I’m actually a fairly good cook, but sometimes things go awry. One such occasion was, sadly, for a Christmas dinner where my father and I decided to cook a prime rib. I’d never done one, mainly for budgetary reasons, and he bought a beautiful, 10 lb prime rib. We cooked it per some instructions for a recipe we had. Sadly, we followed the recipe to the T (note to Ivylass: your rule is for baking, not cooking; in cooking it’s the other way around), and cooked for exactly the minutes alotted. Okay, in fairness, we missed one crucial part of the recipe: it called for a ribroast with the ribs still attached. So the time for cooking was off by a couple of hours. We all love good beef cooked rare (for prime rib. Most other meats should be no more than medium rare). Sadly, this gorgeous, expensive cut of meat was cooked well done. And inedible in that form. It did make for spectacular tacos the next night, so it was a total loss. We had the side dishes for the main course for that Christmas.
The garlic bulb is the big thing, the clove is the little thing. If only I had known that when I made my first lasagna and garlic bread. The lasagna called for four cloves, the bread three. For many years after that the smell of garlic made me nauseous–fortunately I’ve overcome that in recent years, but the memory of that mess lingers on!
HA! FairyChatMom, I see your meatloaf and see you a softball sized scotched egg. Had a flatmate who would make the bloody things using sausage meat and cornflakes instead of mince and breadcrumbs. At least he didn’t subsitute the egg.
Or the time when we asked another flatmate when is dinner going to be cooked.
FM: “Oh, when the pasta’s boiled”
Me: “When did you put it on?”
FM: “Oh, about half an hour ago”
It should read “I see your meatloaf and raise you a softball sized scotched egg”
:smack:
My husband loves plain white rice. I can’t stand it. So he tries to be thougtful and make gravy or sauce to along with it when he makes dinner.
One memorable time he mixed chicken broth, apple juice, and brandy.
I told him not to worry about making gravy anymore.
I thankfully missed out on this one, but a friend of mine decided he was going to make his own chai tea. Unfortunately, while the recipe called for cloves, he didn’t know what cloves are. So he decided to throw in a couple of cloves of garlic. The result has become legendary. My father also has a similar story from his student days. One of his roommates decided to make spaghetti sauce but didn’t know what kind of seasoning to use. He chose allspice, since spaghetti sauce has all sorts of spices in it.
The only thing I’ve made that’s been completely inedible was shortly after I moved into my own place. I didn’t realise how long you have to cook dried beans to make them edible, and I (stupidly) didn’t bother checking how they were doing before draining the water and adding them to the rest of the dish. I think I nearly chipped a tooth.
I started cooking when I was nine. by the time I was 12, I pretty much had the basics down. My sister (18 months older) couldn’t stand the idea that I could do something she couldn’t, and watched me for a few days, then announced that SHE was going to cook dinner.
Roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans. Sounds fairly easy?
No salt, no pepper, no milk, butter or anything else. Burned meat, raw inside, instant mashed potato flakes and hot water, and canned green beans with nothing done to them but heat applied.
We took a few moments to doctor up the potatoes and beans, then sliced, seasoned and broiled the meat, and made Fake You Out Gravy (where there are no pan drippings, you just make a roux and fake it) and pulled it off, but it was touch and go for a few moments there.
Two days later she attempted a 7 minute frosting that necessitated repainting the kitchen.
When I was about 12 I was making ginger snaps. I had made them before, but for some reason I screwed up and put in garlic instead of ginger.
There are many things that garlic can be fabulous in. Needless to say, cookies are not amoung them.
Many many years ago in my family, a birthday party tradition was making ice cream with a hand-cranked ice cream maker. As luck happened, on my birthday, we had a disaster.
Normally with the hand-crank things, the cranking gets progressively harder as the ice cream mixture succumbs to the cold of the rock salt and ice and freezes. This particular batch wasn’t getting harder to turn. Eventually, curiosity led us to open the thing up. Inside the tank was two gallons of chocolate brine.
The old tank had rust spots on the outside and the hard rock salt and ice mix scraped its way through the tank and mixed in with what would have been delicious chocolate ice cream.
Did I mention this was my birthday party? And that I was about ten at the time? Unburdened with the knowledge of what brine tastes like, I grabbed a spoon and took a tast of what was supposed to be my birthday ice cream. <urk!>
My friend’s wife has the blandest taste buds I’ve ever encountered. She won’t eat anything the least bit “exotic” including Chinese, Mexican, Italian, BBQ, etc. The most exotic food she’ll eat is Pizza Hut pizza. In factg, she told me she had never eaten pizza until my friend bought her a slice when they were on a date in their twenties.
