Hey… I’ve seen that commercial!
I’m very scared reading this thread.
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Mac and cheese is made using BUTTER.
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A garlic bulb is made up of many cloves.
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Temperature and cooking time is not optional.
pepperlandgirl you can do wonderful with pork, apple cider, schallots and a splash of rum.
I had a problem with a bad batch of icecream (my mom actually made it) but it seperated out and we had butter 
That being said…
I make GOD AWFUL hamburgers.
I can do greek, italian, japanese, chinese, and random other dishes. I make delicious cakes from scratch, I’m a pretty decent bartender.
But if I have to cook a hamburger. It’ll be a rubbery, dry, chewey piece of felch.
Oooh, there’s a Mexican restaurant around the corner from my former apartment that serves a tequila, lime, and serrano chile sorbet that’s just to die for. Maybe it helps that I’ve usually had a couple of margaritas by the time I get to it, but I love the stuff.
I’ve never really had any culinary disasters that I can think of - made a few things that I didn’t like as much as I thought I would when I read the recipe, but nothing that truly frightened or disgusted me. However, I’ve eaten a few courtesy of other people:
Last summer my grandma made something akin to Quantum Butterfly’s mom’s Lamb Slop, only it was chicken and came out of a box - tinned chicken stew and instant biscuit mix. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to have it again.
My mom once made an oregano loaf - was supposed to be meatloaf but the shaker top fell off the oregano, and even after she picked out as much as she could it was still the prevailing flavor. Fortunately I don’t like meatloaf so she’d already set aside some plain hamburger for me. I also have a running joke about her Cajun Blackened blueberry pancakes.
Nothing tops a guy I dated back in my mid-20s… he didn’t cook much, and his freezer was empty except for a tray of ice cubes. Moldy ice cubes. After seeing that, I made sure we never ate at his place again.
This is great! I’ve had so many laughs reading this… and having screwed up in the kitchen myself a number of times, I can empathize. I’m laughing with you, not at you! 
That being said, Quantum Sister has been nagging me to post one of my own screwups, seeing as the OP was one of Mom’s culinary disasters. So…
Back when I was but a Quantum Caterpillar, somewhere in the preteen years, I was learning the basics of baking. Our family was holding a get-together, so I offered to demonstrate my skills by making an appetizer. I found a recipe for cheese balls that looked tasty and fairly simple, and it was from a set that Mom and I had always had good luck with in the past. So I started measuring and mixing. One of the primary ingredients, as with most baked goods, was flour- 1 2/3 cup or something like that. I put in the 2/3 cup, but a momentary lapse of attention caused me to forget the remaining 1 cup. :smack:
The result was not cheese balls. They were more like cheese flops- flat and greasy. Needless to say, they were not served at the party. Quantum Sister still kids me about the cheese flops to this day.
One of the things I should have known better than to say was “How hard can it be?”. I was all set to make a lovely, fluffy cake for a friend’s birthday. Being a poor college student with no prior baking practice, I had never baked a cake before and only had one bowl. Started by melting the butter in the microwave and catching it when it was boiling. Added the vanilla, sugar and then the eggs.
Scrambled eggs in butter do not a good cake ingredient make. Ick, ick, ick.
Actually, ivylass, cinnamon and cloves are excellent with chicken. Place 1-2 cups of raw rice in a baking tray. Pour in 1.5 times as much pineapple or orange juice as rice. Place chicken on top of rice. Sprinkle with cinnamon, cloves and a wee bit of brown sugar. Dribble lightly with water to run the spices and sugar down around the meat. Plonk in the oven on 325 (GM 4-5?) for about an hour. Check to make sure chicken is thoroughly cooked. Enjoy! 
My very first cooking experience is one I will never forget. At about 5-6 years old I was already begging to cook on my own. My mother’s only rule was that whatever I made had to be eaten… No wasting of food.
So, I chose a very simple recipe - or so I thought. Peanut butter. How hard could it be to make peanut butter. Peanuts. Butter. Sugar. Salt. Chuck it all in a blender and add more as you go along. Boy was I wrong.
Thank the gods I hadn’t made much. It was the most disgusting muck ever. No amount of jam could mask the taste. 3 sarnies later it was all gone.
My ex-MIL was a darling woman. She was in her 80’s but quite active and loved to cook and experiment. One Easter we were invited to their house for supper. Expecting something interesting - perhaps duck again or summat yummy - interesting is what I got. She made pineapple spam balls. They weren’t cooked either. Just ground spam and pineapple rolled into balls. There were a few other choice things as well, but these were indescibable.
