When Good Cooks Go Bad: Wiener Gravy and Other Disasters

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

Believe it or not, Wang-Ka, you can even get free chips in Michigan, although their usually served with salsa, not queso. Of course, I will have to agree with you about barbeque…

My own cooking story - I had invited several friends over to a new apartment for a nice dinner. Had everything planned out ahead of time, and all the ingredients ready, with one exception - I had forgotten to pick up some Velveeta to put into a veggie and cheese crumble. But I figured no problem; I had some cheddar cheese that I could substitute. After all, they’re both orange, so they must cook the same - right?

The disk cooked up well, and looked nice coming out of the oven. Everything was great until the first guest actually tried to serve some of that dish. Cheddar cheese, combined with whatever else I had in there and baked, achieves something close to the consistency and elasticity of Silly Putty. The person raised the spoon as high as they could over the dish (about three feet), and still couldn’t get the long streamer of cheese to break. She actually got up on a chair, and stretched that cheese string to a total length of about six feet, and it STILL wouldn’t break!

I finally wound up fetching a pair of scissors out of the other room…

82

No story, just the joke my father liked to tell about my mother’s cooking: when they were first married, she made “spoon pie”. It’s called that because you spoon out the insides and use the crust for a flower pot.

[rimshot]pa-bum-bum.[/rimshot]

She got the hang of it by the time I started eating solid food.

83

They serve chips and salsa in California, and there’s half-way decent BBQ as well (and yes I’ve had BBQ in Texas). So it’s not “North” as much as “Midwest”. Of course, California is also home to “New York roll” sushi (smoked salmon and cream cheese).

Most of the time I feel that California is not so much a separate state, and more a piece of a planet transported here mysteriously from another galaxy. That would explain how Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown got to be governor.

84

A famous family cooking disaster story is from when my grandmother was a new bride. Her family was of mostly French heritage, and her new husband was Ukrainian. He wanted her to try cooking perogies.

He wasn’t all that sure of the exact recipe, but he had a pretty good idea. Dough for the outside, and a mixture of potatoe and cheese for the inside. This part actually turned out pretty close to what it’s supposed to be.

But although my grandfather had seen perogies made many times, and knew the general ingredients, he took their method of cooking for granted. Everyone knows how to cook them right? I mean, it must be self-evident, right? Apparently not. He just told her to “cook” them.

My grandma decided that she should bake them. I leave the results to your imagination. Solid rocks of dough. Completely indigestible. Can’t even cut them with a knife.

Needless to say, they figured out what was wrong pretty quick.

She actually makes fabulous perogies now, as well as cabbage rolls, etc… And she makes the best tortiere (meat pie). The only complaint with her cooking now is that she tends to overcook her turkey. Veeeeery dry and stringy. Probably doesn’t baste enough, and she tends to leave it in the oven (with the oven still on) until everything else is done cooking, even if the turkey was “done” half an hour before.

85

First let me say that every Mexican restaurant that I’ve ever eaten in has served free chips and salsa–and note that I’m from Montana. They may not be even close to authentic Mexican–heck, they may even have horrible food. But they’ve all served free chips and salsa (a very good thing in the cases where the food was horrible!)

Second, when I was a kid, the youngest of 4, my mom decided that we were in a food rut and that it was time to branch out and start trying new recipes. She bought a cookbook that was all ethnic foods.

Normally a great cook–you have to be at least passable to cook for harvest crews on a regular basis–she lost her head with that book.

One of the very first new recipes that she tried was African Peanut Butter Stew. It smelled great, looked great and tasted great–until she added 2 cups of peanut butter.

Upon serving it to the family (Dad, two teenaged boys, my sister and I) we looked, smelled and bravely tried it. There was a veritable silence at the table, nearly unheard of in my house. Brothers, sisters, mom and I pushed back the bowls with howls of outrage and disgust. Dad bravely kept eating until mom convinced him that it was okay, she wasn’t going to be mad if he quit eating it.

