Worst culinary disasters

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Or, Things That Go Bump In The Oven

My mom, like many moms out there, likes to do things to leftovers. This time, the leftover item in question was a badly overcooked leg of lamb (Mom couldn’t find her meat thermometer when cooking it.) So she got the brilliant idea to make it into a meat pie sort of thing. Alarm bells immediately went off in my head.

“Meat pie?” I inquired warily.

“Yeah. I’ll cook it up in the slow cooker with plenty of carrots and potatoes and things, and tomorrow we can bake it up with some biscuits on top.”

Ohhh-kay. Mom’s success rate with the slow cooker is about 50-50. This goes down drastically when the intended product is anything like a stew or soup. This already sounded ominous, but she would not be swayed. Into the slow cooker went the lamb, along with various vegetables, canned broth and probably some other stuff, where it bubbled most of last Sunday.

Monday night we were spared the Lamb Slop, as Mom had to work late. She suggested that Dad, Quantum Sister or I cook it up; after one look at the congealed mess in the fridge, the verdict was a unanimous no.

Thus came Tuesday night, and this time Mom was home to cook her creation. It smelled as bad as it looked, and the smell only got worse as it cooked. I thanked Og that I am 20 years old and therefore not obliged to eat whatever is provided; I can make my own food if that’s what I want to do. All too soon it was done, and Quantum Sister, being braver or more desperate (or both) actually took a bowlful. After one bite, she turned to me and said, “QB, you’re not gonna like this.” I thanked her sincerely for the warning. Mom sort of scowled, took a bowl to my grandma, and returned with a bowl of her own.

The look on Mom’s face as she tried a bite of her creation was absolutely priceless. Evidently it was worse than I thought. Mom isn’t fussy, so a dish has to be pretty darn bad if SHE won’t eat it. After a few bites, she and Quantum Sister decided to do what I had planned on all along; find something else to eat. Dad was warned away from the Lamb Slop, and we fed it to the dogs for the next couple nights. They loved it.

Anyone else feel like sharing a Culinary Disaster story? Tell, tell!

2

Oops… my apologies for the double post :frowning: If a mod would delete the duplicate, I would be much obliged.

3

When I was 12 I baked a birthday cake for my mother while she was out. Unfortunately we ran out of flour - but as luck would have it there was another bag way back in the pantry.

Turns out it was Rye flour. Who knew?

So we all had iced chocolate rye bread for her birthday. The best part was trying not to break the candles as I forced them into the “crust”.

Good times…

4

I had a co-worker who had just bought an ice cream maker. He was also reknowned for his love of spicy food. So as a joke I passed along a recipe for jalapeno sherbet I had.

He actually made it. In the spirit of adventure, I gave it a try. The conversation went like this:

“This is … interesting.”
“Is it good?”
“I’m going to stand on interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“Yes…interesting.”
“Anything else?”
“How about different?”
“Different how?”
“Well I usually like ice cream. But this is different.”

5

My maternal grandmother was a heavenly cook. We all loved to have dinner at her house, which we did every holiday, and sometimes in-between.

My paternal grandmother, on the other hand…

She boiled hot dogs. I know this is occasionally done, but these were low-quality dogs, and Nana would boil them to the point where they were slimy and falling apart.

She once made an apple pie, ran out of apples, and tried to make it up with grapefruit. Not a good combination.

She once took some leftover steak, ground it up, and made a meat spread for sandwiches. Again, she ran short, so she stretched it with peanut butter. Crunchy peanut butter.

When we went to visit her (she lived quite a distance away, so a visit was usually a multi-day affair), the first thing we did after leaving her house was to find a restaurant.

6

My mother was truly an awful cook and I think that part of this was due to some resentment at having to cook at all. She would rush through things and serve up the results with a grimace and a warning that we were to eat what she put in front of us. One of the standouts that my sister and I still talk about was a typical Saturday lunch of soup and grilled cheese. She would use condensed soup but couldn’t be bothered to actually measure out the can of water to add to it, so she would invariably just throw in too little water, so the result was really thick, icky soup. The grilled cheese would also be a hurried affair, cooked over a too-high flame, so that the outside of the sandwiches would be burnt and the inside still cold and not melted at all.

Then, there is the infamous Christmas of 1996, the last time we allowed her to cook a dinner. Why? The 3 cases of food poisoning which broke out. My sister was spared, but only because she refused to eat anything but the potatoes.

Yikes, I could go on all day.

