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Today I finally made the algorithm I have been struggling with for three weeks work. I did a little happy dance over that. To compensate, I am not having a good day in the kitchen, so I thought I'd make an anti-recipe thread, so we can learn from each others' mistakes. Post your worst disasters here, including an analysis of what went wrong, for the encouragement of others!
I'll start with mine :
First, having some peaches that were going a little soft, I decided to test my new food processor by making smoothies. I put in milk, chopped-up peaches, some ice, and - disastrously, on impulse - two After Eight mints chocolate wafers. It turns out that milk, mint, and peach do not mix; the result was utterly disgusting.
Second, I wanted spaghetti and mince for dinner. It turns out that you should not put in about two portions' worth of spaghetti just to empty out the package, even if it is going a bit stale. Perhaps particularly if it is going a bit stale. Also, use a generous amount of water even if that does make the meat-broth a little thin; the excess will boil off. In my case, water that was actually needed for moistening spaghetti boiled off, and the result was a gloppy mess, strands of spaghetti sticking to each other all over the place, and to the bottom of the pot. It was edible, but only because I was hungry.
Now, what are your culinary disaters?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Um, I burned some bread the other day, does that count? Oh, and the cheese on top of it. Burned bread by itself doesn't constitute a culinary disaster, just a smoke alarm hazard. Burned cheese on the other hand...
I try to get firm recipes before trying anything new. I do like trying new things, but I spend all my creative energies on other projects. Sorry I'm not much help. Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I tried a weird dumpling recipe that I found on the internet a week or so back - instead of using flour, it involved beating egg whites. Kind of like savoury meringue (*ewww*).
The worst bit is I had spent all afternoon making chicken soup from scratch - chicken carcass and all. Hours of careful skimming and clarifying and then I put destruct-o dumplings in.
I learnt - flour-less dumplings are Bad News.
Posts: 4393 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I'm a great cook honest. But, well, I do have one teeny, weeny problem that has caused culinary disasters on very, very rare occasions. I'll share two disasters, but I'll not identify the problem. 1. I made a wonderfully aromatic, healthful stew on a cold, winter's eve. The last vegetable to be added would be peas. When I served it to my family, they balked at eating it due to it's unusual color. Woops, I had added frozen blueberries instead of peas. 2. My roommates and I hosted several guys for dinner. Making a favorable impression on them was one of our motives. I made the jello salad. Sprucing up the area after placing the jello in the fridge to set,, I was unable to locate and discard the lid of the pineapple can. Um, one of our guest found it during dinner in his salad. The impression I made was not favorable, after all.
Posts: 216 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Once I was adding a few dried chilis to spaghetti sauce to give it a bit of a zing!, but the bag slipped and I dumped half the bag in. Oops. Even after scooping out as much as I could, a few people went hungry that night because they just couldn't handle it.
Posts: 2849 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Some of you may remember my thread about the piecrust that got so hot it melted onto the oven heating elements and burst into flame, filling the whole house with smoke. I believe it was before your time here, KoM.
Well, it turns out that not only was the piecrust poorly made, but the problem was exacerbated by the fact that my oven thermostat was not working properly, in fact, in the end it was not working at all! I always suspected that my oven was too hot, but I had just adjusted my cooking to the oven. We discovered that the thermostat was not working when we left the oven on "low" to keep some food warm and the oven just kept heating and heating and never turned off. My husband made the repair, and now my oven is properly calibrated, and I have had to readjust my cooking times and oven settings. Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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Once, when I was a teenager, I screwed up brownies-from-a-box. I added the egg, oil, etc. to the frosting mix instead of the brownie mix. It turned into this sort of weird, super-greasy hot fudge sauce.
Posts: 957 | Registered: Aug 2002
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Once when I was younger, I was making a coconut cream pie and decide to put a 'tad' of vanilla extract in it. Grabbed the extract, and accidentally got a bit more in than intended. Oh well. But then, it turned kind of an all brown color, and I suddenly realized I had grabbed the wrong thing and had put a gob of maple flavoring in it instead of vanilla. It was horrible. The dog ended up having to finish the pie.
I always wear a shirt around the stove, consciously thinking back to the lessons of whoever posted that thread.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I made a baked ziti using only Weight Watcher core foods. Whole wheat ziti, tomatoes, fat free ricotta, fat free mozzarella, egs, and spices.
It was the nastiest thing I have ever tasted. Some food, namely cheese, should never be free of fat.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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When I was learning how to bake (10? 11?), the first thing I attempted completely on my own was peanut butter cookies. The recipe, which my mom had used countless times, called for 1/4 tsp. of salt. An 11-year–old in a hurry, I misread "tsp" as "cup". My dad, who loves peanut butter cookies, came in and snagged a bit of the dough...and promptly proceeded to retch into the sink. Not a particularly encouraging beginning!
Another (shorter) story: I tried my hand at cooking fish for the first time for my new husband. I ended up giving him food poisoning. W00t!
