When Good Cooks Go Bad: Wiener Gravy and Other Disasters

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Take a potato, wrap it in foil, and bake at 350°F for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, depending on size. OR— take a potato, cover it with a damp paper towel and place on a microwaveable plate. Nuke on high for 10 minutes, then turn it around so the inside edge now faces the outside and nuke for 7-10 minutes more. Wrap it in foil to stay hot.

My worst culinary disaster:

I make a dish I call — Chicken and Rice. 2 cups of raw rice, 1/2 cup each diced carrots, celery, and onions. Pour 2 cans of chicken broth on top, add salt and pepper, and stir well. Add chicken pieces on top, and bake at 350°F for about an hour, or until chicken and rice is done and liquid is absorbed.

One day I stupidly decided I could fix this in a crock pot. I came home to a supper of dried chicken jerky, and burnt rice jello. Yum!

Once upon a time, I was a young bride of 17. I had little or no cooking experience. I decide to make liver and onions, which we both liked. I heated up a stainless steel skillet (no Teflon), and slapped that raw liver right in there. No flour coating, no oil. When I tried to turn it…it was stuck permanently. I almost threw the pan out!

Another slight mishap. I was baking Tollhouse cookies. I inadvertently left out the flour! I put the dough on the cookie sheet, and placed it in the oven. When I checked on them, I had melting chocolate all over my pan. I saved the day, by pouring the mess back into the bowl, and added the flour. Stirred it up, and we had chocolate cookies instead!

This is a great thread!

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Wang-Ka– Your scribblings are funny as hell, and you’re damned prolific. Do you write for a living? Have you considered it? You ought to.

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I’d be delighted. All I need is for someone to PAY me for it…

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No payment, but you could submit something to Teemings, the e-zine for the SDMB. Check out [url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=148894] this thread.

You have lots of talent! Welcome to the boards!

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Damn coding!

This thread.

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I’d like to know as well. It was just plain ham flavored bean soup, nothing fancy. It turned purple. Maybe a slight reddish purple, but purple none the less.

She used gov. surplus pinto beans and deli ham slices. I think I have a surplus bag of pintos in the pantry, I may have to conduct an experiment on this soon.

It looked hideous, but it tasted great.

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When I was in high school, I took it on myself to try to educate my girlfriend in all the delights that food had to offer. Her mother had brought her up on a yummy diet of fish-sticks and boiled-broccoli ‘soup’, and I thought that I would show her what actual food was like. I lived with my grandparents at the time, and she would spend most weekends at our house. After my gram and gramp went to bed, I’d start the cooking, so as not to bother them. They were always happy to wake up to blueberry muffins or shortbread, so I figured it was all ok.
I’ve always loved to make desserts, so I started there, making apple pie from scratch, making cakes from scratch, shortbread, English toffee…all the sorts of yummy sweets that she didn’t even know could be made as easily as using a mix. Then, I decided to show her how to make lollipops.
I’d made lollipops a couple of times before, and I was confident in my lollipopability. I hadn’t counted on the distracting presence of a cute high-school girl who wanted to make her appreciation known.
We were smooching a bit when I happened to look over and see that the candy-liquid was smoking…and the very sensitive smoke detectors were going to start shrieking at any moment.
Panic, pure and simple, flashed through me. I grabbed the pan off the stove and ran to the only place that I could think of - the garbage disposal - while my girl opened up the door and snapped off the burner.
The candy was so hot, it made the stainless steel sink ping when it hissed down onto it, and slid into the garbage disposal. I was reaching for the switch to turn it on, when I heard it finally seize with a crack!
I flipped the switch. The only response was the low humming of seized machinery.
Okay, so that wasn’t going to work. I tossed the still-smoking pan out into the snow (yes, I know that I should have done the same with the candy…) and tried (thinkthinkthink) to think of a way that I could get out of this without telling my grandparents what had actually happened. Because, quite simply, knew that if I did tell them, I would be dead - the only consolation that I could take in that is that I wouldn’t be chopped up in the disposal.
Finally, I left the hot water to run into the sink, hoping that it would wear down the candy, and went out to look at the scorched pan.
The pan was a total loss.
It took nearly an hour of running water to loosen up the candy so that the disposal would run again.
Gram and gramp never said a thing about the missing pan, if they noticed. Me, I’ve never made lollipops since…and I don’t think I will. Ever.

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My husband made a dish he found in our low-fat cookbook: fettucine with ham in a cream sauce. Since it was low-fat, one didn’t use cream. it called for a can of evaporated milk to make the sauce creamier.