7

Dunno if this was my worst, but it was truly the most memorable. I wanted to make a meatloaf. I didn’t have any breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs. I did have corn flakes.

Do yourself a favor - don’t try this at home.

I did eat all of it eventually, because I was a poor student. But it was not good. At all.

8

I once tried to make a microwave rice bowl, but apprently did something wrong, as when I opened the microwave door, the mass inside started moving towards me.

Apparently the rice caught fire and turned into some carbon goo.

Did not eat.

9

Well. There was that time I made cornbread but forgot the sugar and baking powder. Cornmeal is BLAND stuff. It literally has almost no flavor. Managed to eat this dense, cornmeal pancake with lots of honey.

Recently, I tried making a quesadilla-type thing with a couple flower tortillas, cheddar cheese, lettuce and mushrooms. The mushrooms were my big mistake. For some reason, the mushrooms were disgusting. Never again.

10

Not me, but my son. He tried to make brownies from scratch, bless his heart.

Only instead of using flour, he used some stuff he found in a bag on the counter. It was white, with pictures of bakers on it. He didn’t notice it was powdered sugar.

He also didn’t mix the eggs very well, and he used a jelly roll pan instead of a 9 x 12 baking dish. We got a very thin, crunchy brown substance with streaky egg yolks through it.

Since then, he’s turned into a halfway decent cook for an almost 14 year old. As I told him, the recipe is the rule, not a guideline.

11

A clove of garlic is much bigger than a bulb. If a recipe calls for three bulbs of garlic, and you want lots of garlic, putting in 4 cloves will be very…garlicky.

Many years ago, my father was making brownies for a family gathering. He makes really, really good brownies - tons of added in M&M’s, peanut-butter chips, chocolate chips, frosting on top…they’re good.

Our oven was going kinda fritzy, though. So dad (the evervescent engineering geek) broke out a high-tech digital thermometer meant for things like this, I s’pose. He had the thermometer set on degrees celcius. Not Farinheit, as the recipe expected.

Heh. We got some interesting…things. The inside of each little cube was still liquidy. The ones on the edge of the pan truly required someone putting nearly all their weight on a butcher knife to cut them. Once you got them cut, they were actually pretty good - sort of like a hard candy, really.

Or I could tell about when I blew up a kitchen with a jar of applesauce, but that’s a li’l bit involved…

12

(psst - cloves and bulbs are the other way about - a clove is the little thing and a bulb is a whole head of garlic)

I’ve actually blocked out the memory of my worst culinary disasters. There was something with turkey meat where the meat went dry and the sauce was watery and vile, but I can’t remember what the hell I was aiming at. And of course there were the fried onion rings that I tried to reheat in the microwave. They caught fire and melted the microwaveable container they were in.

Oh, and there was that time that the cream separated when I was making ice-cream, and ended up with milk ice with lots of droplets of butter in it. I managed to rescue that, kind of, by melting it, taking the butter off and using it to make a cake.

13

JuanitaTech is a spectacularly fabulous cook. She can do no wrong in the kitchen. She’s got the Midas touch and folks come from far and wide just to sample the wondrous creations that originate from her kitchen.

Bearing that in mind, I once started assembling the ingredients for what would inevitably turn out to be a delicious meatloaf. When it came time to add a bit of ketchup, I discovered the only ketchup I had in the kitchen was some green Heinz ketchup I’d purchased for the kids. I had no choice and used it.

The resulting dish looked like it had a bad case of motion sickness.

14

My worst one thus far (knock wood) hasn’t been too awful, but it did end up in the garbage rather than my stomach.

Dish of the evening: lasagna.

Intended ingredient: frozen chopped spinach.

What comes in a very similar package and is also green: frozen chopped broccoli.

Hey, I was an optimist. I thought, “How bad can it be?”

Bad.

15

I didn’t make it, but my very elderly cousin did.

It was Christmas, three years ago, and we assigned her somethign simple to make. You know, on account of her being my very elderly cousin. She was going to make a Jell-O in the shape of a Christmas Tree. Okay, no promblem.

Wrong. Halfway through, she had a momentary lapse of reason and throught she was making…A COLE SLAW. She proceeded to add cabbage, mayonnaise, the works, to the Tree Mold that was just beginning to turn into a mature Jell-O mold.

When she realized what she’d done, she brought it to Christmas Dinner anyway. Everyone thought it was a vegtable dip. It was definitely not a vegtable dip. It was a giant Christmas Cole Slaw Jell-O Jiggler. Anguish. Tears.

