Cooking Fail

charcoalandblush

lovegood90 said:

My first time making mac and cheese from scratch was also my first time making a roux. I had never heard that you had to wait for the raw flour to cook out a bit with the butter before adding milk. So the finished product tasted like this gross, grainy paste.

The first time I tried to make a roux, I used skim milk. Oops. It was horrible.

ginnybinny17

I came home drunk one night and decided to make spaghetti.  I boiled water and put the noodles in the pot, and then went into the living room to chill on the couch til it was ready.

 

Fell asleep and woke up around 5 am to the fire alarm blaring, a house full of smoke, and a pot of "spaghetti" with no water.  The noodles had blackened and were somehow chemically fused to the pot.

teddygirl9

When I first started to cook, I really wanted to make a lasagna. But all we had was meat substitute, so that was fine, I used that. (it was ground up). And then when it came time to top it with cheese, we only had those kraft slices of processed nastiness. So I just put that on top.

It was disgusting. Like, the tofu meat didn't do something properly, and the kraft cheese did a whole lotta something else. It went fully into the garbage =(

I'm a pretty good cook now, but I still havent made a meat lasagna since.

dolewhipper

teddygirl9 said:

When I first started to cook, I really wanted to make a lasagna. But all we had was meat substitute, so that was fine, I used that. (it was ground up). And then when it came time to top it with cheese, we only had those kraft slices of processed nastiness. So I just put that on top.

It was disgusting. Like, the tofu meat didn't do something properly, and the kraft cheese did a whole lotta something else. It went fully into the garbage =(

I'm a pretty good cook now, but I still havent made a meat lasagna since.

When I was still eating wheat, this was my favorite "lasagna" recipe. I still make it for functions even though I'm not supposed to eat it myself

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/lasagna-rolls-recipe.html

teddygirl9

dolewhipper said:

teddygirl9 said:

When I first started to cook, I really wanted to make a lasagna. But all we had was meat substitute, so that was fine, I used that. (it was ground up). And then when it came time to top it with cheese, we only had those kraft slices of processed nastiness. So I just put that on top.

It was disgusting. Like, the tofu meat didn't do something properly, and the kraft cheese did a whole lotta something else. It went fully into the garbage =(

I'm a pretty good cook now, but I still havent made a meat lasagna since.

When I was still eating wheat, this was my favorite "lasagna" recipe. I still make it for functions even though I'm not supposed to eat it myself

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/lasagna-rolls-recipe.html

That does sound good! I remember at a work function someone brought mini lasagna rolls as their appy, and they were really tasty. I like it for portion control haha.

NowIamMrsKlein

FI and I cook a new recipe every Sunday as part of date night. We've made some really amazing dishes, had a few misses, but nothing was quite the disaster that we had the first time cooking scallops.

The recipe called for bring the oil up on high heat and doing a quick sear on each side. We had the scallops  on a cutting board beside the stove, and we anxiously started heating up the oil. FI realizes that he forgot to season the scallops so turns his attention away from the oil and onto the scallops. THANK GOD i was still paying attention and noticed the oil getting a little dark in one corner of the pan. I reach over and flick off the burner, and FI goes 'Oh, I guess we should take that off the heat and start again'

Picks UP the pan and WHOOSH.Flames. Everywhere. So he's standing in the middle of the kitchen holding this flaming pan.

Thankfully the lid was on the counter so I was able to drop the lid onto the flaming pan, and then open the back door, so FI could put the pan in the snow.

Our house reeked something aweful for a day or two.

hellosweetie1015

So... I've been survival cooking since I was, like, 8. My grandmother taught me how to make sawmill gravy at 9. So, by 18, I had known how to successfully make gravy for half my life.

I'm a freshman in college. I had a really fucking shitty first semester, and I'm homesick as all hell. It's finals week in December, but I'm essentially done - I have a cakewalk on something like the last day of exams, two days from now. And damnit, I want something homey. Biscuits and gravy sounds like the best plan. 

Well, I get my biscuits mixed up and into the oven and I start on the gravy. My gravy turns out really thick, like half-dried glue. So I put more liquid in it. Doesn't help. It just turns into suspended blobs of gloop. 

So I'm sad, but I can salvage it - I'll eat biscuits with syrup, and it will be okay. So I pull my biscuits out of the oven. 

THEY ARE HOCKEY PUCKS. Like, they're biscuit-colored, but they are hard as rocks. To this day I have no idea what I did.