My husband is familiar with the concept of milk in a can because we have a great three-ingredient key lime pie recipe that calls for sweetened condensed milk. However, my husband did not know that sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk are two different products.

We sit down to dinner and I notice that the ham sure smells sweetish. I take a bite. This is very odd sauce. It’s sweet. And weirdly thick. It’s like eating a candy sauce with ham in it. On pasta. This is not good. I venture another bite or two and ask my husband if I can see the recipe. That’s when it becomes clear. My portion went down the sink. My husband gamely ate a few more bites of his before giving up.

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My grampa once made an entire pot of corn chowder with salt port using sweetned condensed milk. Ugh.

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  1. Last year my boyfriend and I tried kettle corn (sweet salty popcorn) at a Pumpkin Festival. It was great, so we decided to try it at home. I found a recipe online, and went to work. I’d never made any sort of popcorn before that didn’t come from a microwave, but I found a pot I thought would work on the stovetop. We put in the ingredients, and start shaking.
    He asks, “But shouldn’t we have a lid?”
    “No, we shouldn’t need one, it’s a pretty deep pot.”

Famous last words. In about three minutes we were both ducking molten popcorn missiles coming at our heads. From time to time, I still find a piece of candied popcorn in a drawer, or in a crack between the stove and counter.

  1. When I was taking French in high school, I decided to try to make crepes when they printed a recipe in the paper. However, there was a printing error, and what should have read “2 teaspoons” looked more like “12 teaspoons.” I thought it was odd, but made it anyhow. It tasted like Play-Doh[1]. I realized that the errant 1 in front of the 2 in “12” was indeed just a stray ink mark, and decide to try it the right way again, the next day. This time I screw up and put in 2 tablespoons, rather than teaspoons, of salt. Not quite as Play-Doh like, but still inedible.

[sup][1] Oh, admit it. You know what Play-Doh tastes like.[/sup]

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We bring a glass of water to every customer as soon as they sit down at the mexican restaurant I work at here in Kansas, and at the other mexican restaurant in town, they do the free-chips-and-salsa thing.
My only horrible food experience wasn’t as a result of my cooking. My mom had just made an apple pie in a glass pie plate, and had set it on one of the oven burners to cool. Well, I wanted to make tea, so I sat the teapot on the back burner and turned the heat on. Except I accidentally turned the heat on the front burner, where the pie was sitting. The end result? Exploded burnt apple pie and glass shards all over the kitchen.

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I suggest getting the microwave kind next time.

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About Kettle Corn:

My mom bought some of that, but it wasn’t the same. It tasted ok, but it didn’t have the crunchy outer coating that you get making it with real sugar.

I’ll try making it myself again sometime. I will remember the lid, this time.

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My mother couldn’t open a can of Spam…and her idea of mashed potatoes was to boil the spud until it turned gray and drop it on the plate from a height of 4 feet…But during those elemental years of my gastonomic forsakening, I have made several versatile culinary discoveries…one being that really cheap cheese not only works well as the base coat for road salt and rust damage, its propensity as a intestinal purgent is mind boggling…although it’s penchant at working as well in the other direction, could leave ya sitting and grinning for quite a long time.

Rand…dissolving a chip of Krogers Best Value American under my tounge, as I haven’t felt quite well since Ma’s pork and mayonize pie.

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You mean to tell me that there are Mexican restaurants that do the free chips and salsa thing as far north as Kansas?

That’s reassuring. A couple of years ago, I took a cross country road trip to Michigan from my current location in Texas, and ate at a great many restaurants along the way. The main thing I noticed was that free chips and salsa seemed to evaporate once we got north of Denton.

North of Colorado, no one seemed to know what grits were.

…and once you start getting up into SERIOUS Yankee territory, the concept of “chili” and “barbecue” get quite seriously bent into some surreal territory.

Y’see… Yankees can’t barbecue.

