You most tragic culinary tale

In My Humble Opinion
1

I will start. When I was a young buck, I worked as a prep-cook in one of those groovy little café/deli type restaurants (City Market in Burlington, VT for those of you watching from home). One of the things that I prepped was salsa (from scratch).

The recipe called for something like 2 cups of green chilies (I forget the precise amount). As fate would have it, we were out. In my foolish ignorance, and youthful zeal I substituted habaneros :eek: . Hell, I didn’t know any better!

Well, naturally one samples the salsa onc one has finished making it (these were 5 gallon job lots BTW). I don’t think that I can describe the lingering and surprising pain.

It gets better though. Some time later, having downgraded from a state of “just fucking kill me now” to mere agony, I had to go to the restroom. Did I wear gloves when chopping the habaneros? Why no. Is getting that stuff on your wang any fun? Actually, as it turns out, it really sucks. Double :eek:

Talk about getting it coming and going.

2

<shudder> I feel the need to say this every time these stories come up. Olive Oil. Olive Oil will dissolve the burning sensation on your pretty pink bits when you’ve forgotten to wear gloves while chopping peppers. Wash, wash, wash with soap!

3

I once baked a beautiful lemon Bundt cake for my brother’s birthday. When we cut into it, we found that there was a big cockroach baked inside. I swear I hadn’t noticed the roach in the cake batter. My brother wasn’t too eager to eat my cooking after that.

4

Because I haven’t figured out how to link to a single post (hint hint, oh wiser Dopers)…

Go to post 50 of this thread.

It’s up there with Cervaise’s rant against telemarketers and Scylla’s Horror of Blimps.

5

I put the marshmallow in the cocoa before microwaving in 7th grade Home Ec. I was caught before it exploded.

I also once left out the flour when I was trying to be ‘creative’ and put chocolate chips in peanut butter cookies.

6

I was making a roasting pan full of cabbage rolls at a group home, back in the '70s. Spent all day on it, making dozens of them. They were about half an hour from being done. So I checked on them, opening the oven door and sliding out the rack, taking off the lid to look. They could have used a bit of water. So I’m four steps away at the sink when I hear “sli-i-i-i-i-de, CRASH!” Yep, all of the cabbage rolls on the floor. And all the juices and tomato sauce that was in with them.

We had hot dogs.

7

Click on the #50 that appears next to the exclamation mark on the top of the post.
My worst experience was making bread pudding. I ended up with yellow water.

8

#50 that should say.

9

That simple, huh?

Thanks!

10

This is the story of how I managed to screw up ramen.

I was in college. One night, I got to feeling a little bit munchy. What kind of food did I have? Ramen, of course! Now, ordinarily, I made my ramen in my little hot pot, which worked beautifully. Put your noodles in, add some water, turn it on, and in a few minutes, dinner is served. Put the noodles in a bowl with a little bit of water, add your flavor packet, and you’re good to go. But I didn’t have my hot pot with me. I don’t remember why - I think I left it at home once or something - but there was no hot pot. But I wasn’t worried - after all, dorms have kitchens, and kitchens have microwaves, and you can cook anything in a microwave. So I trotted down the stairs (no elevators) with my bowl and my ramen, confident that I would soon have a delicious meal.

Except the bowl was kind of shallower than I thought, and the ramen a little wider, and I couldn’t seem to get water to cover it for very long. But hey, no problem - the bottom noodles would soon soften in the hot water, and then I could push all the noodles under, and then everything would cook, and there would be great rejoicing. So I put the ramen in for two minutes (hey, microwaves cook things fast!) then popped it out and tried to stir. Hard as a rock. So I gave it another minute. Still hard, and the noodles weren’t sinking. Tried breaking it up with my fork. That didn’t work so good. In we go for another two minutes.

You might ask yourself at this point - “Self, why didn’t look!ninjas just flip the ramen over so that both sides could have equal time under water?” Um… Well, I…

Anyway, I probably spent a good fifteen minutes in the dorm room kitchen, microwaving and stirring, microwaving and stirring. What I wound up with was both soggy and crispy at the same time, in a strange, starchy, almost thick kind of broth. It was not at all the ramen I had longed for. So I threw it all away and went back upstairs to see if I had any popcorn instead.

And that’s the story of how I managed to screw up ramen.

