Cooking blunders - share your best

[rose]

At lunch today I mistook a horseradish root for a parsnip and added it to some vegetable soup. Blech! It got me thinking after all your embarrassing shopping moments that you all must have some really funny cooking mistakes to share. Once I mistook cayenne for chili powder and practically ruined a pot of chili. After adding several cans of beans and tomatoes it was still too hot for me but my dh (we had only been married a month or so) ate the whole thing over the course of the week. I learned right there that he was not like my father who was soooo picky. I felt much better about experimenting on him after that. :)

[wendy not in HI]

We had been married about a month when I decided to bake banana bread.  I felt like such a great wife!!  It smelled sooooo good, but didn't seem to look right.  When we cut into it, the texture was all wrong and dense.  I looked back through the recipe and realized I had forgotten the baking soda - who knew that one little teaspoon could make all the difference!!  I think about that every time I make banana bread! :) 

 

I once made Kool Aid for a youth activity.  There was sugar up in the cupboard at the church and I thought I'd use that instead of bringing some from home...  yeah... it was salt, not sugar!  Unfortunately, I didn't taste it before setting it out for the kids...

[happi duck]

I accidentally used *vanilla* soymilk in the Thanksgiving mashed potatoes!

[Night Elf]

My story is simple ignorance. The first meal I ever cooked by myself was when I moved into an apartment with my boyfriend (1st husband). I wanted a special meal so I bought beef tips. I didn't know how to cook them so I breaded them and baked them. It was awful. I cried at the dinner table. I've hated cooking ever since. :)

[Amy in NH]

When I was a child I tried to melt butter on the stovetop (pre-microwave) in a Tupperware measuring cup.

 

Also used baking soda instead of powder and ended up with volcano muffins in the oven.

 

Also made a double batch (huge bowl) of fortune cookie batter which was unsuccessful. Was able to alter it into teal crepes which made excellent frisbees.

[Schadenfreude]

Not a cooking mistake but a funny story about cooking. When my husband and I got married he gave me a list of dinners and asked if I knew how to make them. They were easy processed dinners his working mom used to make. I only knew how to cook fresh so I said no without an explanation. For the next 2 years he cooked all the meals. The first time he came home from traveling for work there was a fridge full of awesome leftovers. He was confused and asked where all the food came from. I told him that I made it. He said "But you said you couldn't cook." To which I replied "I only said I couldn't make that crap your mom does." :rofl: We have been married 19 years and that is still the first story about me he shares to new people.

[SparklyUnicorn]

LMAO...about the horseradish in the soup...whew that must have been "interesting"

 

I don't have any crazy food stories.

 

 

[Spy Car]

I made fresh gnocchi last night using a new method and took to heart the advice that minimizing the use of flour (vs the riced potatoes) was going to yield best results.

 

So I lovingly rolled out dozens of hand-shaped gnocchis (and they looked so good). However, when I placed them in boiling water they turned into boiled blobs of paste.

 

I don't have many cooking disasters, but (with the good timing of this thread) I don't even have to look back more than 24 hrs.

 

Bill

 

 

 

 

[Spy Car]

Not a cooking mistake but a funny story about cooking. When my husband and I got married he gave me a list of dinners and asked if I knew how to make them. They were easy processed dinners his working mom used to make. I only knew how to cook fresh so I said no without an explanation. For the next 2 years he cooked all the meals. The first time he came home from traveling for work there was a fridge full of awesome leftovers. He was confused and asked where all the food came from. I told him that I made it. He said "But you said you couldn't cook." To which I replied "I only said I couldn't make that crap your mom does." :rofl: We have been married 19 years and that is still the first story about me he shares to new people.

 

Love it!

 

Bill

[kiana]

Started the kitchen on fire by forgetting about a pot of oil, then cleverly taking the lid off a smoking pot of oil, feeding oxygen to the flames.

 

Made icing with flour instead of confectioner's sugar. 

 

Brain blipped and used soy sauce in a cake instead of vanilla. 

[Liz CA]

Last year I decided to bake dh a birthday cake from a new recipe. Still don't know what went wrong. I am typically doing okay with baking and cooking in general but this thing was hard as a rock. To top it off, we forgot it in the laundry room fridge and I found it in April (birthday was in December). It had fossilized even more.