It’s a sad fact, but nearly totally true. I quit ordering restaurant barbecue because Yankees apparently think of barbecue sauce as a kind of syrup served on meat. I had one meal I couldn’t even taste what it was, due to being drowned in smoky, sugary syrup. My wife asked what kind of meat it was. I had to admit I didn’t know. The main reason I ate as much of it as I did was to try and figure out what it was. It didn’t hurt me, at any rate, and I only got a little ill afterwards…

Barbecue is NOT THAT DIFFICULT, especially now that you can buy a variety of interesting sauces at any grocery store. You get a barbecue pit and grill. Failing that, you get a grill and dig a hole. You build a fire in the hole. You put the grill over the fire. When the flames die down, you put the meat on the grill. You pay attention. When the meat has been cooking awhile, you flip it over. Hamburger in particular is easy – when the top side starts to bleed, flip it. When it’s been flipped twice, it’s medium rare. When it quits bleeding altogether, it’s medium well. When it begins to turn black on the outside, it’s well done. In the case of chicken, keep cooking until all the meat is quite firm, and then cook ten minutes more; what is “rare” in beef is “bird-flavored jello” in chicken, and no one seems to like that.

Is this difficult? If so, we will save the use of mesquite and hickory woods for the advanced courses, and smoked meats for the postgraduate classes…

Yankees apparently have a difficult time with chili, too. I ordered a cheese and chili coney at one place (Michiganians pride themselves on being the only state that knows how to make coneys properly) and got a hot dog with cheese and sloppy joe sauce on it. My wife ordered a “wet burrito” (and saying that phrase out loud would get you a BIG laugh anywhere in Texas) and got something akin to a microwave burrito with tomato sauce and meat on it. At yet another place, I ordered chili cheese fries and got French fries with cheese and spaghetti sauce on.

Anywhere that offered Mexican food offered a Wet Burrito plate. Listen, folks, the phrase is CHILI BURRITO or BURRITO WITH CHILI SAUCE. Texans didn’t invent the Coney Island, but we know enough not to advertise that we’re selling WET WEENIES… which is about the same double entendre as WET BURRITO…

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If it’s any consolation, we have restaurants like that in Chicago too. (Not too surprising considering that we have a fairly large Mexican population here, but even with a lot of Italians you can find a good number of scarily Americanized Italian restaurants here.) I can’t say how much of their other fare caters to American palates, but that’s something at least.

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Oh, I nearly died laughing.:smiley:

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A bit of knowledge I have gained from cooking with my grandmother: a no-bake cookie recipe can not be changed to a regular cookie recipe by switching peanut butter for flour. That made glue.

As far as something I’ve done; I’ve messed up a cake pretty bad. The outside was burned, but the inside was soggy. Still not quite sure what went wrong there.

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Wang-Ka Have you ever heard of Critters? If you like writing you would probably love that. Also look into The Harrow and other E-zines.

Anyway my horror stories:
For christmas one year my cousin decided to make chocalate chip cookies. SOMEHOW she reversed the salt and sugar in the recipe, add 1 teaspoon of sugar and 3 cups (or whatever) of salt. They were horrible. Fortunatly my depression raised grand mother came to her rescue and somehow turned the cookies into chocalate chip gravy which was suprisingly good, although a little salty.

This one isn’t really a horror story. One time I boiled a bunch of spegheti noodles then relized we didn’t have any spegheti sauce, so I decided to make it myself. I took some canned tomatoes and pureed them, added green peppers and a whole lot of differen’t spices. I browned 3 pounds of hamberger and 1 pound of ground venison, added it to the sauce and simmered it for an hour or so. I left for the store and when I came back my dad had dug into it and he said “This is the best chilli i’ve ever had!” Noone in my family new if it was meat for tacos, chili, sloppy joes, or spegheti sauce. Didn’t matter though, my family ate it whichever way they wanted to. I wish I had written down the recipe, but I don’t follow recipes. My GF’s always got scared when I went into the kitchen to cook and got into a “cooking frenzy” (one of my GF’s called me the Mad Chef). Almost all the stuff I make looks disgusting but after people taste it they usually like it alot.

When I was 8 my mom made some type of bean soup, and since it was April 1st I decided to play a prank. I took about half a bottle of herb lax, ground it up and stirred it into the soup. My dad ate 5 bowls of it and you can imagine what happened next…

One time my roomates GF made some type of chicken ciche that smelled and tasted like puke. For some reason everyone that tasted it absolutly loved it and kept coming back for more even though they were absolutly disgusted by it. She thought the meal was a success and made it again. This time noone liked it at all. About a week later we found out why. My roomate’s less then law abiding cousin had borrowed the pyrex dish the night before, used it to “cook” Crystal Meth and hadn’t cleaned it at all.

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This isn’t a disaster story, more of “I can’t believe I ate that stuff”…

My brother Ed invented a dish called “hamburger brownies”. In a casserole dish, layer cooked hamburger meat on the bottom, then mashed potatoes, then melt American cheese on top.

A vanishing piece of Americana, home of ground meat.