I called my mother in absolute hysteric tears, and within two hours my dad was there to take me home for the two days between then and my last final.

OliveOilsMom

ginnybinny17 said:

I came home drunk one night and decided to make spaghetti.  I boiled water and put the noodles in the pot, and then went into the living room to chill on the couch til it was ready.

 

Fell asleep and woke up around 5 am to the fire alarm blaring, a house full of smoke, and a pot of "spaghetti" with no water.  The noodles had blackened and were somehow chemically fused to the pot.

One of my roommates in my on campus apartment did this.  Except she left the boiling water on the stove with the spaghetti in it and made a phone call in the bedroom.  She shut the door behind her.  She was alone at the time.  So eventually the fire alarm goes off and she didn't hear it!  She just kept chatting away.  Next thing she knows is that a police officer is in her bedroom and there is a loud blaring noise!

The fire alarm went off and its hard wired, so the cops responded.  They entered the apartment because no one answered the door.  To this day, I have no idea how she didn't hear the fire alarm.  They were so loud!  She never cooked another thing the whole year!

sophhabobopha

Just last week I attempted a no flour cake. It boiled and spilled all over my oven.

esstee33

I just remembered my favorite cooking fail, which isn't even mine, but my little sister's. She was pretty young, at least young enough that it was one of her first experiences making cookies by herself and she misread the recipe so instead of adding 1/4 tsp of salt to her peanut butter cookies, she added 1/4 CUP of salt. Grossest fucking cookies ever. You could see the salt content just by looking at them. 

bethsmiles

A few years ago for Thanksgiving I decided to make a pumpkin pie cheesecake. The recipe looked really good and I was so excited. I made it the night before but made the mistake of multi-tasking while baking it (I was helping SO's brother set up a Match.com profile). So I forgot the sugar. It was so, so gross. And SO's family is so polite so they were all trying to choke it down. I told them I was not at all offended if they didn't want to eat it, I knew it wasn't good!

The next morning SO's dad put it in a blender with some sugar and made little parfaits out of it that were actually pretty good though so it didn't all go to waste!

hellosweetie1015

My brother AND my sister have messed up cakes.

My brother flipped the oil and water ratio once in my apartment. It made the biggest, blobbiest, grossest looking cake ever, and it took me three months to get the ick it left out of the bottom of my oven.

My sister was using my dry measuring cups, which have lines inside in case you need, like, 1/2 cup of something liquid? I dunno, maybe they're seal lines, they're not great. She needed to measure out a cup of buttermilk, and she filled the 1 cup measure to that seal line thinking it was the 1 cup mark. They were inedibly dry. She made fantastic icing to go on them though, so I'm not sure how she did it.

Cakes are easy for me. There is no winging it with their main ingredients, so I can be precise, which is my strongest point in cooking.

jenna8984

I love salt and I've never turned away anything for being too salty so I'd probably eat half of these fuck ups!

wandajune6

I regularly make things that are mediocre but not technically failures. Basically, recipes that no one in our household likes.

My biggest failure in memory was a beautiful chocolate orange cake using a Nigella Lawson recipe. Before her cookbooks were available for the US market, I found a used copy of an old British cookbook and calculated measurements. I spent a fortune (for me at the time) tracking down a good quality orange marmalade and chocolate. It was looking like it would be the greatest thing I ever baked- and I had friends coming over that night for dinner who would share in my great accomplishment. But I missed or messed up one little calculation: the size of the spring-form pan. It ended up oozing all over my oven and being an inedible mess that was horrible to clean up.

I've got a foodie crush on Nigella. The first time DH had dinner at my place I made her pork chops with garlicky tomato and spinach salad recipe. I've been making it for years and have never screwed it up. I somehow managed to fry up pork chops and leave them raw on the inside. I was so flustered that I also doubled the garlic in the salad. It was awful. We picked at dinner then went out for ice cream.

huskypuppy14

FeeleyToBe said:

jenna8984 said:

I hate when that happens and you have to waste/ throw out good meat!
God I have too many to even tell. In high school there was all those commercials about how easy Mac was so easy and anyone could do it. Yup I fucking burnt it. Put it in the microwave with no water.

We tried a crock pot recipe that was pork cops and red wine. The wine didn't cook off so it was like eating straight wine soup with onion dip mix stirred in- so nasty!

That time I tried to fry shrimp. Didn't know oil was flammable (I know I'm an idiot) so I put it on high with a lid trying to get a boil going. Second I removed the lid a fireball erupted. Almost burnt my apartment down and had a heart attack simultaneously.