But my friend says she’s a wild woman in comparison to her parents. As mentioned above they wouldn’t even eat pizza because they thought it was too ethnic. Which was why I was surprised when I heard they used to have tacos.
Then I heard their recipe for tacos. Buy a box of store brand premade taco shells. Buy a package of ground beef. Fry beef until brown. Insert beef in taco shell. Consume.
No spices. No salsa or pico de galla. No guacamole or sour cream. No cheese. No lettuce or tomato. No salt or pepper. No ketchup or mustard. Nothing. Ground beef in a corn meal shell.
Okay, once when I was about 13, I decided to make cookies, now mind you I was a pretty good cook, I could make what my mom made, which was pretty much alot.
Anyway, I wanted to make choco chip cookies and got the recipe out of our big betty crocker cook book. only we didnt have baking soda or baking powder, and the redipe called for both, but the amount was so small i figured no one would notice. The resulting cookies were bricks, with chocolaty chunks.th only one who would even look at them was my dad, who ate the whole batch, mind you he would have eaten a dead cat if you called it a cookie.
Motorgirl, I love mac and cheese, would it be possible to e-mail you to get that recipe? 
I once had to cook tripe. I was longing for it. And lo and behold I found it on sale at the butchers. But you had to buy 2 kilograms (5 pounds) of it. So, I bought all this tripe and took it home. Does anyone realise how much tripe there is in 2 kg (tripe for uninitiated is sheeps stomachs, or guts).
I carried this upstairs and boiled it. I didn’t realise the longer you boiled it the toughter (and smellier) it got. By mid afternoon, flies were leaving fresh dog shit to come to my kitchen. It was at that time I knew I had a disaster.
What to do? I buried it all in the back yard. Apart from it raining it still stunk. And something dug it up- I suspect we have a hyena in Australia. And nobody knows why.
Definitely - check my profile.
This reminds me of what my sister told me, about a friend of hers whose mom made chocolate chip cookies with zucchini in them (to be healthy and use up the produce in their garden), to the extent that he thought all chocolate chip cookies were like that and avoided them from anyone else. It was only when he was an adult and grudgingly tried one that his girlfriend made that he realized his mom was the weird one.
JulKatBo: I did that once as well when making vegetarian chili, which really disappointed me since it tasted like it would have been good otherwise. 
I also made a tofu stirfry using the tofu from the “juice-box” packaging - ew, it was mushy and tasteless. Trust me on this, only use that for tofu “scrambled eggs”, pumpkin pie, and other soft things. If you want it to be chewy, get the tofu that comes in a deep dish filled with water and covered with plastic.
I made a curried chickpeas with spinach dish a few months back, following the cookbook’s recipe. I couldn’t stand more than a couple forkfuls, and threw the rest out. It tasted vile and slimy; I have no idea if that was a mistake on my part or how the recipe was written, but I don’t intend to try it again to see.
My aunt, Lord love her, has been transplanted from Boston to Florida. And now thinks she can cook southern food. She can not. Trust me on this. She can’t cook any other food either, but Dear God! The things she’s done to innocent food! I wrote a cookbook that all my aunts contributed to and I sold copies to my friends - Home Cooking Recipes. As I sold each book, I explained to read Auntie’s recipes for comic value, never actually try them.
Allspice and apples in meatloaf (kinda weird but not too bad) and she doesn’t like ketchup - but she used cocktail sauce instead. Apples, horseradish and allspice should NEVER be in the same dish. EVER! Then there’s the vegi-cheez casserole (made with cheez whiz) that if you run out of corn, just substitute pinapple. And her giblet gravy recipe - just reading it is enough. She’s just got this thing about allspice. It’s just wrong!
Hmm…there was the time last Thanksgiving when my sister and I overbasted the turkey, and it fell apart into a disgusting pile of limp meat and bones (tasted good though). We took a picture of it for posterity.
Then last Christmas, we reheated some corn/veggie mix in the oven and left it too long.
Oh, and lastly, at the same Christmas dinner as the Corn Incident, I made skor bars and didn’t grease the pan. Nothing in the toolbox was able to get it out.
Many of these tales are absolute howlers! I love this thread.
Here’s mine. I had been living on my own a short time, and I decided I was going to make chocolate chip cookies. Never mind that it was 10 pm on a weeknight, I was hungry!
I had a bag of the instant mix - make the little dough balls, put them on the sheet, bake away.
So I put them in the oven and set my timer for 9 minutes. (The instructions had said 9-12, IIRC.)
