Poll: Cooking disasters

[GayeC]

The post about "flaming baby carrots in the microwave" made me think again about a question I've been wanting to ask: What is your funniest and/or most irritating cooking disaster?

One of mine (and there are several to choose from!)involves the CL panettone recipe from Nov. or Dec. 1999. I had looked forward to making this recipe for weeks -- got the right pans, ordered special dried fruit from King Arthur, etc. On the day I had set aside to bake it, things went wrong from the outset -- the kids needed something from me every 5 minutes, they were in and out of the kitchen making messes, etc. I should have quit while I was ahead, as the process was doomed from the beginning. I forgot ingredients, added them in the wrong order, just about everything you could do wrong. The crowning injustice occurred when I had the dough kneading in the Kitchenaid and discovered I had forgotten to add the melted butter. Let me just say right now that you do not want to add melted butter to a big lump of dough in a rapidly moving Kitchenaid! Butter flew out of the bowl and through the air. It was unbelievable how far it went and how many places it landed. Despite this abject failure, I continued through the rising (it didn't) and baking stages. Needless to say, the panettone was inedible (although the KA fruit was still nice!). A sad situation at the time but now a cooking legend in my family!

[sneezles]

I know that with 21 years of marriage and cooking for years before that, that I should have many disaster stories! But I seem to have developed a mental block-guess they're all to painful to remember!

[BarrieCov]

Just had a major one recently! My mom and I were preparing food for my sister's bridal shower, and we were making a delicious-sounding recipe for Orzo with shallots, red onions and tomatoes. Well, we tried to multiply the recipe to feed about 50 people. Bad idea.

After I spend eons chopping all of the shallots and onions into dainty little pieces and sauteeing them, I added the broth and orzo. Something must have been wrong with the pots or maybe orzo does not like to be multiplied, because we ended up with a gluey, sticky mess that was burned on the bottom. We tried to salvage it by putting it in another pot, but the burned flavor had already permeated the entire dish. We ended up doing a quickie pasta salad, and my dad graciously scrubbed out both burned up pots.

My first disaster on this scale! http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/frown.gif

[Ohioan]

Oh boy, here we go again! http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/biggrin.gif Hey, if you want to read some real howlers from last year, take a look at the thread called "It's time to embarrass ourselves again," aka: http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/Forum1/HTML/000595.html

Read it and weep -- with laughter. Now I can hardly wait to read the blunders of the new guys on the block! http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/smile.gif

Cheers,
Phoebe

[SusieO]

When my husband and I were first dating, I wanted to make him a sweet potato pie (his favorite) for his birthday since he doesn't care for cake. I found a recipe for sweet potato meringue pie which called for baking the filling in the pie shell, then adding the meringue on top. I made the filling, poured it into a prepared frozen pie crust (the kind in the aluminum pan) and put it in the oven. When I took it out of the oven, the pan buckled, I dropped it, and the pie filling went everywhere, but mostly on the oven door. So I scraped the filling off of the oven door, baked the other crust (you know how they come in twos) put the filling in the second crust, and added the meringue. There was a little less sweet potato filling than there should have been, but no one thought anything of it.

[mandarin2j]

Preparing fondue for a house party. I didn't have a double boiler, so I used a metal mixing bowl sitting in a larger pan. The bowl spun with every stir, so the cheese melted VERY unevenly. But that wasn't the worst of it. My favorite part was when I tried (operative word: tried) to remove the bowl from the pan of water. I used a pair of pliers (the ultimate kitchen gadget in my early apartment life!). I lost my grip, the bowl tilted, and cheese goo spilled all over the surface of my stove. http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/eek.gif All this, and of course, being me, I was running late. The first guest arrived as I was just beginning to clean up. Quel mess!

[hlao23]

I have two.

One year we rented a house that included a large property with lots of fruit trees and berry bushes. I decided that I should learn to make pies. I made a gooseberry pie to take to my Grandparent's house for Sunday dinner (the whole family comes over on Sundays). I must not have mixed the filling well enough. Just under the top crust was a half-inch thick, rock-hard layer of sugar. We tried to eat the pie without the top crust but the gooseberries were very sour. http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/frown.gif Oh, well, my family doesn't trust me anyway - they're afraid I might try to slip them something that's healthy.

