Your Worst Cooking Flop

[kalanamak]

(I didn't mean to get the other thread closed by such a mis-post ;))

 

Mine was a Lime Upsidedown Cake of my own creation. I tried to wed my really good Pineapple Usd C with Shaker Lemon Pie and came up with something so nasty and bitter, I couldn't chew one bite.

 

Your flop?

[Parrothead]

(I didn't mean to get the other thread closed by such a mis-post ;))

 

Mine was a Lime Upsidedown Cake of my own creation. I tried to wed my really good Pineapple Usd C with Shaker Lemon Pie and came up with something so nasty and bitter, I couldn't chew one bite.

 

Your flop?

I can't make fried chicken correctly. It always have undercooked insides and almost burned outsides.

 

Lime upsidedown cake sounds wonderful. You ought to work on it some more and perfect it. Or maybe we could ask the WTM dessert fairy to.

[ssavings]

I make "mac n cheese" for allergenic DS - so, no wheat, no dairy, no soy, etc.

 

A few weeks ago,i made it at my mom's, and grabbed her almond milk to make it with. I didnt read the label.

Turns out, mom drinks a very sweetened almond milk - she adds additional sweetener and vanilla to "sweet vanilla almond milk".

Poor DS asked if I combined rice pudding with "mac n cheese". It was not edible.

[pbb119]

a few weeks after getting married, I wanted to make fried chicken for my husband.

 

Got my chicken ready, put the oil in the frying pan, turned the gas burner on high, and waited. and waited. and waited.....

 

 

for the oil to come to a boil..........

[OLG]

Mine involves lime too! I was in my 20's and still remember the disaster since I had guests for dinner. I cooked fish in a pouch on the grill but used sliced limes instead of lemons -ugh. Bitter, inedible, embarrassed. Never did that again.

[RoughCollie]

Mine involves lemons. Lemon meringue pie soup, prepared for a dinner party.

[Mandamom]

7th grade home ec....

 

We were making cheese fondue and I burned the butter. My partners were thrilled (not!) to have to eat brown/blackened cheese fondue because of course we were required to eat our food no matter what. :001_huh:

[Miss Marple]

Oh, I still blush when I think of this one. Dh was in residency while I was finishing pharmacy school. Needless to say, I did little cooking (not going to bother for just myself) and we ended up getting at least one good meal per day at the hospital where we both worked. My mom is/was an excellent cook and made things look so EASY!

 

Well, dh invited a staff (MD) person (and his wife) over for Sunday luncheon. I, being the optimist that I am, decided to try something I had not made before. Mom had always made a delicious brisket in the slow cooker, served with BBQ sauce on kaiser rolls. I was going to try it. I put the brisket on low that morning and went to church. Lunch was to be served around 1:00 p.m. meaning the brisket was in the slow cooker for about 4 hours ON LOW!

 

When we sat down to eat we discovered that the brisket was not tender and falling apart as my mom's always did. In fact, it was downright difficult to chew! And there were little tendrils of blood flowing from it when we cut it. Everyone put on a good face and gnawed away! I noticed that my homemade potato salad and baked beans (both of which I do well) went over quite well. I had a lot of brisket left over :P

 

I'm sure that the wife was horrified - I remember saying that there must be something wrong with the cut of meat because mom's was always so tender LOL!

[BakersDozen]

My first attempt at making coleslaw remains a favorite family story even 16+ years later. Dh and I sat down to eat...and our coleslaw crunched even more than it should. We tried a few more bites thinking maybe we just got a tough part of cabbage but no, it really was like hard plastic. Picking through the coleslaw we noticed white pieces of something...yep, it was plastic! I did not take the protective plastic off the blade of our new mixer/shredder!

 

I haven't made coleslaw since then. :D

[Karen in CO]

Kale chips. I made kale chips perfectly 4 or 5 times before I burned an oven full. My whole house REEKED, even after I got the smoke cleared. :D

[funschooler5]

a few weeks after getting married, I wanted to make fried chicken for my husband.

 

Got my chicken ready, put the oil in the frying pan, turned the gas burner on high, and waited. and waited. and waited.....

 

 

for the oil to come to a boil..........

 

I did that same thing when I was a newlywed! I was on the phone with DH when I was trying to boil the oil to make some fish.:lol: I mentioned that to him on the phone, and that the room was getting awfully smokey. He told me to shut off the burner. I don't want to think about what would've happened if I hadn't been talking to him. Hopefully I would have been smart enough to figure it out.:lol::lol:

[Butter]

I tried making buffalo chicken lasagna... twice. Both times were huge fails. It was more soup than anything and the lasagna noodles were just nasty and gummy. Totally inedible. The second time we kept trying to bake it longer as if that would make it better. And then at 8:30 we gave up and went out for pizza because we were all starving.

