kitchen disasters

since the recipe thread is doing well i figured who not start
a thread with our not-so-shining moments in the culinary arena?


can i go first????

i was baking some kind of bread and the recipe called for sugar to be sprinkled on the top during the baking to get that carmelized topping thing going.... being out of sugar i used Sweet and Low....


it took me days to get that taste out of my mouth.......eewwww!!!!


Warning: The Surgeon General suggests that if you are out of sugar, get off your lazy rear and go to the store.

Hehehe :D

When I was 7, my mom and I were making biscuits. I went to take them out with the dish cloth and it touched the bottom of the oven and caught on FIRE! I threw it down and made a black mark on the floor (that we could never get rid of). To this day, I'm still terrified when I take things out of the oven. And my mom blames herself for letting me take them out.

This happened to a friend of mine. She decided one day to try something different so she bought some ludfisk (I'm sure this is spelt wrong). The longer she cooked it, the more watery it got. Even the dog turned up his nose at it and he's a Golden Retriever!! That was about 8 yrs ago and she's never tried it since.

As for me, I'm anything but a gourmet cook. I eat all my disasters because I'm too cheap to throw it away.

I was helping my mom make Christmas cookies, and after dishing the rice krispie bars in the the pan, I put the Tuperware bowl on the burner I had just used to melt the caramel. I still hear about the "favorite" bowl I melted :)

Oh that reminds me of the time I melted the spatula to the pan and my apartment stunk up so bad, I was afraid it was poisonous odor and had to stay at a hotel for 3 days with my animals!!!

I don't want to reveal how old I was when I did this but let's just say I wasn't a little kid but I was old enough that I should have known better. I was baking a chocolate cake. The recipe said to line the pan with waxed paper and then grease the waxed paper and then pour in the batter. I was out of waxed paper so I substituted.......Saran Wrap. :eek: You guessed it! Saran Wrap melts when put into an oven! DUH! :eek: Had to throw out the cake and the pan as well! :rolleyes:

LOL! :)

One of my college roommates, although fairly brain smart, was not as lucky when it came to common sense (and I don't just say this becuase of this story) She managed to put a dish towel on to a hot burner and burn 4 holes into...it looked like a face, but of my gosh the smell!!!

Oh my goodness this thread is hilarious! My worst disaster would have to be the first time I tried making pizza with dough from scratch. I made up the dough fine, turned it out to roll it and instead of being a circle, it was rectangular. I didn't know that you can't re-roll pizza dough. I tried to re-roll it, and it turned very tough, the more I stretched it, the more holes it got in it. It was sticking to the counter, my face, my arms, my legs, the floor and everywhere in between. I was getting madder & madder, and finally crumpled it all up and threw it in the trash. We went out to eat that night. :o :rolleyes: And now, everytime I say I'm gonna make pizza for dinner, Mark looks at me real funny and says "Are you sure you are in the mood to do this???" :D

Oh and the other real disaster was back when I lived at home and the first time I made apple pie. There were two of them and they came out of the oven beautifully. I put them on the stove to cool, and proceeded to start making dinner. I turned on the wrong burner accidentally to start warming, left the room for a couple of minutes, and hurt a tremendous crash. The entire pie (that was sitting on the heating burner) exploded...there was apple pie on the cieling, floor across the room...just everywhere. It really taught me a lesson, and I am petrified and always double check now.


Oops I just thought of a third funny one...About 10 years ago, my best friend (now sister-in-law) & I were making & canning tomato sauce, and taking turns changing duties every 20 quarts or something. One would process the tomatoes through the blender, and the other would fill the jars. Everytime it was my turn at the blender, she would say "Make sure the lid is on the blender...do you have the lid on" I got tired of it and said, "Yes YES YES I have the lid...I can remember already!!" So the next time, she didn't ask, and the next time the tomatoes shot out of the blender so fast, we were drenched. :eek: We still laugh about to this day!!

Hmm.. since I've been living alone, I set fire to my oven. I baked a cheesecake, and I guess some butter dripped from the pan. Then, when I went to heat the oven the next time, the butter caught on fire. Scared me so bad, I refused to use the oven until my mom came to visit and cleaned it out for me.

One time I was babysitting, and I had to start dinner. We were having sauseges. I put the sauseges in the frying pan, and was talking to the kids, 7 and 5. I said, "Geez it sure is taking a long time for these sauseges to cook!" and the 7yr old said, "I think they would cook faster if you turned the frying pan on." Sigh.. :rolleyes: :D

two from batchelor life...

lived in a house w/no stove

i'd 'heat' my soup on the floor grill of the house heater...once i took a nap after turning the thermostat up to 'HIGH'.......i think i lost about 10 lbs before i woke up...a great way to diet!

one rainy night i decided i wanted barbequed chicken....i set up the grill in the garage and sure enough....there was so much dang smoke i thought the fire dept would show up........

the worst part was the people that would slow down to look at the fool having a cook out in his garage.:eek:

Too funny!!! :)

When I was maybe 10 years old, my grandmother and I were making gingerbread together. We had done so many times before, kids in my family start learning to help cook the Christmas they turn 4, so this was not a "newbie" incident. We were rushing, had to make one "substitution," I think brown sugar for regular or something like that, but that wasn't the worst part. Just as we were pouring the batter into the pan, I said, "You put the baking soda in, right?" She said, "No, I thought YOU did!" So, we tried! We stirred the baking soda into the already mixed dough IN the baking pan.

It was hysterical. When baked, parts of it were 3 inches high, and parts a gummy 1/2 inch high - it looked like a map of some very hilly place! It was so bad that we got teased about it for YEARS!!! I didn't make gingerbread again for 20 years - and no one else in my immediate family made it for years after that incident either!

My favorite story is one we tell on one of my sisters. She was in charge of dinner (I think we were teenagers) and beef stew was on the menu. Everything went well until the point of thickening the liquid. You're supposed to use flour for this step. She got in a hurry and grabbed a yellow box -- yep, the baking soda!:D She thickend the whole pot with about a half-cup of baking soda! Needless to say, we threw out every bit and went out for dinner that night. :D

My mom (ACGAS) was cooking with a skillet in the kitchen. Our old cat (RIP), she was a youngin', jumped up onto the burning hot skillet.

That's why her pads were pink instead of brown. :(