[Paige]

I made chocolate chip cookies and mixed up the salt and sugar ratios. They looked a little weird but I didn't figure out until we tasted them. Worst cookies ever!!

 

I was making some sort of roast in the crock pot and the recipe called for tapioca. I had no idea what that was (I was probably 19) and dumped a box of tapioca pudding into the crock pot with everything else! My family makes fun of me for that one still.

 

 

[Junie]

I made boxed mac and cheese for the kids last night.  I usually make the sauce with the powdered cheese stuff and half a (small) can of evaporated milk.  I didn't have any evaporated milk, so I had to use the milk and butter that the box says to use.  I melted the butter, added the milk and the sauce, and whisked it up.  It didn't look right.  On closer inspection I realized that the heat of the butter curdled the milk.  Ick.   :ack2:   I gave the dc plain noodles with butter and Parmesan cheese.

[Forget-Me-Not]

I halved a cookie recipe, but forgot to use half the eggs. They came out flat and had to be scraped from the cookie sheet!

[rose]

 

Brain blipped and used soy sauce in a cake instead of vanilla. 

That reminds me of a story that I almost forgot! Years ago dh was giving me a little bit of alone time probably for my bday. He offered to make me a cup of tea, sweet dh that he was. In his awsome brilliance he decided that vanilla would taste nice in the tea (weird but not outlandish) but mistook the soy sauce that I had in the unmarked jar for the vanilla that I also had in an unmarked jar! After putting a little in he realised his mistake but couldn't bring himself to just pour it out (you'd think that he'd been through a depression the way skimps and saves) so he brought it to me anyways hoping that I wouldn't notice! :ack2: I definitely did. I still love laughing at him years later about this one. :D

 

[Chelle in MO]

I halved a cookie recipe, but forgot to use half the eggs. They came out flat and had to be scraped from the cookie sheet!

 

Lol!  Then the day before yesterday I doubled a cookie recipe, but forgot to double the eggs!  I thought the dough looked/felt weird, but I put it into the frig to chill while we went out for lunch. I kept thinking through the ingredients and finally realized what I had done. I added the extra eggs to the dough before baking and they turned out quite a bit different, but edible. 

 

When I was in jr. high, I forgot half the flour in a cookie recipe. They ended up looking lace-like. Also around that age I made popcorn on the stove and used corn syrup instead of corn oil!  Sticky, nasty, burned mess.

 

In high school. I set my sister's apartment slightly on fire when I forgot about the popcorn I was cooking!   :eek:  

 

As a newlywed, I was trying to make au gratin potatoes like my mom's and forgot the flour. That  made for a very runny sauce!

 

Another newlywed one...I knew to mix flour and water to pour into beef drippings for making gravy. I thought I'd be so smart and mix the flour w/the beef drippings instead of water (better flavor, right?). As I was shaking the two ingredients in a plastic cup w/a lid, the lid suddenly popped off and the mixture went EVERYWHERE. Apparently, the beef drippings were a little too hot to enclose like that.   :lol:

 

I'm sure there are more, but those are the most memorable.   :D

[kiana]

In high school. I set my sister's apartment slightly on fire when I forgot about the popcorn I was cooking!   :eek:  

 

HA! That's what I forgot about too!

[KungFuPanda]

I found some marinated pork bulgogi at the Asian market last night. I didn't ruin it. It was delicious, BUT I made two pounds of it quickly in my cast iron skillet and some oil. My kitchen is COVERED in a layer of grease. I made a first pass at cleaning, but need to go in again. The floors were so bad I had to mop first and then sweep. I need to mop again. I haven't even dealt with the range hood yet. I knew it was spitting while I was doing it, but I just didn't realize the full devastation until this morning. I'm a MESSY cook, but this was extreme.

 

Next time I'll just grill it outside no matter how cold.

[UncleEJ]

When DH and I were first living together. I was 18, I made some pork chops that were supposed to be braised in apple cider. I used apple cider vinegar instead. The smell of 2 cups of ACV simmering for an hour ruined both our appetites. I had to reread the recipe a few times before I caught my mistake. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. He still brings it up.