[Plucky]

I tried making Korean Pumpkin Soup for my foreign exchange student. He wrinkled his nose at it. He tried to fix it and couldn't. :(

[Diane in CO]

Cinnamon tacos....yeah, I thought the cinnamon was taco seasoning :tongue_smilie:

 

My husband had a few bites and then mentioned that there was something wrong with the tacos :lol: Ten + years later he still mentions it whenever we have tacos:D

[kewb]

I, of course, cook everything perfectly. Although there was that time I set the lamb chops on fire. Dh, on the other hand, tried to make beef burgundy for me on one of our first dates. I don't know what he did but the sauce was purple.

[jenangelcat]

cakes. i can do carrot and chocolate only. every other kind turns out awful. the grossest thing i made was pig's feet.

 

my hubby takes the cake though when he tried to make mushroom soup pork chops classy by adding sauteed onions and garlic. omg it was awful. we still joke about it 10 years later.

[Crimson Wife]

When I was first married, I didn't realize that one could not substitute Jell-o for unflavored gelatin in a chiffon pie. I thought that I could use the flavored Jell-o and just cut down on the amount of fruit. The dang thing never set :lol:

 

I gave up on trying to make meatballs after several attempts that fell apart. I tried several different recipes but no matter what I did, they wound up as meat mush. :tongue_smilie:

[Just Kate]

Well, there was the time when I was about 15 years old when my mom asked me to put the lasagna in the oven while she was still at work, so it would be ready to eat when she got home. Of course, I did exactly as asked and didn't realize that I needed to remove the Saran Wrap from the top of the pan. Thankfully we realized what I'd done before we all started eating.

[laundrycrisis]

1. The time I thought I was cutting fresh basil from a pot to sprinkle on our dinner of tortellini and marinara. My allergies were acting up and I could not smell. We had "fresh mint tortellini".

 

2. I normally put a tablespoon of cinnamon into my pancake batter. It's yummy...except for the time I mixed up the cinnamon with the tandoori seasoning. Not so yummy !

[Slartibartfast]

I mixed the chili powder with cayenne once.

 

Fortunately I realized what I had done before we ate but we did get take out that night. :lol:

[kalanamak]

 

2. I normally put a tablespoon of cinnamon into my pancake batter. It's yummy...except for the time I mixed up the cinnamon with the tandoori seasoning. Not so yummy !

 

Last year I made mustard snaps instead of ginger snaps, and they were actually pretty good!

[gardening momma]

This is my mom's (she would tell the story if she were on this forum): when she and my dad were first married, she made chili for their first meal. My grandparents had 3 kids and adopted 6, plus were foster parents, so she was used to having a full house of people. She did most of the cooking, too. So she cut the recipe down to feed two people, but forgot to cut the salt. :001_smile:

[bnrmom]

Just recently I tried to make an eggplant tart. I was rushed to get it done before dh had to go to class. I cut a some time off of baking the crust and then about 10 minutes in the oven. Needless to say the crust was a hoppy mess and the eggplant was still too firm. Inedible.

[Farrar]

I made blue soup a la Bridget Jones once. No joke.

 

It was a soup that calls for wild rice. I'd made it many times but when I went to the cupboard, I turned out to be out of wild rice, so I thought, oh, this imperial rice has a similar nutty texture and cooking time - it'll be fine. Well, it tasted okay, but the whole soup turned a purplish blue and NO ONE would eat it. My in laws were there and I think they left early and went out for supper.

[*********]

Well this one was dh (but I'm *sure* I'll think of one of my own to come back and add). Dh made scrambled eggs once. (Now, mind you this was back before we were married, dh no longer "cooks", lol.) He was making them for dsd and dss, who were probably 4 and 6 at the time. Anyway, dh just opened the spice cabinet and started adding random spices. Both the kids took one bite and protested. Dh claimed they couldn't possibly be THAT bad. So he and I taste them. Yep, they were that bad. 'That time dad made eggs' is still talked about today. :D

[gardening momma]

Well this one was dh (but I'm *sure* I'll think of one of my own to come back and add). Dh made scrambled eggs once. (Now, mind you this was back before we were married, dh no longer "cooks", lol.) He was making them for dsd and dss, who were probably 4 and 6 at the time. Anyway, dh just opened the spice cabinet and started adding random spices. Both the kids took one bite and protested. Dh claimed they couldn't possibly be THAT bad. So he and I taste them. Yep, they were that bad. 'That time dad made eggs' is still talked about today. :D

Dh occasionally fries fish for himself (I can't stand fish and I won't make it). He likes to look in the spice cupboard for something to season it with. One time he tried cinnamon. :ack2: It stunk up the house. It smelled awful. He still thought it tasted ok, but I won't allow him to put cinnamon on fish anymore. :001_smile:

[BarbecueMom]

My friends and I tried to make an angel food cake once. In a 9x13 pan. Ungreased. With the oven set 100 degrees too high. And we forgot about it.