Then, there's the first time I cooked greens - spinich, I think. I didn't realize how thoroughly it needed to be rinsed. We had several friends over for dinner that nite and I was not too happy when I tasted the greens and realized that they had an interesting crunch. No one else seemed to notice. The recipe included sesame seeds so maybe everyone thought the texture was normal.

[Luiza]

I was once trying to caramelize some onions while chopping something in the food processor. After a while of supervising both, I notice a funny smell, and I realize to my horror that I was stirring the onions with the plastic spatula for the food processor. I had melted plastic all over the onions, and the stuff in the food processor didn't fare much better. And from the look of the spatula, I was at it for quite a while, as nothing of the protruding part was left. And it was a big spatula! I was so embarrassed, and made a deal with myself to never cook past midnight again.

And now comes the incident my DB remembers the best. We just moved in together, and I had to start cooking for two. As the heavy aluminum pan I was using to cook for myself was not big enough, I started cooking one of my regular recipes (don't even remember what) in a thin-bottomed stockpot. Then I went to do something else, remembering that the oil takes a long time to warm up. Next thing I know, there is heavy smoke and flames shooting up to the ceiling. I put I lid on the pot and the flames stopped, but the oil-painted walls were covered with grease and ashes. It took my DB three days to clean it (and we had a kitchen that could barely fit half a person). The catch was that the ceiling was very tall and you had to scrub while precariously perched on a ladder. And I couldn't help with this because I'm afraid of heights. Now I never leave unsupervised oil heating on the stove, that's for sure. http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/redface.gif

Don, that was some roommate! I laughed so hard. Of course, I would have laughed a great deal less if he was _my_ roommate... http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/smile.gif

Luiza

[Don]

Junietoo, Your story about beer reminded me of another incident with my stepfather. He is so proud of being Italian that he will drink rot-gut if it has an Italian label on the bottle. Well, his mother had some grapes growing on a vine in the backyard, and he asked her if he could have them to make "wine". She agreed, so he brought the grapes home, smashed them up a bit, added sugar, put the mix in a huge green glass jug, and promptly screwed the lid on tight. About a month or so later, I returned home from school and was watching TV when I heard an explosion down in the basement. It scared me so badly that I called my mother at work and told her the house had been firebombed! She eventually talked me into going downstairs to see what had happened. Well, let me tell you, there was sweetened grape juice from one end of the basement to the other. (It had been a finished basement.) What's worse, there were large chunks of thick green glass embedded in all of the walls. If someone had been in the basement when the explosion occurred, they would have died. Needless to say, Italian or not, my mother forbade my stepfather to ever try to make wine again.

[Jessica]

I've recounted a few already on this site, but just last night I went to bake a birthday cake for a friend. The phone rang, and when the timer went off I checked the cake and then went back to the phone. I forgot to reset the timer and burned the whole thing.
Undaunted, I made it all over again and mentally chided myself for wasting the ingredients.

[LaraW]

I have had too many cooking disasters to remember them all, but I can think of one big one.

Last Thanksgiving we were going to my in-law's for dinner. I was to bring a salad for about 10 people. Easy enough, except that I chose that morning to also make bread with yeast that was dead (didn't know it was dead until bread didn't rise and had to throw it out) AND make a pie (not very good at making pie crust last year.) I also had not read the recipe thoroughly enough to know that the filling required cooking before going into the crust. It was about 20 minutes from when we had to leave and I was still washing the greens. I tried rolling them in a towel to make them dry quickly, and ended up with greens all over the floor. I think we just had greens in our salad that year.

[Roo]

I think I've forgotten more cooking disasters than I remember, but I have 2 really good ones that pop into my head.

DH got a food dehydrator for Christmas. (The kind you use in the microwave.) I decided to use it for the first (and last) time to make bananna chips. On my first try I burned the bannanas. On my second try I lowered the heat, and burned the bannanas. On the third try I lowered the heat, and burned the banannas. (Seeing a pattern?) On the fourth try I lowered the heat put the bannanas in the microwave and walked out of the kitchen for a minute. When I returned, much to my suprise I had flames shooting out of the microwave.

My other cooking disaster involved my discovery of the reason behind the manufacturer's warning to unplug the hand mixer while inserting the beaters! Need I say any more?