We got out the “emergency rations”–frozen pizzas, and took turns writing comments next to the recipe in the cook book so she would NEVER try it again!!!:smiley:

86

My mommy cooks all meats well done and doesn’t bother with any way to re-moisturize them. Her vegetables are frozen in the bag and cooked plain in the microwave so that they are dry and tasteless. They make the baby Sparticus cry. Her idea of salad is shredded carrots and raisins slathered in immitation mayonnaise. Her idea of dessert is a bowl full of ice skim milk (like ice cream without the fat), except that she uses the non-dairy kind. Sparticus looked forward to Swanson’s TV dinner night, which was usually three times a week. Sparticus was skinny until he moved away.

87

I am amazed, but pleased, to hear that free chips and salsa are so widespread. Gonna have to get a list of restaurants from you people next time I take a cross country trip.

And I should probably point out that only recently did my wife teach me how to use a microwave to make queso.

YES, it is possible to use a microwave to make queso.

…but when I was nineteen, my roommates and I did in fact blow the door off a microwave in exactly that manner. Admittedly, it was a cheap little “cheese sandwich” model microwave that came with the apartment, but you’ll certainly admit that there is considerable shock value in seeing what a block of generic Velveeta can do to a cheap little microwave…

…so perhaps what I should have said was “don’t put a whole block of Velveeta in a bowl and stick it in the microwave for ten minutes to melt it…”

88

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

89

The most recent story in my Food Horror Story collection is the time my husband decided to make dinner one night. He labored over the hot stove for about an hour and produced a meal that was very good, considering that his culinary skills are pretty much limited to toast and buttered noodles. Feeling quite proud of himself, he then popped a Sara Lee Apple pie in the oven while we were eating so we could have dessert.
15 minutes later, the fire alarm was shrieking and the entire house was filled with an incredibly noxious smell. Yes, you guessed it–he’d left the plastic wrap on the pie.
Apple/melted plastic pie is a smell I’d rather not ever smell again in my entire life.

But that’s not even the funny part. Two weeks later, he put a frozen pizza in the oven, right along with the cardboard circle from the package. Luckily, it didn’t smell nearly as bad as plastic/apple pie, but it did catch on fire.
He’s not allowed near the oven anymore. :smiley:

90

I am in awe of the tales of culinary catastrophe I have so far read. All of you will be pleased to know that I have nominated this thread for a Pulitzer.

My own small tale of kitchen disaster concerns biscuits. In south Mississippi, certain generations of women were judged partly on their biscuits. Buttermilk biscuits being the primary standard. My siblings and I were blessed by having two grandmothers and a mother who, IMHO, have never been surpassed in their talent. Upon leaving home we had to search out our own replacements for this staple. My wife is a great cook, but for whatever reason doesn’t have the correct genetic encoding required to make biscuits the traditional way. Luckily, Pillsbury provides us with an excellent frozen substitute. I really don’t know how my younger brother and sister survive (they do live just a few minutes from my mother so they may cheat).

This story concerns my other brother (the middle one). Being a brave soul he decided that, being single and living away from home, he should learn how to make them on his own. He found a recipe he felt would be acceptable and proceeded to bake. He was doing fine until it came time to add the baking powder. He looked around but could not find the required ingredient. He did find a box of baking soda and thought, “What’s the difference?”.

I will have to admit they looked beautiful but I will leave the taste up to your imagination.

91

My mom is an excellent cook, but even she has had her moments of cluelessness.

The first: she decided to make popcorn for the first time (the plain kind, not the microwave kind), when I was maybe 8 years old. She took a big Dutch oven, heated some oil, and poured in…the entire 2-lb. bag of popcorn. I have a very vivid memory to this day of a column of popcorn pushing up the lid of the Dutch oven, with my tiny, 5’1" mom trying in vain to subdue it.