 

I think about a one-square-inch section in the middle was still edible.

 

There was a bottle of Smirnoff Orange Twist involved.

[AK_Mom4]

Popcorn cookies.

 

As a young teen, I added uncooked popcorn kernals to chocolate cookie dough. Thought that they would "puff up" during cooking and make a really yummy cookie. Nope.

 

Dad broke a tooth biting into a kernal. :tongue_smilie:

[Cosmos]

Your flop?

 

A pot of nastiness called West African Peanut Soup. Now, I have eaten many delicious peanut soups and even have one beloved family favorite. But this one was atrocious. It had tomatoes as well as peanuts and, when roughly blended as the recipe instructed, had the exact texture and color of vomit. Bleah. It turns my stomach just recalling it.

[Pink Fairy]

I've finally given up on chicken and dumplings. No matter what recipe I try, the dumplings always end up nasty little dough balls. :001_huh:

[funschooler5]

When I was a kid I tried making peanut butter by smashing up peanuts and mixing them with butter.

 

Yeah...that didn't work out. :001_smile:

[*********]

I've finally given up on chicken and dumplings. No matter what recipe I try, the dumplings always end up nasty little dough balls. :001_huh:

 

You didn't do anything wrong. That's what dumplings *are*, IMNSHO. :D

 

(I make chicken and dumplings. Dh loves it. Zee and I eat 'chicken and gravy', which is just the dish BEFORE adding dumplings.)

[butterflymommy]

I got the idea from "sneaky chef" to make broccoli-spinach muffins, but instead of sneaking in a little green with a boatload of sugar (like a lot of her recipes do) I decided to up the greens and lower the sugar. The batter looked like green sludge (the kids were calling it algae) and the end result looked and tasted like chewy, rank, moist sponge. To this day the kids talk about the "algae muffins" and how gruesome they were.

[AprilTN]

This:

 

 

http://nofearentertaining.blogspot.com/2011/05/mexican-chicken-bake.html

 

 

I found it on pinterest. Talk about a pot of nastiness. It looked, smelled, and tasted like vomit. At one point I realized just how disgusting it was going to be, and I started laughing as I was cooking. It was too late at that point and I just had to finish making it.

 

I decided to post this recipe as my answer, then...

 

Before I replied I asked dh to tell me which meal was the worst flop ever (married 20 yrs) and he said this very recipe.

 

Epic grossness.

[Belacqua]

I once made a loaf of rye bread that probably could have been weaponized (couldn't our military make use of the world's densest material?). I still don't know what I did wrong, but the knife wouldn't even go through it. To make matters worse, I realized the next time I tried to use my KitchenAid mixer that the rye dough had burnt out the motor. So that was a $400 loaf of inedible bread.

 

I've also had several interesting outcomes when using my late grandmother's recipes, because she tended to use "t" and "T" randomly. I try to guess whether she really meant teaspoon or tablespoon, but the results are occasionally unexpected. She also used "oregano" to mean oregano, basil, tarragon, savory, sage, or rosemary. To her, they were all oregano.

[intp4yhwh]

After I burned boiled potatoes (yes, it's possible) as a teen, my mom didn't have me cook.

 

Once I was married, I 'attempted' to make a heart shaped cake for our first Valentine's Day. Don't know what I did, but it was terrible! Both the cake and the frosting! It looked kinda pretty, but it went in the trash. :)

[Jean in Newcastle]

My very worst flop was when I made garlic mashed potatoes. Unfortunately, instead of garlic powder, I accidentally grabbed the mustard powder. Mustard mashed potatoes are a bad idea!

[Alice]

I made a green tea cake from Cooking Light. I could swear that I followed the directions exactly but it was inedible. Rubbery, flat and a weird texture. It tasted ok but the color was a bright algae like color and really unappetizing.

[Rjmakmom]

I have 2 culinary disasters.

 

The first was when I first got married at 19 and tried to surprise my new husband with pancakes. I guess I didn't use enough water, combined with flipping the pancakes too many times and using the back of the spatula to flatten then down. Those pancakes were so heavy and dense you could have used them as bricks to build a house! Poor guy choked down a half of a pancake and was "stuffed".

 

The second was more recent. We like cheese and onion enchiladas. We LOVE crab meat. We thought it would be a good combination. It was awful!! Somehow the crab meat turned totally fishy and it was so bad that no one could eat it. Even my dogs refused to eat it! A whole pound of lump crabmeat went into the trash and we ordered a pizza!