Just for shits and giggles I’ve occasionally contemplated trying to make these on my own just to see if they were as bad as I remembered, but it frightens me to think about it.
This thread is a corker by the way!
Good grief…this thread is hilarious!
My contribution to the list o’disasters:
High school. “Bachelor Foods” aka “HomeEc for Jocks.”
First assignment: biscuits from scratch. Baking powder, baking soda…they’re the same thing, right?
They were very nice hockey pucks…
I love this thread!
My Dad’s favorite story to tell about one of his sisters (he’s the oldest of 7 kids) regards the first time that she made chocolate brownies.
Apparently their containers weren’t marked very clearly. She substituted corn starch for flour. The result resembled a truck tire. That’s ok … one of his little brothers, human garbage disposal machine that he was, ate all of them anyways. Eek!
I was having some people over on a chilly evening and decided to make mulled wine. This involved heating up some red wine with fruit slices and spices. I decided to make it in a crock pot so it would be ready when my guests arrived. I’m not sure why, but you cannot – I repeat can NOT – heat wine in a crockpot. It was vile.
We’ll my biggest disaster is detailed in the thread
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=168306
And it’s too painful to think about again.
Most of my mistakes include not paying attention such as grabbing Chili powder instead of Cinnamon for coffee cake. Grabbing comet instead of kraft parmesian for pasta, and grabbing a jar of Alfredo sauce instead of blue cheese for a salad. Another time while grilling the steak I asked my roomate to grab the Garlic powder. The idiot brought Garlic salt instead. The nastiest saltiest burgers you could ever imagine. Once when I was kid I was trying to make candy canes. It took me so long to figure out how to twist and shape the first one, the rest hardened. I had one Candy cane, and one eighteen inch stick of red candy, one of white, and eight inch diameter blobs of each
I love this thread! It’s had me laughing for the last 20 minutes.
OK, my story. Well, actually my mom’s story, but I have a supporting role.
My mom is an excellent cook, but sometimes I think she gets a little too ambitious. She’s also been playing on the Internet and downloading lots of recipes. This past Memorial Day weekend, she decided to try a recipe for chocolate babka from Martha Stewart’s Web site (our new neighbors were supposed to be moving in soon, and Mom wanted to give them some homebaked goodies).
Mistake number one: the recipe called for more than 2 pounds of very finely chopped chocolate. All we had was chocolate chips. Since it’s kind of hard to shred chips, Mom decided to melt them in the microwave and let them harden into one solid lump. Three bags of chocolate chips later, we got out the knives and the cutting board and started chopping. It turns out chocolate melts very fast when you’re trying to chop it up – and even faster when you try to shred it with a cheese grater, as my mom found out.
Mistake number two: the yeast wouldn’t foam. Or, rather, Mom wasn’t sure if the yeast was foamy enough when dissolved in the warm milk, because there were only a few bubbles. She sat the mixture over a pan of hot water, trying to get it to bubble some more, until she finally conceded it had enough bubbles 15 minutes later.
Mistake number three: failing to warm up properly. This recipe doubles an exercise in low-impact aerobics. After Mom rolled out the dough into three perfect 16-inch squares (I know this for a fact, because she made me get the tape measure), she had to dump the shredded chocolate on top, roll it up, pinch the ends, twist it six times, brush it with egg wash, layer one side with chocolate, flip the other end on top, pinch the ends, roll that whole mess two or three times and stuff it in the pan – and this is the abridged version! It took the two of us 20 minutes to decipher the instructions, and another 30 minutes to create the three loaves.
Oh, and did I mention there’s streusel? You can’t have chocolate babka without a streusel topping. At this point Mom realized she forgot to make the streusel. I just stood there, hanging over the counter, watching Mom giggle her insane little laugh of the thrice-damned as she crumbled ingredients (sugar? butter? Hell, I’d stopped caring threee hours earlier) into a bowl and smooshed them together into little blobs. Finally she sprinkled the streusel on top of the loaves and popped the pans into the oven.
Seven hours after the whole mess began, we had three inedible chocolate-swirled bricks sitting on our kitchen counter. Dad was brave enough to try a piece. He claimed the inside wasn’t bad, but I’ll have to take his word for it, seeing as all three loaves went straight into the garbage. Mom swears this recipe is the real reason behind the indictment.
A couple of years ago I was visiting a friend and we were bored. We wanted to do something different for a change, so we decided we’d make a cake. So we went to the store and picked out some cake mix and fancy colored icing to decorate the cake with. We wanted to do a layer cake and bought one mix of chocolate chip cake and one mix of the rainbow stuff. We brought it home and started mixing it all up.