16

Macaroni & Cheese

Fiance wanted Macaroni and Cheese, not the boxed kind, but the kind his aunt made, which he swore was the best macaroni and cheese EVER. He didn’t have the recipe for it, and he couldn’t seem to remember to call her & get it, so I had him tell me what he remembered about it: elbow macaroni, american cheese, milk & flour.

So I set off to the store to get the ingredients thinking: Harumph! I’m a good cook. American cheese? How plebian! I’m going to be gourment and make maraconi & cheese that’s even better than his aunt’s because I know how to use high quality ingredients. Blah blah blah, more snobby blathering…

So I ended up with havarti, gruyere and one other cheese, melted it, mixed it with some whole milk & a little flour, and a little dry mustard for zip. Well, it was grainy, the cheeses didn’t melt together properly. I’ve melted cheeses together before and been successful, so I decide that it was just a fluke, and since I’m mixing it with macaroni and baking it, no biggie, it will all turn out OK.

It didn’t - the end result was lumpy, with a sandy mouthfeel and the blandest thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. The next weekend he called his aunt, got her recipe and we made it - it is the best mac-n-cheese ever - he wasn’t lying.

17

It involved beef liver, milk and prunes. It was an actual recipe, and I figured, since it was actually published in a cookbook, it couldn’t be as bad as it sounds. It was at least as bad as it sounds. I took the entire thing outside the apartment dumpster at night in the middle of winter.

18

I love my paternal grandmother, but the woman can not cook. Part of the problem is that she does not believe in throwing anything away-- no matter how green and furry. Also she had a strict rule of cleaning your plate. The only saving grace was that you didn’t have to put anything on your plate.

I remember spending the night with her one weekend. After skipping dinner and breakfast, I was starving by lunchtime the second day. To my amazement, my grandmother served nachos for lunch. ‘Nachos!’, I thought. Just chips and cheese. It was edible and mana from heaven to my hungry little body. I took a huge plateful and after one bite was horrified to discover that hiding under the cheese was sliced squash. That was the last time I ever put more than a teaspoon of food on my plate when visiting my grandmother.

19

My mother is an excellent cook and even better baker so in all her years she’s had only two real failures. The first was a batch of black eyed peas. She decided to spice them up a bit with some sort of salsa mixed right in. It was tasty even though it was on the edge heat-wise. We froze it and then re-heated it a month or so later. Holy Beelzebub it was hot! The leftovers were worse, I don’t think my dad was kidding when he said he had blisters on his tongue. There was still a bunch left when Mom decided to toss it, fearing a nuclar meltdown if re-heated another time.

Her second boo-boo was a tuna casserole. Normally her tuna ‘wiggle’ is excellent-- I hate the stuff normally but look forward to hers. Problem was, this one time, she didn’t check to see if the milk was okay before adding it to the other ingredients. It smelled fine when it was placed on the table, so my dad put a big forkful in his mouth and then just about died. Choking, coughing, gasping, spitting, it was horrible to watch. Funny too.

Then there’s my sister who is a terrible cook. Only person I know who makes solid soup. She puts dry pasta into the soup and is always confuzzled why there’s never enough liquid and the pasta is crunchy inside.

Me, I made a ganache once that refused to set up, so the cake was not so much enrobed as lying in a puddle of soft, truffle-like chocolate.

20

Not mine, but a student flatmate’s – tinned salmon bolognaise. Here’s what the judges said:

Visual appeal: “Not impressed with either the peculiar grey colour, or the vomit-like consistency.” 0/10.

Aroma: “Strong and acidic – definitely off-putting.” 1/10.

Texture: “Remarkably watery, with distinctive grittiness.” 1/10.

Taste: “A battery-acid tartness overpowers any subtle nuances that this dish once aspired to. Any garlic, basil or other herb or seasoning that may be present is utterly redundant. The tomato appears to have been treated with industrial dry-cleaning solvents prior to inclusion, and the salmon replaced with the contents of a vacuum cleaner’s dust bag.” 0/10.

In another student-related story, I probably helped to avert a culinary disaster when a different flatmate wanted to confirm that his piece of chicken was still “ok to put in his stir-fry”. Two of us managed to persuade him that once chicken has progressed from grey to dark red and in fact shows a certain green tinge, it had certainly passed its ‘Best Before’ date, even though he “thought he’d only had it on the shelf about a week”.