 

One time my mom and I made some peanut butter cookies and forgot the peanut butter. They were a bit bland. Lol!

[DesertBlossom]

For a few years I didn't realize that cumin and curry were different things.

[jen3kids]

I used dry mustard instead of ginger when making gingerbread cookies once. They weren't too bad, but they definitely were not ginger cookies!

[Chelle in MO]

I used dry mustard instead of ginger when making gingerbread cookies once. They weren't too bad, but they definitely were not ginger cookies!

 

Did you make a Dry Mustard Man to decorate?   :lol:

 

(Just teasing!) 

[kiana]

I used dry mustard instead of ginger when making gingerbread cookies once. They weren't too bad, but they definitely were not ginger cookies!

 

I actually put a bit of mustard in my gingerbread deliberately. 

 

I mean there's ginger in there too but the mustard gives it just a little kick. 

[Greta]

I sometimes make simple baked apples to go with our breakfast:  just peeled, cored, and chopped apples, sprinkled with cinnamon, and baked.  That's it.  One day the normally delicious aroma smelled a little off, and then it started to smell downright awful.  I looked at the jar of cinnamon still sitting on the counter and saw that I had grabbed the cumin by mistake.   :ack2:

[Guest]

Oh, you mean that time I made bone broth, and strained it to get out the detritus--pouring the broth right down the drain?  That time?

 

[Greta]

Oh, you mean that time I made bone broth, and strained it to get out the detritus--pouring the broth right down the drain?  That time?

 

 

:lol:  That sounds like something I would do!

 

 

 

I remembered another genius cooking moment from many years ago.  When I was a teenager I would occasionally (not very often!) volunteer to cook dinner, but I was still a very inexperienced cook.  One time I was cooking a big pot of stew, and I *thought* the jar of pepper had those little holes in it to control the flow.  I was wrong, it was just an open top jar.  So I went to "sprinkle", but basically dumped the entire jar into the stew.  But wait, it gets worse.  

 

Now any person of normal intelligence would have just scooped out the big lump of pepper (yes, inevitably taking *some* of the stew with it, but not a big deal) and thrown it away.  Not me!  In my panic, I stirred the pepper into the stew really fast, as if not *seeing* the giant lump of pepper in the stew meant no one would notice!!!  Needless to say, it was inedible.  At least my brother got a good laugh out of the situation.  My parents didn't seem so amused.  :D

[2ndGenHomeschooler]

Once when I was 11 I decided to make a big breakfast to surprise my mom. Dad had left for work and mom was in the shower. I recruited my younger siblings to help me. The menu was eggs, bacon, toast, and fried leftover baked potatoes. I knew how to make everything but the potatoes. I'd watched my mom fry potatoes before but when it came to doing it myself I had no idea how to cook in oil. I wondered out loud when the oil was ready and my 8yo brother said mom let it boil first. (Sounded good to me - and 8yo isn't that young when you're only 11.) I cranked the stove up to high and waited for a long time but it never boiled. I finally decided to just throw a slice of potato in and see what happened. It exploded. I had left the nearly full 1 gallon jug of oil next to the stove and it caught on fire catching all the cabinets on fire. My 9yo brother grabbed the fire extinguisher but he wouldn't use it because he thought mom would be mad at him for making a mess. I didn't know how to use it. Our 5yo brother went running for a bucket of water and fortunately mom was out of the shower and figured out what was going on before he had a chance to follow through. We had three fire trucks, an ambulance, and a police car in front of our house at 6:30am. We were all fine. My parents got a completely remodeled kitchen (except the awful, dated floor which wasn't damaged at all), the neighbors brought us breakfast, professional cleaners cleaned every inch of our house, all of our clothes were dry cleaned or washed by friends, and we spent the summer in my grandparents' pool so we'd be out of the way while all that happened.