My friend brings out her mom’s cake pans. I thought they looked pretty small and said so. She says no, they’re fine, they use them all the time. I’m a bit more baking savvy than her, so I said that they were probably meant for one mix, half in each pan. No, she insists her mom uses them all the time. I shrug and tell her I really didn’t think it would fit but if she wanted to try it, to go ahead. So we try and stuff these mixes into the pans. Lo and behold, the entire thing doesn’t fit. So we got out the cupcake tins and filled them with the remaining batter. I could smell disaster already. She wouldn’t hear of it.
We load the cakes into the oven, set the timer and wait. When it’s time, we take the cakes out of the oven. They look OK. It was already 11 pm and we wanted to get going on the icing because that was going to be the fun part. But you can’t ice a warm cake! So we stuck them in the freezer for about half an hour to cool them down enough to ice. When we brought them out, we were faced with the task of layering them. Shouldn’t be too hard. Take them out of the pans and put one on the other.
So, we started on one of the cakes. Knife around the side to loosen it, hold it over a plate and prestooo…oh. Hm. Looks like the inside is kind of raw. So we scoop out the goo. But now there’s a hole in the cake! It looks terrible. So we go ahead and put the other cake on top, it will cover the hole. Hey, it’s raw in the middle too! I knew the pans were meant for one mix. Scooped out the dough. Now we have a cake that looks like the grand canyon. It won’t be any fun to ice this monster, there’s no surface to decorate! Ah but didn’t we make cupcakes that turned out nicely? So we smoosh two cupcakes into the hole.
So now we have the ugliest cake I have ever seen. A giant doughy chocolate chip/rainbow layer cake with cupcakes squashed in the middle. We figure icing will cover up the monstrosity. We grab our cans of chocolate icing and go to work. It’s starting to look like an actual cake now. While waiting for the cakes to cool in the freezer we had been practicing making roses with the colored frosting. Once we’ve got the thing covered in chocolate, we go to town with our roses. Then we sign it. Now it’s a big brown blob with smaller pink and blue blobs all over it.
We didn’t know what to do with it so we just stuck it in the refrigerator in the basement and never looked at it again. I certainly didn’t want to eat it.
We have our cake saga documented with photographs. It’s the sorriest looking thing you’ve ever seen. I’m not sure what happened to it. We still laugh our heads off whenever we talk about our baking adventure. We’re going to try again next time I go to see her and this time we’ll only use one mix.
Actually, a lot of desserts have zucchini in them-chocolate cakes, and my grandmother makes a mock apple crisp with zucchini. It’s used to make them moist.
Then there is this thread.
My friend and I found this recipe for something called a Great Depression Cake. It called for cloves-only thing was, we couldn’t find ground cloves in her cupboard-only whole ones. No matter, we thought-they’ll just disolve.
Well, they didn’t. The cake, itself, was quite tasty-until you bit down on a chunk of clove. Then my friend’s mother revealed that she HAD crushed gloves in the cupboard-so why hadn’t we used them? :smack:
Okay, for your son that’s cool, but just make sure he understands that it’s only until the training wheels come off. If he doesn’t experiment (and make mistakes) then he’ll always just be following directions and never learning about the essence of cooking and creating.
And I bet I can make a very tasty meal with cloves, chicken breasts and cinnamon. In fact, a quick Google turns up Kota Kapama, chicken braised with cinnamon and cloves, which sounds pretty good. Maybe you’ve got a prodigy on your hands. Maybe he can whip something up for Floridope?
When I was a tiny thing, probably 3 or so, I decided to help my father with my mom’s birthday cake. He didn’t know this, mind you. But he had a pan full of chocolate cake batter sitting on the counter, while he waited for the oven to heat up. I covered it in pepper. I’m told my explanation was that I thought my mom liked peppermint, and pepper sounds kind of like that.
When I was 5, I was helping my mother make soup, and decided that if a little bit of parsley was good, a few handfulls would be better. She made me eat every bit of it. It took me a long time to not run and hide from parsley after that! 
My mother isn’t the best cook in the world, she’s not bad either really however I am the best cook in the family if I do say so myself. I once gave her my recipe for apple and dried cherry crumble, handwritten. A day or so later I get a call from my mom who says that she thinks she did something wrong but couldn’t figure out what it was. I asked if she followed the directions exactly, she said yes. I drove by later that day and took a look at her creation. It was… interesting… slightly damp and mushy with pockets of dry flour… flour it can be said fairly dominated the landscape of what should have been a bubbly heavenly fruit dish.