The second: one year she bought a bag of marshmallows for the Thanksgiving sweet potatoes, and found the perfect hiding place from inquisitive sweet-toothed daughters: the second oven. Nobody ever uses the second oven, except on Thanksgiving! Until, of course, you need to preheat it to cook the turkey, without looking inside first, because what on Earth could possibly be in there if nobody ever uses it? Melted plastic stuffed with burnt sugar…yum yum!

92

My first attempt at cooking was a cake. The ingredients were water, flour and green food coloring. That I microwaved. In a metal dish. I was 6. I think you can imagine what happened.

93

Not just that far North–all the Mexican places near me do the same thing. I live in the Boston area, and it’s hard to get much more “Yankee” than that (though, as a Red Sox fan, it’s hard for me to admit that) :slight_smile:

In my book, this is a good thing. I loathe and detest grits. I have no food allergies, and few food quirks, but one I do have is that I generally refuse to eat anything that appears to have already been eaten once before, if you get my drift. I thus avoid grits, oatmeal, cream-of-wheat, and a variety of other things.

This is simply incorrect. I will agree that by and large chili and barbecue are worse in the North than in the South, but there are certainly plenty of exceptions. There are several excellent barbecue (and I mean real barbecue–cooking with smoke, not straight flame) places in the Boston area. I took a friend from Texas to one once, and he pronounced it as good as any he’d been to at home.

Chili is another story, and I will certainly agree that chili in restaurants in the North tends to be lousy. However, you have absolutely no idea what goes on in people’s homes, and plenty of people, myself included, make an excellent knock-your-socks-off chili.

In any case, while it’s certainly true that chili and barbecue aren’t generally as good in the North, please don’t lump all “Yankees” together. I know the difference between good and bad barbecue sauce, and any sauce whose main ingredient is either corn syrup or ketchup will never come near my food. And I know that real chili isn’t made with ground beef or beans, and that there are plenty of varieties of pepper besides bell and jalapeno (before I got married to a woman with a lower heat tolerance than mine I used to start my chili with four fresh habaneros).

Not to be too nitpicky, but you are aware of where a “coney” got its name, right? Hint: It’s nowhere near Michigan.

-astraeus

94

I have had my fair share of culinary screw-ups. Ingredients that sounded OK together until I actually mixed them together. A fine example of this would be cream of mushroom soup and soy sauce. Just trust me on this one!

This one was the worst. Two weeks ago, My Sylver and I got out of bed on a rather chilly Sunday morning, sub[/sub], and decided that a change was in order and that instead of our usual breakfast fare, (Wheaties and Lucky Charms) we would have bacon and eggs and I would make muffins, as pancakes didn’t sound good and I didn’t have enough sliced bread to make french toast. I like Blueberry and he likes Poppy seed. So I mix up the batter for both, and make 6 of each in the first batch. Not a problem. They turned out wonderfully. I put the second and last batch in as we were sitting down to eat. I set the timer for 15 minutes again, knowing that when it went off, I’d have a couple of minutes to get to them.

After breakfast we decided to put up the Christmas tree. We hauled it out of the closet, along with all the decorations, lights and other assorted stuff that goes with it. We set the tree up, I put the lights on as we went, though we had to take a couple of breaks to replace bulbs in some of the strands and to untangle others. After all the lights are on, we started hanging the ornaments and let me tell ya, I’m picky when it comes to ornament placement. I take after my mother in this respect. So finally, we get the decorations finished and sit down to admire our handi work.

The phone rings, it’s for My. Sylver, a friend of his wanting to comiserate with him in regards to the fact his team is out of the playoffs. They chat for about twenty minutes and then Mr. Sylver say good bye. I’m thinking about going to take a nap. It’s 3 o’clock and I’ve had an industrious day. I’m laying in my recliner, with my eyes closed, just on the verge of sleep, and Mr. Sylver asks, “What is that smell?”

HOLY SH*T!!! The muffins!!

I run to the kitchen and yank open the oven door.