I know someone who screwed up mac n cheese too. Cooked the noodles but didn't drain the water before adding the cheese from the squeeze pouch.

Do we know the same person? She was my roommate at the time and me and my other roommate tried to tell her, but she didn't listen. Ugh, her now husband ate it anyway.

afox007

jenna8984 said:

I love salt and I've never turned away anything for being too salty so I'd probably eat half of these fuck ups!

My uncle is the same way. He ate almost the entire batch of my dad's chicken marsala and thought it was great. He came home after I had fed everyone something edible so he didn't even realize there was anything wrong with dinner.

afox007

I just remembered one of my first kitchen fuck ups. My grandma taught me to cook as soon as I could read. She showed me the basics and then would set out the recipe and all the ingredients and leave me to it. 

I was making ginger snaps one day and she had set out the molasses and the vanilla extract. The vanilla extract was a huge costco bottle, so in my head that was clearly the molasses. I didn't bother reading the label and since I had never seen molasses before didn't know it was the wrong consistency.

I wound up putting half a cup of vanilla and a tsp of molasses in the cookies. They were awful, but I was 6 so I still choked them down because, sugar! 

ElcaB

When H & I were dating, we decided to start experimenting in the kitchen together. Neither one of us had ever done much serious cooking, so we were pretty new at it. 

For our first meal, we made baked chicken parm. Easy enough, right? What we didn't know was the difference between a CLOVE of garlic and a HEAD of garlic. The recipe called for three cloves of garlic, so we used three heads of garlic. 

The food turned out pretty good, minus the fact that it was so freaking garlicky. If vampires do exist and are indeed repelled by garlic, I think we wiped them off the face of the planet with our chicken parm. We smelled like garlic for a week. 

KnotAlwaysRight

FI is an experimental cook, and his train of thought sometimes seems to be, "well, I like X, and I like Y, so obviously I would like XY." One of the least successful results of this was the last time he made pasta. I had thought we were out of tomato sauce, but when he insisted that he wanted to cook pasta, I just assumed I'd been mistaken. You know what is not a good sub for pasta sauce? Salsa + ketchup, mixed and heated up.

One of my worst ones was a college fail. A roommate and I decided to host a dinner party and we were making what was supposed to be some kind of roux-based sauce. Not really understanding how the process worked, we ended up trying to thicken the sauce with basically handfuls of raw flour, then tried to cover up the horrible taste with tons of cheese. Luckily the process took us so long that everyone was plastered by the time dinner was served and nobody could tell how awful it must have been.

lovesclimbing

I haven't had many cooking fails.  No big ones stand out. I'm a pretty decent cook and I can usually salvage most stuff.

The banana bread I made tonight feels like a fail though.  My mom always put brown sugar on top of the banana bread, and I always have too.  But tonight I FORGOT the brown sugar, so now it doesn't look right and I'm sure it won't taste quite right.

WHYYY?

Heffalump

esstee33 said:

I just remembered my favorite cooking fail, which isn't even mine, but my little sister's. She was pretty young, at least young enough that it was one of her first experiences making cookies by herself and she misread the recipe so instead of adding 1/4 tsp of salt to her peanut butter cookies, she added 1/4 CUP of salt. Grossest fucking cookies ever. You could see the salt content just by looking at them. 

My now-H did that back when we were dating, except he was making penne a la vodka and used 1/4 c. of red pepper flakes instead of 1/4 tsp.  I have a higher spice tolerance than he does, but I couldn't eat it:  it was like the pasta equivalent of chicken vindaloo.  DH tried, and I literally saw his entire face break into a sweat.  He eventually gave up.

My fails are pretty run of the mill, but my uncle is infamous for his Christmas roast fail.  Christmas Eve, and they always did a big thing for Christmas Eve--family, friends, neighbors, mailman, you name it.  One year, three of their four kids were in the Christmas pageant, and my aunt had to run them over to the church.  There was a roast in the oven, and my aunt told my uncle when he needed to take it out, as she wouldn't be back in time.  My uncle is a bit of a know-it-all but knows nothing about cooking, so he decided he was the smartest person in the world, and he would just set the oven timer.  Apparently he thought it was like a microwave, where when the time is up, it just stops cooking and sits there, waiting for you.  And for good measure, he turned up the heat so it would cook faster. 