[Don]

My favorite cooking disaster came from my college days. I had a roommate who couldn't tell a stove from refrigerator. He went to make himself a grilled cheese sandwich with one of those old sandwich grill machines with the heating element on the top that you pull down (similar to a Foreman grill, but with no heat on the bottom). About two minutes after he plugged in the "sandwich maker" something smelled funny. He had actually plugged in the fryer and the plastic cover had melted into the oil. Then, a couple of minutes after I plugged in the sandwich maker, I smelled something burning again. Apparently, my roommate had never made a grilled cheese sandwich before, because he put two pieces of bread side-by-side in the machine, each topped with a slice of cheese, and then the heating element directly on the cheese. He told me that he thought you had to "grill the cheese". What a mess. But he wasn't done. Later that same day, he decided to make some frozen fish sticks for lunch. All of the appliances in the house were electric, so you could imagine my surprise when I walked by the stove and saw flames shooting out. Somehow, he had managed to knock a fish stick off the pan and through two oven grates only to have it land directly on the electric heating element where it promptly caught fire. Needless to say, he was never allowed in the kitchen again.

[Gail]

Back when I was in my teens, a friend and I used to bake Christmas cookies together. This particular year, we decided to make Mexican Wedding Cakes. Perusing the recipe, I failed to note that the quantity of sugar given included the portion to be used to coat the finished product. So, I dumped the entire portion into the batter.

After a while in the oven, the cookies began to smell a bit odd. Imagine our surprise when we went to check and found a sheetful of smoking puddles of caramelized sugar! Once we'd gotten over the initial shock, we nearly laughed ourselves silly.

[junietoo]

Can I mention a DH incident? (not that I don't have my own, but, like Sneezles, I've filed them away and can't remember the file name.)

He was making beer (an all-the-time event at our house) for a Christmas holiday party. As he was preparing to bottle it, he set the 5-gallon bucket partially off the counter and, you guessed it, it fell not just on the hardwood floor, but over onto the counter splashing up the walls, cupboards, windows, stove, under and over the refrigerator and even on the ceiling. As he was reaching to catch the falling bucket, he dropped the coffee pot that was full of coffee. I was standing just on the other side of the kitchen island and watched it all unfold. It was surreal. Thankfully, no one was hurt. But it was the biggest mess we have ever encountered in 27 years of marriage.

Barbara

[emilycat]

My biggest culinary mishap was probably the summer after my sophomore year of college...I was heating some tomato sauce in a Pyrex bowl...yeah, I didn't know that you aren't supposed to put those things directly on the burner. It didn't take long for my bowl to explode, sending shards everywhere. I call my mom now anytime I'm heating something questionable. http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/smile.gif

[KimK]

My funniest disaster was when I was cooking chicken a la king and peppermint bark side by side on my stove top. When it came time to add a large amount of minced garlic (out of a jar) to the chicken a la king, I accidentally added it to the peppermint bark. Since my candy was pretty far along in the very long cooking process, I finished it up. It tasted very strongly of garlic, that's for sure. I took it to work and it was gone within an hour. Coworkers will eat anything!!

[emilycat]

Kim

Your story's a riot! I can't believe they ate it...was it any good?

[Anne]

I can't believe I missed the thread on this last summer - what a hoot! One of my 'better' disasters involved making shrimp ettoufe (sp?). This was our traditional New Year's Eve dinner for several years. One year I could not find the peanut oil for making the roux so used olive oil. Olive oil is not a good high temp cooking oil and the smoke was very impresive. We opened all the windows and my DH got the coleman stove set up on the front porch so I could finish outside. The meal still came out great. We were talking with our neighbors the next day and they had been ready to call the fire department because of all the smoke comming out our windows until they saw me cooking on the porch. They asked what the mess was all about and my DH simply responded that it was just me cooking.

[michelern]

One of my disasters which actually seems mild after reading what everyone else has written, would be when I was trying to impress my in-laws (had only been married a couple of months at the time) by cooking breakfast rolls from a recipe in CL believe it or not http://www.cookinglight.com/bbs/smile.gif Anyway, the recipe called for orange and lemon peel using a zester- which to a new cook is foreign. I decided to just cut up the peel...Afterall, who needs a zester when you can do it by hand, right???? HA!!! The rolls which would have been quite tasty were the most bitter things I have EVER eaten. Haven't gotten up enough nerve to try to cook to much for them since!!!

[scnewton]

My embarrassing moment came when I baked my first cake many years ago. It was for my father's birthday so I wanted everything to be perfect.

When it came time to put the cake batter in the cake pans, I realized all I had were pie pans. In my youth and naivete, I thought to myself, "Hmmm. Cake pans, pie pans... it's all the same."