Big Mistake. Smoke comes billowing out, and along with it the acrid smell of scorched metal and burnt bread. Ack!!

I run for the front door, Mr. Sylver runs for the back door, the cat runs downstairs. We swing open the doors, and are thankful for the fresh air. We propped both doors open, and head back for the kitchen. I turn off the oven and turn on the fan above the stove, and open the oven door again… More smoke pours out, but Mr. Sylver is ready with the air freshener. I reach for the muffin pan with my oven mits, take it out and set it on the range top. In it are 12 perfectly round pieces of black coal. My evil little mind is already thinking about my brother’s christmas stockings and the great joke it would be for them to actually find coal in them on Christmas morning.

But, no.

That would be evidence against myself and right now, the only witnesses to my shame are my husband and my cat. My husband has equally damaging incidents on his record, so I know he’ll keep quiet and a year’s supply of catnip and kitty toys will take care of the cat. My secret is safe.

No one knows that I burned muffins for 2 and 1/2 hours, stinking up my house, and ruining my only muffin tin.

This weekend, it’s back to Wheaties and Lucky Charms.

95

BTW, montana cricket welcome to the board.

96

I’ve been trying to come up with some good cooking stories about me, but, while I’ve screwed up some recipes, none of them have been particularly noteworthy.

However, I have some great stories about friends of mine…

My friend Jesse, who once, making microwave popcorn, put it in for four minutes and didn’t stay close by. In fact, he didn’t even check on it…until the smoke alarm went off.
Jesse also once was cooking on an old gas stove. He turned on the burner, put an oiled pan down on it, and after a minute wondered why the oil wasn’t getting hot. Then he remembered that the stove’s pilot light didn’t work on one side, so you had to light the burners with a candle kept close by. He had forgotten this.

So he turned off the burner, and realized that he should get rid of the unburned gas in the air. Did he open a window? No… Did he just wait a minute for the gas to dissipate? No… He lit a match. He got rid of the gas in the air, all right–and his eyebrows, too.
Jenn, an old friend of mine who at the time was just learning to cook, tried an experiment. She knew she liked chicken, and that she liked balsamic vinegar, so she thought she’d combine the two for a dish. Fine so far… So she got out the chicken and the vinegar, turned on a pan, poured in the vinegar, waited for it to heat up, then put the chicken in–no grease, not even any water for dilution. She boiled the chicken in vinegar! Her then-boyfriend (now husband) loved her very much and ate it anyway, commenting only that it was “a little sour.”
There was Dan, who wanted to make mashed potatoes. He had never made them before, but he figured they couldn’t be too hard, right? So he got out the potatoes and peeled them. Good so far. Now he didn’t know what to do, though, so he went ahead and mashed them–before cooking them! (Dan is a very strong person.) So he mashed them, and then cooked them; they turned a bit green, but (apparently) tasted OK.
And then there was Tasha, who used to cook pasta for a half-hour, but that wasn’t the half of it. Tasha once made a turkey for Thanksgiving. Tasha is not a very patient person, and patience is a required virtue for those who wish to cook a decent-sized turkey (this one was about 20 pounds).

So the turkey had been in the oven for about four hours at too low a temperature, and it was nowhere near done, but Tasha just couldn’t wait any longer. So she took it out, carved a bit off, and tossed it in the microwave for a few minutes. She and her boyfriend (the aforementioned Dan) ate this, and apparently liked it. They then put the remaining turkey–still not fully cooked–in the fridge, loosely covered; it’d be OK, right?

The next day Tasha decided to make turkey soup. She took the whole rest of the turkey, chopped it into smaller pieces with a cleaver, put it all in a pot, and covered it with water. She heated it up for about an hour, but at a low enough flame that the water never even came to a full boil. She and Dan took this soup to a potluck party; fortunately one of their housemates was also there, and, having witnessed the “cooking” process, warned everyone surreptitiously not to eat the soup. Dan and Tasha ate it though, and were mystified to find no-one else going near it.