He turned up the oven temp, set the timer, took a shower, got dressed, puttered around, decided to run to the store for a couple of things, then hit the liquor store on the way home to stock up for that night.  He and my aunt arrived home at the same time to find the entire downstairs filled with smoke.  He charred that roast down to a large-ish briquette.  Guests started arriving 20 minutes later, the house was still smoky and smelled terrible, and my aunt was still yelling "All you had to do was take the damn roast out of the oven!"  Luckily, there was so much other food that no one went hungry, but I don't think she spoke to him until New Year's.

theartistformerlyknownas

Many years ago, I decided to boil eggs to make egg salad for the next day's lunch. Not wanting to to tempt the "watched pot never boils," I covered the eggs with cold water, turned on the burner, and walked away. Thennnnnn my BF at the time got to my apartment to pick me up for the Wednesday night church service we were attending at the time. Yup, totally forgot about the eggs. For almost 2 hours. By the time we got home, all the water had boiled off, the eggs had exploded, and were burned into a stinky black mess in the bottom of the pan and all over my kitchen walls.

[Deleted User]

ElcaB said:

When H & I were dating, we decided to start experimenting in the kitchen together. Neither one of us had ever done much serious cooking, so we were pretty new at it. 

For our first meal, we made baked chicken parm. Easy enough, right? What we didn't know was the difference between a CLOVE of garlic and a HEAD of garlic. The recipe called for three cloves of garlic, so we used three heads of garlic. 

The food turned out pretty good, minus the fact that it was so freaking garlicky. If vampires do exist and are indeed repelled by garlic, I think we wiped them off the face of the planet with our chicken parm. We smelled like garlic for a week. 

Ha ha ha!  You kind of made 40 clove garlic chicken.  Try it some time- if you like garlic.

[Deleted User]

huskypuppy14 said:

FeeleyToBe said:

jenna8984 said:

I hate when that happens and you have to waste/ throw out good meat!
God I have too many to even tell. In high school there was all those commercials about how easy Mac was so easy and anyone could do it. Yup I fucking burnt it. Put it in the microwave with no water.

We tried a crock pot recipe that was pork cops and red wine. The wine didn't cook off so it was like eating straight wine soup with onion dip mix stirred in- so nasty!

That time I tried to fry shrimp. Didn't know oil was flammable (I know I'm an idiot) so I put it on high with a lid trying to get a boil going. Second I removed the lid a fireball erupted. Almost burnt my apartment down and had a heart attack simultaneously.

I know someone who screwed up mac n cheese too. Cooked the noodles but didn't drain the water before adding the cheese from the squeeze pouch.

Do we know the same person? She was my roommate at the time and me and my other roommate tried to tell her, but she didn't listen. Ugh, her now husband ate it anyway.

Now that's true love.  Or something.

thespeshulestsnowflake

Does putting Pop Tarts in the toaster count? My brother was making Pop Tarts for dinner once because our mom was sick in bed. Well he forgot about them, which caused the toaster to go on fire. Luckily there was no damage, but the police came by the house. They asked my brother if they were blueberry pop tarts, to which he replied yes. They told him those kind burn the best.

Oh and one of my college roommates set oatmeal on fire in the microwave. She forgot the water.

theartistformerlyknownas

My roommate in college set a bagel on fire in the microwave. She set it for 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds to defrost, then walked away and forgot about it.

arrippa

thespeshulestsnowflake said:

Does putting Pop Tarts in the toaster count? My brother was making Pop Tarts for dinner once because our mom was sick in bed. Well he forgot about them, which caused the toaster to go on fire. Luckily there was no damage, but the police came by the house. They asked my brother if they were blueberry pop tarts, to which he replied yes. They told him those kind burn the best.

Oh and one of my college roommates set oatmeal on fire in the microwave. She forgot the water.

I have forgotten toast in the toaster before but it just pops up and gets cold. It would never catch on fire since the toaster turns off when not push down.

thespeshulestsnowflake

arrippa said:

thespeshulestsnowflake said:

Does putting Pop Tarts in the toaster count? My brother was making Pop Tarts for dinner once because our mom was sick in bed. Well he forgot about them, which caused the toaster to go on fire. Luckily there was no damage, but the police came by the house. They asked my brother if they were blueberry pop tarts, to which he replied yes. They told him those kind burn the best.

Oh and one of my college roommates set oatmeal on fire in the microwave. She forgot the water.

I have forgotten toast in the toaster before but it just pops up and gets cold. It would never catch on fire since the toaster turns off when not push down.

I dunno. I wasn't actually there. Knowing my brother and the old toaster, it could have been turned up all the way and gotten stuck.