After baking, I put the two layers together, bottoms in the middle, and realized that cake pans and pie pans are not the same thing! I had a cake with inverted sides.

My dad had a good laugh when he saw my cake and we even named it the "pike"- a cross between a pie and a cake.

[KimK]

emilycat -

The peppermint bark was actually fairly good - albeit with a definite garlic undertone and major aftertaste! I even ate a little myself.

The thing that burns me the most is that this stuff is very tricky to make correctly - it hardly ever works. But when it does, it is sooooo good. Melts in your mouth. I think I've probably made it at least 20 times over the past 5 years, and it's only worked perfectly twice -the garlic incident being one of them!

[tovie]

Let's see, the worst are the ones other people see (g) I'm usually a pretty decent baker and my friends enjoy all the goodies I make and share. I was on a muffin kick and had turned out some pretty good results from various recipes when I ran across a recipe for pear muffins. The recipe called for dicing the pears and mixing them with the sugar and spices and then adding them to the batter, which contained no sugar. Well, I got the batter all mixed and went to dice the pears only to discover that they were rotten. I was really mad as I'd only bought them a couple days before. I went dashing off to the store to buy more, came home, diced them, stirred them into the batter and baked the muffins. I was going out to dinner that night and I had just removed them from the oven when my ride showed. So I tossed several in a container for her and ran out the door.

Dinner over, I was back home and wanted to see what the muffins tasted like. Ugghh! They were horrible. In my haste to finish up I had forgotten to toss the pears with the sugar before adding them to the batter. And then I had to call my friend and explain to her why she really didn't want to eat them (g)

Tovie

[Kelli Kerrigan]

How about a non-cooking disaster?? Once while preparing a lovely huge meal for a new boyfriend, (you know, impress through the stomach) which turned out with the exception that I had forgotten to BOIL the shrimp that I had so proudly arranged on a nice platter.
I even took one, peeled it, and almost DIED when I started chewing! He looked at me and said "I was waiting to see what you were going to do with those things." Ever try to spit something out daintly while gasping air and trying to recover? Luckily I boiled the water (that was in the pot waiting) and he ate the cooked and chilled shrimp cocktail for dessert. Egads!

[GayeC]

Thank you for sharing these disasters! They are hilarious. I have to say that my melted butter slung around the kitchen pales in comparison to 5 gal. of spilled beer and exploding homemade wine!

[gobluem82]

My disaster is from college as well. The restaurant I worked for at the time gave everyone turkeys for Christmas (cheaper than a bonus, I guess), so we decided to have a bunch of people over for an old-fashioned turkey dinner. Not too many college students have all of the proper turkey equipment, and I was no exception. So instead of the metal skewers you use to close the turkey up, I used the closest thing I had, which were straight pins. I carefully counted them when I put them in, but when it was time to carve the turkey, you guessed it--one was missing. So I had to announce to my guests that there may be a straight pin in their turkey, so they should cut and chew VERY CAREFULLY! Luckily, as we were serving the turkey, we found the missing pin. I'm happy to say I now have the metal skewers!

[AGC]

This is actually a frightening confession that few people know about. My husband and I were quite overwhelmed when our 1st son was a newborn. The pediatrician advised us to boil all nipples before (OUCH! just kidding!) putting them on the bottles of formula for my son to drink. We both worked full time and this was a tedious process which we quickened often by cramming as many nipples in a pot as possible. Unbeknownst to me, my husband had just put a pot of them on to boil when he suggested we run over to Wendy's drive-thru for dinner. We had just placed our order when he said "DRIVE HOME, NOW!". He had just remembered the boiling nipples. By the time we got home, all smoke detectors were screaming and the fire dept. had been called. Two huge trucks and a police officer soon showed up at our tiny house which was filled with thick smoke. The smelly silicone nipples had burned through the pot, through the stove burner, and the heat had broken all glass on back of stove, plus the light bulb in the range hood above! An oily thick ashy smut covered all ceilings and walls throughout the entire house. We cleaned some, painted over some. Anyway the firemen were so nice. They said we had been seconds from losing our house. After hearing this story, I think my mom seriously considered coming to take our son away (only briefly). And you may be thinking, are these people 17 yrs. old? No! 29 and 36!!!Just mentally and phys. exhausted. That was 5 yrs. ago and we have managed one more baby and a fair degree of safety since...With shame,-amy