Miraculously, neither one of them got at all ill from this experience.

-astraeus

97

Actually, there are Mexican restraunts that do that quite a bit more north than that.

I live in southern Idaho and have seen/enjoyed that little tradition, both in my home town, and in Coeur d’Alene, which is just a hop, skip and a jump from Canada.

Mind you, I have no taste for spicy, so I usually have to wait until one of my friends try the salsa. If they complain that it’s too blasted mild, it’s perfect for my pathetic little taste buds.
As for a few horror stories…

See, I used to be a Boy Scout. (And still am, in fact. Assistant Scoutmaster for my local troop.) And during my now almost ten years with the Scouts, I learned one very important thing.

You can make good food while camping. And you can make very BAD food while camping. And you’re going to have to eat it, either way.

My assistant Scoutmaster when I was actually a boy in the troop was my Scoutmaster’s wife, who was an awesome campfire cook. Except on certain occasions…

The one that pops to mind is the potato soup incident. See, she’d decided to make the soup before the campout and just heat it up once we arrived and set up camp. Which was a good idea, as this was a winter camp and by the time we’d have finished with set up, it’d likely be dark.

So, she makes the soup. A little over four gallons of potato soup. Spends several hours on this soup to get it all done. Then has to go pick up her kids from school. And asks her husband to find something to keep the soup in and cold. Cold is no problem, you just have to set it outside the door and pop it in on occasion so it won’t freeze solid. It’s the container that’s a problem. What do you use to hold four+ gallons of soup?

Well… Every been to a bulk foods store? Familiar with the five gallon tubs of laundry detergent? Guess what he found to hold the soup.

He did swish water through it first, though.

Somehow, this soup managed to get all the way to the camp site without his wife ever seeing what it was being held in.

Now, I got to be the lucky guy who warmed this back up. I, of course, figure if it’s in the bucket, it’s obviously supposed to be there. So I dump it into the large pot we brought for it, and heat that baby up.

Smelled absolutely wonderful…and had the strangest tingle on the tongue when I taste-tested it…

Luckily, before I had a chance to try more than about two spoonfuls in an attempt to figure out what was going on, my assistant Scoutmaster walked in, saw the soap bucket by the stove and put two and two together.

The soup went into a hole and we had canned chili that night.
The other incident, which isn’t so much a horror story as just humorous, involved a friend of mine in the Scouts. He was patrol leader, and came up with a wonderful plan for saving money on the meals for the next campout.

The meal plan, in its entire glory:

Hot dogs. And some more hot dogs. And, hey, why not some more hot dogs?

Nine meals of nothing but hot dogs and assorted condiments to go with them.

They saved money. But one of them still gets queasy when he sees a hot dog and they all agreed that my friend was no longer allowed to plan menus.

98

A good friend’s mother was an awesome cook. SHe made masterpieces. I was asked by her to help with a dinner party she was hosting, where as she put cocktail weenies in a mixture of grape jelly and ketchup! 'They taste good really" ’ Luckily I was(and still am) a vegetarian, whew! What was she thinkin?

99

My mother was visiting her husband’s family in far northern Minnesota (no insult intended to the residents of that fine state!) when she was presented with tacos – the ingredients on the table were plain browned ground beef, limp lettuce (I think) and MIRACLE WHIP.

On TACOS. Miracle Whip. EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!

100

My recent cooking disaster wasnt mine but I noticed it…

My cousins husband bought a few tacos in jack -in the box (which is a sin to me anyways) but they gave him wrapping with foil on it …

He popped it in the microwave in the wrapper … iIheard a buzzing and a crackling as I walked by the microwave ,

The foil was on fire I turned it off just in time … Theres a burn mark in the microwave … First thing He said when i said the microwave was on fire "oh crap the tacos were wrapped in foil "

The food was still edible and the microwaves still usable

So it wasnt a total disaster this time …