[Guest]

Another newlywed one...I knew to mix flour and water to pour into beef drippings for making gravy. I thought I'd be so smart and mix the flour w/the beef drippings instead of water (better flavor, right?). As I was shaking the two ingredients in a plastic cup w/a lid, the lid suddenly popped off and the mixture went EVERYWHERE. Apparently, the beef drippings were a little too hot to enclose like that. :lol:

I just did something like this yesterday, even though I knew this is probably what would happen. I was making a wine gravy that I had already been reducing for twenty minutes and I didn't want to use water, which would dilute the flavor I just went about reducing. So I tried to put the wine into a cup off the stove, with flour, but yeah, that sucker blew off in under a minute. At least I had it over the sink because I did figure that would happen; I just somehow thought I was going to shake it up fast enough that the steam wouldn't have time to explode it. ;)

Edited January 28, 2017 by Quill

[Paige]

Once when I was 11 I decided to make a big breakfast to surprise my mom. Dad had left for work and mom was in the shower. I recruited my younger siblings to help me. The menu was eggs, bacon, toast, and fried leftover baked potatoes. I knew how to make everything but the potatoes. I'd watched my mom fry potatoes before but when it came to doing it myself I had no idea how to cook in oil. I wondered out loud when the oil was ready and my 8yo brother said mom let it boil first. (Sounded good to me - and 8yo isn't that young when you're only 11.) I cranked the stove up to high and waited for a long time but it never boiled. I finally decided to just throw a slice of potato in and see what happened. It exploded. I had left the nearly full 1 gallon jug of oil next to the stove and it caught on fire catching all the cabinets on fire. My 9yo brother grabbed the fire extinguisher but he wouldn't use it because he thought mom would be mad at him for making a mess. I didn't know how to use it. Our 5yo brother went running for a bucket of water and fortunately mom was out of the shower and figured out what was going on before he had a chance to follow through. We had three fire trucks, an ambulance, and a police car in front of our house at 6:30am. We were all fine. My parents got a completely remodeled kitchen (except the awful, dated floor which wasn't damaged at all), the neighbors brought us breakfast, professional cleaners cleaned every inch of our house, all of our clothes were dry cleaned or washed by friends, and we spent the summer in my grandparents' pool so we'd be out of the way while all that happened.

 

You win! (for the best blunder story)

Edited January 28, 2017 by Paige

[The Girls' Mom]

Well, there was the time I was doped up on cold medicine and microwaved one of those ramen noodle bowls...but forgot the water.  The kids lovingly refer to it as "the time mom tried to kill us all with toxic fumes".

 

I have a couple to tell on my dh.  Occasionally, early in our marriage, he would get home from work before I did and cook dinner.  Once he made ground beef burritos.  He didn't tell me until AFTER I took a bite that he'd accidentally used cinnamon instead of cumin.  He was hoping I wouldn't notice.  Then there was the time he decided to make breaded pork chops.  He dipped them in an egg batter that he made and put them in a pan to cook in the oven.  There was extra batter, so he poured it over the top.  We basically had pork chop omelets.  Only they were nasty.  

 

[luuknam]

When I was 10 or 11, my parents renovated our kitchen, and we got a new oven, which was a combination oven/microwave. Soon thereafter, my mom told me to bake some parbaked bread rolls, something I'd done before. So, I put preheat the oven, then put the rolls in, notice it has a timer knob, and set it to the time (15-20 min?). Then, I went upstairs for a little while. After 8 or so min I went back downstairs, and as I open the living room door there's a very burnt smell and some smoke. Turns out the timer knob was for the microwave part, so the rolls had been microwaved and baked simultaneously.

 

Other than that, I've had several recipes where I thought something didn't seem right, but followed the recipe anyway. I'm finally starting to get better about not doing what the recipe says if it doesn't make sense to me.

[Guest]

These are funny! My worst kitchen catastrophy was when I tried to make homemade marshmallows. I knew it was important to be very technical about it, but I was nevertheless interrupted and left my then-12yo son to keep the mixture heating just to a certain temp. Well, I knew there would be trouble because it had gone towards the butterscotch candy phase. I tried to mix it and almost burned up the motor on my KitchenAid stand mixer. I chucked the whole sticky mess in the sink and blasted it with boiling water, which worked, but I had my doubts. I have not worked up the nerve to try making the marshmallows again, even though I really want to experience success with it.

 

The classic from my childhood was the time my sister and I conceived to make Popcorn Balls. We read the recipe, which called for "6 cups of popped corn." You can probably imagine our error. We poured in 6 cups of kernels. Folks, that makes a whole lot of popped corn. We had a trashbag-full of popcorn for a couple weeks.