I had written 2/3 cups of flour.
She interpreted that to mean 2 to 3 CUPS of flour. ;>
MrWhatsit and I read in a Cook’s Illustrated magazine awhile back about how you can make your own taco shells by deep-frying corn tortillas. We tried it and it was really yummy, so now when we have tacos, that’s what we do.
So, a few weeks ago, we had tacos for dinner without incident, and afterward I thought I’d take young Whatsit Jr. out for a stroll. MrWhatsit told us to have a good time and he’d stay home and do some laundry.
Except first he thought he’d make himself up one last taco. He turned the heat back on the burner under the pan of hot oil…and then went back to the bedroom to sort laundry while the oil heated up. Yeah, you can see what’s coming.
15 minutes later, having totally forgotten about the oil, he is startled when the smoke detector goes off. He races back out to the kitchen, to discover 5-foot flames leaping out of the pot of oil, flames licking at the wooden cabinets over the stove, and the range hood is burning. Also there is a 2-foot layer of thick gray smoke throughout the entire apartment, hanging ominously from the ceiling.
MrWhatsit credits his Navy training with his quick thinking in grabbing the pot lid with a pair of tongs and clapping it on the pot to extinguish the flames. (If he’d taken the other route and gone out into the hallway to grab the fire extinguisher, I think the Whatsit clan would currently be living in a hotel while their apartment was renovated due to fire/smoke damage.) He then opened every window and door in the place and set up fans.
I came home to find him waiting for me in the stairwell – never a good sign. He says, to my worried face, “OK… the first thing you should know is… I’M OK!” Oh God, I think. I could actually smell the scent of burned plastic wafting down the stairs from our apartment.
Net damage: the cabinets are burned but still useable, the fan cover on the range hood totally melted and fell off but the fan still works, the smoke detector needs to be replaced, a wooden spoon burned totally to a crisp, the paint all burned off the range cover, the pot was like a nuclear meltdown, and of course there was horrible smoke damage on the top two feet of our entire apartment – which MrWhatsit, bless him, scrubbed off with a sponge and bucket over the next week or so.
I’m not sure that was so much a culinary disaster; more like a disaster, period. But I am pretty sure that taco was definitely not worth it.
Hehehe…are tacos gross if my mother makes them as sloppy joes instead? She and my sister don’t like spicy foods, so she just makes sloppy joes and puts them in taco shells. Still good, as far as I’m concerned.
Last year, my dad grilled some chicken, and didn’t leave it on long enough. It was PINK in the middle. I was so grossed out. And with my dad, if you say something, he’ll be offended.
Reading about your hubby’s taco experience, MsWhatsit, reminds me of an incident my sister was involved with.
We used to eat lots of tacos and always had tortillas in the house. One day she decided to make her own tortilla chips. Heating up some oil, she cooked her chips and went into the living room to chow. Several minutes later, my father notices a funky orange glow in the mirror that reflects the kitchen. Running in he finds the stove ablaze (from the grease) and the hot oil pan she used to make her tortilla chips with. We covered the pan and batted the flames.
It took hours to scrub the walls as clean as they would come. Burnt incense to hide the smell, but mom knew summat was up when she got home from work and walked in the house. As usual though she didn’t get in much trouble. :rolleyes:
This is hysterical, I was actually moved to call my mom and read some of these over the phone. Nothing like a great description of someone else’s stupidity to make ya feel all better about your own!
Ok, the boll weevil thing? Yeah, and I wasn’t even young or not wearing glasses, I just big fat didn’t know.
When I was young and newly married and poor, we got a lot of lovely family charity regarding the grocery bill. My mother would nicely say something like “These roasts were buy 1 get 1 free, but I’m out of freezer space” or Grandma would send over some homemade jam with the ‘made too much’ excuse.
My slightly odd Mother in law apparently looked on our household as a place to dump the ancient contents of her cupboards in order to make room to buy more stuff she would never use. I received a box of Jiffy baking mix and followed the recipe to make cupcakes for a friends birthday. I noticed the black speck looking things in the batter, but since we’d never used the pre-made baking mixes growing up, I just thought they were spices or whatever.
The smallest, flattest cupcake like things were then served, and naturally it was the last person to notice and identify the bugs and loudly exclaim about what everyone had just eaten. My friends must be a pretty squeamish bunch, although it was sorta funny seeing 3 different people vying for a spot at the commode to vomit in simultaneously.