[Ohdanigirl]

(I didn't mean to get the other thread closed by such a mis-post ;))

 

 

 

I never read that thread, so I forgive you. :D

 

I haven't had any recent ones, but the funniest thing I can think of was when I made myself a coffee at a friends house. She had a clear glass container (with scoop) of sugar on the counter. Her SIL and I decide to make coffee for ourselves and hubbies. Imagine our surprise when we tasted our coffee and realized the sugar was actually salt.:ack2:

 

Danielle

[TheTwinsMom1]

Mine is cornbread. No matter what it just crumbles and falls apart. I can't even make Jiffy corn meal mix where it does not crumble.

 

Growing up my cousin and I accidently added salt to pancakes instead of sugar. Talk about nasty.

[2cents]

My disaster- my own interpretation of a coconut cake. Coconut shavings sunk to bottom of the pans and the cake layers came out with a sludge like consistency on the bottom and tasted awful! The frosting was ghastly because I put too much coconut flavoring in it-apparently a little of that goes a looooong way. It was a gigantic disaster. But on the bright side, the dog got a little plate of it and LOVED it! It was slightly encouraging until I remembered that the dog is no gourmet. She also eats out of the cat litter box when she can. I no longer experiment with coconut...ever.

[Dealea86]

I once started a fire in the oven when I put my gingerbread in the wrong sized pan and it overflowed. We transferred it to a larger pan and finished it in the toaster oven and it still tasted yummy.

 

I don't know if these count as disasters, but I am apparently incapable of making homemade brownies. They never turn out good. I also routinely burn beans when making them on the stovetop. I never burn anything else, and I'm an otherwise excellent baker, so I have no idea why beans and brownies are my nemeses.

[Donna]

I made couscous (I can't even spell it) once and it was horrible...just so tasteless and yuck. My family wouldn't eat it and they eat everything else I have ever cooked. Five years later and whenever someone mentions me cooking something delicious...that couscous fiasco comes up again so the family can remind me that I have cooked something that didn't taste good.

[swellmomma]

I was just telling ds the time I was making banana bread and wanted to double the batch. I doubled the wet ingredients but got sidetracked and forgot to double the dry. Yeah, banana soup lol

 

He is currently trying his hand at vegan peanut butter cookies so we will see how those turn out (he is good at adapting recipes and coming up with something completely different so we will see if he ever has a goot flop story one day)

[LostSurprise]

I know there have others but the one I remember the best was trying to make a beef roast.

 

What could do wrong, I thought. You wash it, put it in an oven-safe container, turn it to the right temperature until the inside temp is right.

 

3 hours later, its the right temp but the meat is red, very red, so I stick it back in.

 

4 hours later, the temp registers past done but when I stick a knife in it it bubbles blood. Bubbles. Like a fountain. In multiple places. Its like a horror movie. I feel like I'm killing something.

 

5 hours later I try to drain the blood and wash the meat. It should be done, right? There is so much blood. Its so disgusting. I give up and put a frozen pizza in. Its 8 pm and dh has been home for hours.

 

I still have no idea what happened. It was like The Exorcist.

[Tap]

Moroccan Chicken Pie. Dh would agree!

 

It was phillo dough, layered with stewed chicken, egg (egg strings cooked in broth), seasoned with spices including cinnamon with sugar. It was cooked to perfection, beautiful and smelled heavenly.......we ate a few bites and tossed it in the trash. :ack2:

[Pippen]

Once I made shortbread cookies called Meltaways. As a PSA, I can warn you that if you forget to add the flour to shortbread cookies they do indeed meltaway...and the butter seeps into the oven and smells for a very long while.

 

My non-cooking friend was over and got to witness me opening the oven door and seeing little clumps of dough sitting in a sea of butter on the cookie sheet. She's never let me live it down.

[Belacqua]

Moroccan Chicken Pie. Dh would agree!

 

It was phillo dough, layered with stewed chicken, egg (egg strings cooked in broth), seasoned with spices including cinnamon with sugar. It was cooked to perfection, beautiful and smelled heavenly.......we ate a few bites and tossed it in the trash. :ack2:

 

We made that once and while we didn't hate it, it certainly was...odd. The sugary chicken was just kind of bizarre, and the egg bits added a kind of disconcerting texture. My husband still refers to that time we made Chicken Dessert.

[swellmomma]

Once I made shortbread cookies called Meltaways. As a PSA, I can warn you that if you forget to add the flour to shortbread cookies they do indeed meltaway...and the butter seeps into the oven and smells for a very long while.

 

My non-cooking friend was over and got to witness me opening the oven door and seeing little clumps of dough sitting in a sea of butter on the cookie sheet. She's never let me live it down.

 

:lol::lol: I love melt aways and for now on will never be able to bake them without thinking of your sea of butter