[Guest]

Once when I was 11 I decided to make a big breakfast to surprise my mom. Dad had left for work and mom was in the shower. I recruited my younger siblings to help me. The menu was eggs, bacon, toast, and fried leftover baked potatoes. I knew how to make everything but the potatoes. I'd watched my mom fry potatoes before but when it came to doing it myself I had no idea how to cook in oil. I wondered out loud when the oil was ready and my 8yo brother said mom let it boil first. (Sounded good to me - and 8yo isn't that young when you're only 11.) I cranked the stove up to high and waited for a long time but it never boiled. I finally decided to just throw a slice of potato in and see what happened. It exploded. I had left the nearly full 1 gallon jug of oil next to the stove and it caught on fire catching all the cabinets on fire. My 9yo brother grabbed the fire extinguisher but he wouldn't use it because he thought mom would be mad at him for making a mess. I didn't know how to use it. Our 5yo brother went running for a bucket of water and fortunately mom was out of the shower and figured out what was going on before he had a chance to follow through. We had three fire trucks, an ambulance, and a police car in front of our house at 6:30am. We were all fine. My parents got a completely remodeled kitchen (except the awful, dated floor which wasn't damaged at all), the neighbors brought us breakfast, professional cleaners cleaned every inch of our house, all of our clothes were dry cleaned or washed by friends, and we spent the summer in my grandparents' pool so we'd be out of the way while all that happened.

You win!

[Chelle in MO]

Once when I was 11 I decided to make a big breakfast to surprise my mom. Dad had left for work and mom was in the shower. I recruited my younger siblings to help me. The menu was eggs, bacon, toast, and fried leftover baked potatoes. I knew how to make everything but the potatoes. I'd watched my mom fry potatoes before but when it came to doing it myself I had no idea how to cook in oil. I wondered out loud when the oil was ready and my 8yo brother said mom let it boil first. (Sounded good to me - and 8yo isn't that young when you're only 11.) I cranked the stove up to high and waited for a long time but it never boiled. I finally decided to just throw a slice of potato in and see what happened. It exploded. I had left the nearly full 1 gallon jug of oil next to the stove and it caught on fire catching all the cabinets on fire. My 9yo brother grabbed the fire extinguisher but he wouldn't use it because he thought mom would be mad at him for making a mess. I didn't know how to use it. Our 5yo brother went running for a bucket of water and fortunately mom was out of the shower and figured out what was going on before he had a chance to follow through. We had three fire trucks, an ambulance, and a police car in front of our house at 6:30am. We were all fine. My parents got a completely remodeled kitchen (except the awful, dated floor which wasn't damaged at all), the neighbors brought us breakfast, professional cleaners cleaned every inch of our house, all of our clothes were dry cleaned or washed by friends, and we spent the summer in my grandparents' pool so we'd be out of the way while all that happened.

 

Oh, my gosh!   :scared:  That's the stuff that mom-nightmares are made of!   I'm so glad everyone was ok!

 

(The bolded really made me laugh!)

[Chelle in MO]

:lol:  That sounds like something I would do!

 

 

 

I remembered another genius cooking moment from many years ago.  When I was a teenager I would occasionally (not very often!) volunteer to cook dinner, but I was still a very inexperienced cook.  One time I was cooking a big pot of stew, and I *thought* the jar of pepper had those little holes in it to control the flow.  I was wrong, it was just an open top jar.  So I went to "sprinkle", but basically dumped the entire jar into the stew.  But wait, it gets worse.  

 

Now any person of normal intelligence would have just scooped out the big lump of pepper (yes, inevitably taking *some* of the stew with it, but not a big deal) and thrown it away.  Not me!  In my panic, I stirred the pepper into the stew really fast, as if not *seeing* the giant lump of pepper in the stew meant no one would notice!!!  Needless to say, it was inedible.  At least my brother got a good laugh out of the situation.  My parents didn't seem so amused.   :D

 

 

I just did something like this yesterday, even though I knew this is probably what would happen. I was making a wine gravy that I had already been reducing for twenty minutes and I didn't want to use water, which would dilute the flavor I just went about reducing. So I tried to put the wine into a cup off the stove, with flour, but yeah, that sucker blew off in under a minute. At least I had it over the sink because I did figure that would happen; I just somehow thought I was going to shake it up fast enough that the steam wouldn't have time to explode it. ;)

