our parent’s pride.
Who knew you actually had to mix the powder with anything? :smack:
Actually, I love to cook for my family. My mom turned 70 back in June, and we all went to visit her. We decided that she was not going to cook the entire time we were there. Drove her nuts, actually. But we all took turns in the kitchen.
On my night it was steamed crab and lobster claws, boiled potatoes, grilled corn, caesar salad (yes, with homemade croutons), and wheat beer.
I was baking some chicken in a pyrex dish in the oven, and wanted to steam some veggies. The chicken was done slightly ahead of time, so I took it out of the stove, put it on the left hand side of the hob, turned on the gas on the right hand side of the hob below the double boiler for the veggies and walked away.
A few minutes later it sounded like a bomb had gone off in the kitchen. Aparently I don’t know my left from right, and turned on the gas underneath the pyrex dish. Pyrex doesn’t seem to like direct flame, and chicken and glass had flown all over the kitchen.
My girlfriend did this once too. Although to this day she is convinced that someone came into the apartment (imagine a classic Chicago style one with the wood patio/back steps) and turned the burner all the way up when she was downstairs changing laundry loads in the basement.
Someone had given me some habaneros and I was gonna freeze them, and kinda thought you were supposed to blanch them first (like you do with tomatoes). Funny, about 10-15 seconds after dunking the peppers in the boiling water, I started coughing, wheezing and my eyes were watering. I couldn’t figure it out. then I told my husband what I did (he was wondering why I was hacking so bad) and he laughed and told me I just made pepper spray! Man did that suck!
My most recent one falls under the never take anything for granted heading.
I like and use a variety of different hot sauces when I’m cooking Caribbean. One dish I make goes perfectly with Crystal, a Louisiana sauce that’s not all that hot and also has a nice vinegar note.
I’ve been using Crystal for more than 10 years. It always comes with that little restrictor cap so it comes out in drops or dashes. Or, I should say it always USED TO come with the little plastic cap. The new bottle opened didn’t have one, and I didn’t notice.
Luckily, the 2 TBS that ended up in the mix didn’t jack up the heat too much to be edible.
I decided to make Emeril’s boiled shrimp recipe to serve while watching the SEC championship. There are two sub recipes that accompany it: one for a spice mix, one for cocktail sauce.
I decided I should make the cocktail sauce first, to give the flavors time to blend, and allow it time to chill. In go the ketchup & lemon juice. At the third listed ingredient, though, I somehow switched over to the spice mix recipe. Two tablespoons of garlic powder (wow, that’s a lot of garlic, and all I have left, but okay…) One tablespoon black pepper (really?) One tablespoon cayenne (well, I like spicy…) One tablespoon oregano – wait a minute, something’s not right here…
Argh! Off to the store to get more garlic powder.
Normally, I just use the packaged Zatarain’s shrimp boil, but I decided to try this instead. I have to say, this version is much tastier. I am, however, wondering whether the requirement for 1/4 cup of white wine really makes a difference given that it’s immediately diluted with 4 cups of water. I’m thinking this is just an excuse to open a bottle of wine.
One of my former landladies once put her new electric kettle on the stovetop to boil water… one of those dumb mistakes you make when it’s too early in the morning and your brain is running on auto-pilot.
Burning plastic is not a good smell to wake up to.
This was almost a monumental fuckup, but I caught it in time. We hired a new kid to work the deep fryer, and he emptied the hot oil into a large stock pot to be transported out to the grease trap outside. It was raining.
This little retard tried to carry 4 gallons of HOT OIL into the rain.
I invited the future Mrs.kidneyfailure over to my apartment for dinner one night during our courtship. It was the first time she’d ever come to my home and, actually, the first time we’d ever been alone. I told her I’d make her hamburgers and a salad and we’d eat and talk. It was all part of my plan to get her to fall in love with me.
I’d never actually cooked anything that didn’t need to be microwaved, but, y’know, how hard could it be, right? Just chop up some vegetables for the salad and add dressing. I had seen someone make burgers once so I thought I could do it too. Well, the patties I made were way too thick and turned out to be burned on the outside and frozen on the inside. MKF took one bite and made this face–just for a split second–that said “WTF is this slop?” before smiling and telling me it was “good.” While preparing the salad, I unscrewed the top to puncture the safety seal and accidentally dropped the bottle into the salad bowl, drenching the vegetables in dressing. I tried to dump some of the dressing out but it basically ended up as Italian dressing and vegetable soup. MKF ate every bite of her burger and had two bowls of salad while I tried to hide my embarrassment and choked down my ice cold burger.
Then I accidentally spilled wine on her sweater…
THEN, while walking her out, she discovered that she’d left her cellphone in my apartment. We returned to fetch it and I discovered that I’d locked my keys inside.
Somehow (God only knows how after that horrible night) my plan to get her to fall in love with me eventually worked out. I once asked her what she thought of the food that night.
“Terrible,” she said. “That was probably the worst date I’d ever been on. But I liked you, so I didn’t care.”
This was back when I was in high school and was home alone with my little brother … my mom had left a note telling me to warm up some soup for my brother’s dinner before he had to go off to after-school tutoring. I couldn’t find any soup anywhere until I finally looked in the pot and found it full of soup. My brother complained it was awfully bland but he wolfed it down and went on his merry way.
Later my mom came home and the following conversation ensued:
Mom: Did you feed your brother soup?
Me: -not really interested- Sure.
Mom: -opens freezer- Really? It doesn’t look like any of it’s gone.
Me: -looks up- Oh, I didn’t give him the soup in the freezer. I gave him the stuff in the pot.
Mom: -horrified- There was nothing in the pot. That was just water - I was leaving it to soak after I cooked the soup.
Pardon me while I hide in the corner, whimpering, at the very thought of the result. :eek: It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve worked in a professional kitchen and I still have some burn scars from then if I look close - obviously I keep adding home kitchen burns to the mix - and I didn’t even do anything stupid to get those, much less that disastrously awful.
I once had cause to visit this burned out hippie. I arrived to find smoke billowing out of the open door of his bedsit and flames shooting up the wall from the cooker which he never cleaned. He’d set the accumulated grease under the rings on fire while making a fryup. And he insisted on finishing cooking it before he put the fire out!
My partner saw him at a Hawkwind concert recently so he’s not killed himself yet.