So I’m in the other room on the computer, and every now and then I hear a click. Mind you, this is the first time I had used the oven itself - had barely used the stove, for that matter. I take a look at it, see nothing, and sit back down.
BEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEP BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
Apparently, we were under nuclear attack. Instinctively, I duck and cover, head between legs. The clanging continues.
Oh, my. It’s the smoke alarm. I’d forgotten about it.
It’s very late at night. Now I’m petrified that some irate neighbor (apartment complex!) will be pounding on the door, demanding a pound of flesh instead of a pound of butter, or something. I’m getting scared.
I go back into the kitchen. Smoke is pouring out of one of the burners. I flick the overhead fan on and turn the oven off. I peek inside. Oooh, smoke. Gray, gray, and more gray, very gray. I decide it would be better to let them cool for a moment in the oven with the heat off. And as if to vindicate my decision, the alarm abruptly ceases.
Whew, I say. Let me sit for a minute. I know those cookies are not worth saving, but I’m not opening that oven until I’m sure we’re smoke free.
As I sit, the alarm resumes. BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
I cannot convey how loud this was. Picture a bus or subway train. It’s packed, and everyone on board is talking on a cell phone. You know how those people are. No, wait. Picture a convention of talk-show hosts, each trying to out-blather the other.
Still not quite loud enough. Ozzy, Metallica, and a jet plane would have been auditorially dwarfed by this noise.
So I run back into the kitchen. Now, my goal is to turn the blasted alarm off. I first open a window or two to get any remaining smoke out. Then I look at the alarm. It’s on the ceiling.
Now, again, this is my first place away from home. At home - and perhaps this is true of most homes - the smoke detector was this little thing you disabled by removing the batteries.
But this one was hard wired into the ceiling. But I didn’t quite know that at the time. First, I jumped up, smacking it. “Stop!!” I yelled, disrespecful of the Alarm Gods. “Dammit, cut it out!”
It didn’t work. The alarm continued, mocking me.
This is when I made my final, near-fatal mistake. I reached up and pulled the alarm down, intending to get to the battery compartment.
This, then, is when I discovered that the alarm was hard wired. I wrenched it down from the grasp of the ceiling, and suddenly found myself awash in a pristine spray of sparks.
And then, darkness.
“Uh oh,” I mumbled into the inky depths of the kitchen. “This is not good.” The depths did not answer, but I thought I heard giggling.
Turns out the dislodging of the alarm shorted a circuit or two. The bedroom and bath were fine, but the entire front portion of the apartment was not.
I called maintenance - luckily, we had a 24-hour service - and they came out in about 20 minutes. The guy went into the electrical closet, which we’re not permitted to enter, and flipped the switch.
“I think I know what caused the blackout,” I said to him, and he followed me into the kitchen.
They fixed the ceiling, which had no small amount of plaster missing, and the alarm. No charge.
And the cookies were burnt.
I disowned the oven from thence on, and used it only rarely in the two years before I moved to my current place. It traumatized me something fierce.
Actually, when my son is cooking, he needs to follow the recipe exactly. He doesn’t have enough knowledge to experiment yet. I narrowly prevented him from experimenting with the chicken breasts one evening.
He wanted to use cinnamon and cloves instead of garlic and onion powder.
OK this is gross, but hey, I was 14 at the time, vain and refused to wear my glasses…
I was assigned making a sausage casserole for my Mom’s family reunion. OK no problem - We all cook a lot, and she was right downstairs in her office if there was anything freaky. Sausage casserole is sausage, macaroni, onions and peppers in a tomato sauce topped with cheese. Quite tasty. And the recipe called for ground black pepper, which we were out of. So, I find an old can of paprika, and a quick shout down to Mom approves it for use, but it’s not as spicy as black pepper so use a tablespoon rather than a teaspoon of it.
Now I didn’t ask WHY it wasn’t as spicy… Turns out that this can of paprika was old… quite old… we’re talking Eisenhower-era here. Mom only used it for the occassional deviled egg. So I shake and shake and barely any paprika comes out. I pry the lid off and the paprika is solid but about a tablespoon of it. I chisel the paprika out and mush it up a bit and mix it into my vat of sausage casserole. I see little specks and dots in the mix and just figure that’s what paprika looks like. And being the good girl I was, I put the container in Mom’s purse to buy more.
At the reunion, the casserole didn’t go over very well. Those little specks? Well, actually they were bugs. Dessicated weevils actually. Figured it out by the remains in the can. So here we are - with about 150 relatives all bringing their best food. And we brought insects in tomato sauce.
Mom made me always wear my glasses after that.