 

I'm seeing a theme here...isn't it funny what we'll talk ourselves into?  :lol:

[solascriptura]

I found some marinated pork bulgogi at the Asian market last night. I didn't ruin it. It was delicious, BUT I made two pounds of it quickly in my cast iron skillet and some oil. My kitchen is COVERED in a layer of grease. I made a first pass at cleaning, but need to go in again. The floors were so bad I had to mop first and then sweep. I need to mop again. I haven't even dealt with the range hood yet. I knew it was spitting while I was doing it, but I just didn't realize the full devastation until this morning. I'm a MESSY cook, but this was extreme.

 

Next time I'll just grill it outside no matter how cold.

Ugh.. done that before with the same dish. Koreans usually lay newspaper everywhere they can before attempting to pan fry pork bulgogi.

[BarbecueMom]

My friends and I once tried to bake an angel food cake in a 9x13 pan, at 450 degrees, instead of the normal angel food cake pan at 350 degrees. Completely scorched and burnt on the outside, goop in the center. There was like an inner ring of okay cake.

 

In our defense, we were pretty drunk that night.

 

I have done the "strain the broth right down the drain" thing before too! I also missed the colander one time draining spaghetti and dumped it into the sink, landing right on an open raw meat package. Neither of those can be blamed on alcohol though.

[Tree Frog]

Another newlywed one...I knew to mix flour and water to pour into beef drippings for making gravy. I thought I'd be so smart and mix the flour w/the beef drippings instead of water (better flavor, right?). As I was shaking the two ingredients in a plastic cup w/a lid, the lid suddenly popped off and the mixture went EVERYWHERE. Apparently, the beef drippings were a little too hot to enclose like that. :lol:

:D

I thought I was being smart to use a Tupperware salad dressing shaker to make my cherry jello one time. Worked like a charm until it exploded red cherry jello everywhere... cabinets, counters, floor. What a hot, sticky mess!

[EMPgirl]

A few years ago the kids asked for pumkin pie. I rolled a perfect crust, mixed up the pumkin filling, and baked it to perfection. Kids waited patiently for it to cool. Finally, we sliced it up, topped it with whipped cream, and they shoveled in a big bite. I forgot to add the sugar ðŸ˜.

 

A friend of mine hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner and thickened the gravy with cream of tartar. Nobody said a word and she didn't realize till the next day when she tasted the gravy with leftovers. 😆

Edited January 28, 2017 by EMPgirl

[Gisel_le]

When I was first married at 19, I asked my new husband what his favorite dinner was because even though I had zero cooking experience, I figured I'd be able to make it. How hard could cooking actually be? Ha!

 

He was a southern boy with a southern mama who could make the most amazing fried chicken you've ever tasted. Years later, I actually saw her preparing her fried chicken and it was an all day event.

 

Anyway, I completely burnt the chicken. We sat down to eat it anyway, figuring we could pick off the burnt stuff. One big bite later, my husband was spitting out the raw, still bloody chicken. Gag!! I cried.

[Chelle in MO]

I thought I was being smart to use a Tupperware salad dressing shaker to make my cherry jello one time. Worked like a charm until it exploded red cherry jello everywhere... cabinets, counters, floor. What a hot, sticky mess!

 

Ewww!  That would definitely be worse than beef broth!

 

When I was first married at 19, I asked my new husband what his favorite dinner was because even though I had zero cooking experience, I figured I'd be able to make it. How hard could cooking actually be? Ha!

 

He was a southern boy with a southern mama who could make the most amazing fried chicken you've ever tasted. Years later, I actually saw her preparing her fried chicken and it was an all day event.

 

Anyway, I completely burnt the chicken. We sat down to eat it anyway, figuring we could pick off the burnt stuff. One big bite later, my husband was spitting out the raw, still bloody chicken. Gag!! I cried.

 

At first I was laughing when I read, "How hard could cooking actually be?"  But I was so sad reading at the end!  I would've cried, too!  