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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When I first made cupcakes as a teenager, no one had explained the idea of leavening to me. So I decided filling the cups 2/3 was not going to do it for me. It took a looong time to clean the oven.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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My brother has never been able to make mac and cheese. As in, the stuff from the box where you add milk and butter. It always comes out really think and weird tasting. We may have found the problem though. He called a couple months ago and asked if there was really supposed to be half a stick of butter in it. Yes. Has it always called for that much butter? Yes. Oh....
Posts: 1547 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Once, I was living in the suburbs with some other college girls, in a neighborhood of mainly families and retired people. I mention the demographics because this story is mostly about my lawn.
We were busy, full-time students with part-time jobs, and didn't tend to the the lawn like the neighbors would have liked to see us do. The curmudgeony old man down the street threatened to call the neighborhood ordinance enforcers (whoever they are) if we didn't start mowing more regularly. Our landlord caught wind of it and, to make amends, ordered a lawn service to come spray herbicide and ordered us to mow every other day. I had been enjoying the nice lush foot or so of vegetation, but I relented.
However, the night before the herbicide guys were to come, I noticed sadly that all the lovely broadleaved dandelion greens in our lawn were going to be sadly wasted. "That's just not right!" I fumed. "Those are edible!"
Dandelion greens go nicely in salad, but the amount that I managed to harvest that night was probably enough for twenty large salads (our house was on a corner lot.) And that's if you went easy on the lettuce. I figured there had to be some other way to prepare dandelion greens, and set to work. They're dark green and leafy, right? Probably full of all kinds of vitamins like spinach is. Say - why not cook them like spinach? True, they're a bit more pungent than most greens you eat cooked, but cooking them down like that is bound to mellow out the flavor.
Cooking down dandelion greens, even if you use a lot of water and steam them for several hours, does not mellow out their flavor. It concentrates it. The stuff was dang near inedible, but I was not going to give up that easily.
The trick, I figured, was not to serve dandelion greens alone. In salads, you mix them with lettuce. So in cooked form, why not mix them with cooked spinach?
I had on hand 6 boxes of frozen cooked spinach. I added them one at a time, trying to water down the horrid putrid greasy aroma that the dandelions were exuding. It took a lot of spinach. I ended up with at least a gallon of putrid, shrivelled, stinky greens. They were still inedible.
But of course, by then, I had way too much pride invested and couldn't let my roommates see me just give up. Plus, that was an awful lot of spinach to let go to waste. So I ate cooked dandelion greens for about three weeks.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Is anyone else getting really hungry reading all this?
I'm going to the store to get some cupcake mix.
But first, a quick disaster story, courtesy of my old roommate.
He was making mac and cheese ( I know, could there be a simpler food item) from the box, and apparently the complex multistep instructions were beyond him. Also, he was drunk. He boiled the noodles in milk, not water, and where he was supposed to add salt, he added sugar.
By far the worst mac and cheese I've ever tasted.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:When I was learning how to bake (10? 11?), the first thing I attempted completely on my own was peanut butter cookies. The recipe, which my mom had used countless times, called for 1/4 tsp. of salt. An 11-year–old in a hurry, I misread "tsp" as "cup".
Megan, I did almost the exact same thing - it was a cake for my dad's birthday. Oops. Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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It was always impressed on me from an early age that you DO NOT NEED MUCH SALT, so I never made the too much salt error! I plan to pass that wisdom onto my potential children.
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Oh heck, I still have trouble with tsp and Tbs, or Tbs and cup.
When I was 15 or so, I was home on a summer day with a friend and my little brother. The friend had brought over a packaged Churro mix, so we decided to make it. I'd never fried anything before, but I figured we had a frying pan, and it sounded like the right tool for the job.
So we emptied a bottle of peanut oil into the pan, set the (electric) burner to high, and went off to watch TV while we waited for it to heat up.
Well, long story short, the microwave still bears signs of melting, and there's still yellow fire extinguisher dust in ever nook and cranny of the kitchen. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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When I was 14 and in Home Ec, we were assigned to make chocolate chip cookies.
I didn't really know the difference between shortning and Oil... so I used Oil...
What came out got entitled "Chocolate Collage" It wasn't bad but it didn't really resemble cookies. It was kinda all smooshed and melted together.
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Last week at a convention, I decided to try a recipe on the menu at the toast room that was labeled as "very weird".
By very weird I'm sure they meant VERY DISGUSTING. The combination of Marshmallow fluff, bacon bits, and tang on toast tasted more than a little like vomit.
Oh, and a great culinary disaster from my dad. We were having a night in, he and I, and he decided to make a new special recipe of chicken. I was around six, and he put it in front of me, and I tasted it and made a halfhearted effort to continue eating it, after I realized it was icky.
He took a bite and spit it out and realized that instead of the flour that the recipe called for, he'd put powdered sugar on it. It's a family story.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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