11

I made cookies for the Latin club bake sale on Tuesday. They were little sugar wafer things, and they were really good. But they were ugly. I don’t know what happened. The first batch spread out, so I ended up with one giant pan-sized cookie that I had to break into pieces. The next batch I tried to make them smaller, but they didn’t spread out at all, so I ended up with small lumps. I took them to the bake sale anyway. No one bought them, so I took them all back. I didn’t want to take them all home, though, so I just started giving them away for free…including some to the people who had refused to buy them. Next time, I bet people will buy my ugly cookies, because they were delicious.

12

Butter cookies.

Two small children busily mixing things up.

Two small brown bottles in the cupboard when the time comes to dump the vanilla extract in.

We had already dumped the prescribed tablespoonful in when I sniffed. “Heeey… that doesn’t smell like vanilla.”

Closer inspection of the brown bottle led to the revelation that the contents were

GARLIC EXTRACT.

And penis ensued. “Let’s scoop it out and put the vanilla in! Maybe people won’t notice the taste…”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Even the stomach on legs, formally known as our beagle, gave the results a fishy look.

13

One night, one of many nights, when the sound of the chirping smoke alarm sent my Dear Hubby scurrying into the kitchen asking, Dinner ready? I decide to make an effort for change. I removed the batteries.
I still seem to set the nachos on fire (I stack them too high, I think), but at least the neighbors don’t know about it.

14

I was feeling experimental, and had picked up a gourmet food magazine. I decided to make Creamy Asparagus Soup with Lemon Dumplings. Took about 3 hours in total, but I tasted some of the soup while I was cooking it, and knew it would be well worth it.

The instructions said that you were supposed to (after cooking it, of course), run the soup in batches through a food processor and then the sieve, returning it to the pan to cook a bit more. What it really ought to have said is to run it in very very small batches through the food processor. I filled the blender with soup, turned it on, and discovered that asparagus, in it’s liquid form, is not a vegetable to be trifled with. There was some kind of explosion in there, and then there was hot hot hot everywhere, and I was frantically jabbing at the stop button. I then put about half that much in, and it did it again. Only this time, because the soup had more space to accelerate in, it went even farther. I would conservatively estimate that about 20-25% of the surface area of the kitchen, including me. It got on my glasses and in my hair, and all over the floor. It looked like Slimer from Ghostbusters had had a sudden and disastrous personal accident.

And there was only enough soup left for about three bowls :smack:

15

This is what happens when you leave home without learning how to even boil water first.

16

Many years ago, whilst in college, two of my brothers and I decided to have a little barbecue so one brother goes up to the roof of the apartment building to fire up the hibachi-he can be trusted with fire. Apparently the other brother can’t at this point in time. We’d left him in the kitchen heating up a wok of oil with which to make homemade french fries. I never thought to ask him if he’d ever deep-fried before. When brother #1 and I return to the apartment there are billows of oily smoke coming from the vicinity of the kitchen. We rush in, fortunately the wok hasn’t actually caught fire yet, and brother #1 grabs it off the stove and puts in in the sink. To this day I don’t know what compelled him to do the next thing which was turn on the faucet. As soon as the water hit the oil there was a ginormous explosion. Everything, I mean everything, every surface, in the kitchen was covered with a fine layer of oil. It took hours to clean up. And for our eyes to stop stinging from the awful smoke.

17

:eek:

18

Over Twenty years gone by now. The Mrs. and I caught, cooked and cleaned nearly 12 dozen blue crabs. I picked and saved a bunch of meat to make crab cakes. Followed a family recipe, but mistakenly used Baking Soda instead of Baking Powder.

The damn things were huge, beautifully golden-brown, brimming with backfin chunks of meat, and tasted like they were seasoned not with Old Bay Spice, but with Alka-Seltzer tablets! :eek: :smack: :frowning: :mad:

19

:smiley: I lack the wit to come up with a really-good wisecrack here, but I just wanted to point that out.

Must have been some awful cookies, though. Garlic and penis butter cookies?

20

There was the romantic Christmas Eve Dinner featuring Vulcanized Duck, or the bread pudding without eggs, or the Thanksgiving with deceased yeast rolls, but my favorite culinary disaster wasn’t my own, it was my mom’s. I called up my parents to say happy Thanksgiving a couple years ago, and while speaking to my father, he interrupted with “Oops, I’ll call you back. The turkey’s on fire and I have to help your mother put it out.” Click.

Yup, mom’s cooking was why my family actually preferred mine.