 

I tried to cook my first turkey for our first Thanksgiving.  Little did I know the oven in our new house had a malfunctioning thermometer. The turkey looked raw on one side and done on the other!    

[Cecropia]

I've cooked a frozen pizza with the cardboard still under it a few times.

 

I manage to cook a roast with that juice-absorbing paper/plastic pad underneath it about once a year.

 

I really need to be better about checking under things.

[AnnE-girl]

My biggest blunder was attempting to add water to a Pyrex pan of acorn squash that had already been in the oven for half an hour. Fortunately my oldest, who was a toddler at the time, was not in the kitchen when the glass started exploding in the oven. We had a picnic dinner in the living room of Burger King that night.

[KungFuPanda]

Ugh.. done that before with the same dish. Koreans usually lay newspaper everywhere they can before attempting to pan fry pork bulgogi.

Ah man. That's good advice. We had cheese and crackers for dinner because I haven't dealt with all the fallout yet and I didn't want to work in there.

[Heidi]

Newly-wed, I was so excited to make french bread just like my mom. She even made me a recipe book to follow. Her directions said "salt generously."

 

It was not edible.

[rose]

All these newlywed stories remind me that I need to actually let my dc have a chance to screw things up on my watch. I sure hate giving up control of the kitchen!

[Chelle in MO]

I thought of another...(I should probably quit before you think I'm totally incompetent!)

 

I had several bowls of pizza dough (covered w/flour sack towels) rising in the oven.  Took a couple of the bowls out. Kneaded that dough, then turned on the oven to preheat. I smelled something burning, so I opened the oven and saw a flour sack towel IN FLAMES.  Shut the oven door and called hubby who was in the garage right outside the kitchen door. He grabbed a spray bottle of water and doused the flames. 

 

No dough was harmed in the making of this blunder!   :D

[Greta]

Newly-wed, I was so excited to make french bread just like my mom. She even made me a recipe book to follow. Her directions said "salt generously."

 

It was not edible.

 

 

Moms and their recipes!  Sometimes they don't realize just how specific we newbies need those instructions to be!  The first time I ever made my own icing for a cake I was using a recipe that my mom gave me.  It said to melt butter and cocoa and vanilla (and maybe something else I'm forgetting) in a saucepan on the stove, and then add powdered sugar until it reached the desired consistency.  So, being totally clueless, I'm adding a teaspoon of powdered sugar at a time, and starting to get frustrated that the consistency isn't changing at all.  Finally, it dawned on me that the powdered sugar was the main ingredient in icing!!!  DUH!  So then I started adding it a cup at a time, and turned out fine.  It just took awhile.  :D

 

I'm going to have to stop sharing stories now, because I'm starting to feel like the world's dumbest cook!

[gingersmom]

I was making a pound cake for the school bake sale.

 

This was a big deal because my mother did not/would not bake and so I was so proud to do this alone.

 

I'm yelling at my brothers/father not to breathe/move a muscle because my cake had risen and I didn't want anything to happen to it.

 

I walk in kitchen, open oven door to admire it and accidentally let the oven door slam shut.

 

My cake went flat and I was in tears.

 

I think I landed buying something pre made for that stupid bake sale.

[Chelle in MO]

Moms and their recipes!  Sometimes they don't realize just how specific we newbies need those instructions to be!  The first time I ever made my own icing for a cake I was using a recipe that my mom gave me.  It said to melt butter and cocoa and vanilla (and maybe something else I'm forgetting) in a saucepan on the stove, and then add powdered sugar until it reached the desired consistency.  So, being totally clueless, I'm adding a teaspoon of powdered sugar at a time, and starting to get frustrated that the consistency isn't changing at all.  Finally, it dawned on me that the powdered sugar was the main ingredient in icing!!!  DUH!  So then I started adding it a cup at a time, and turned out fine.  It just took awhile.   :D

 

I'm going to have to stop sharing stories now, because I'm starting to feel like the world's dumbest cook!

 

My mom is the same way.  I always wanted to skip the decades of practice and go straight to the "experienced cook" stage.  I now have the decades, but don't feel experienced!

 

The above sounds like chocolate frosting for Texas sheet cake!  Mmmmmm... :drool5:

 

Just think how much you've learned from those experiences!  They've made you a GREAT cook, I'm sure!