S/O Proud kitchen moments -- Kitchen disasters

[AuntyT]

I've got a couple them:

My first attempt at a cake (age 13), I tried to fit a full cake mix into 1 heart shaped pan (it should have gone into two pans).  The during baking, it started to overflow from the pan and there was cake all over the bottom of the oven. I tried  to scoop out some of the batter from the middle while it was baking (and getting batter all over the oven door).  The end result was burnt edges and raw middle.

My latest one involved making garlic bread for a big family dinner.  There was 1 piece that wasn't quite done so I stuck it back in the oven while I was serving up everything else.  About half way through dinner, we notice that something seems a little off but just put off at to leftover smells from the BBQ.  After dinner, I noticed that the oven was still on and then pull out what used to be a piece of garlic bread and is now a piece of carbon.  It took me two hours of scrubbing to get the oven cleaned. 

[gramma dishes]

...   After dinner, I noticed that the oven was still on and then pull out what used to be a piece of garlic bread and is now a piece of carbon.  ...

Just think, if you had left it in there a few more hours maybe you'd have gotten a diamond!   

[Bethalize]

When picking recipes from the Internet it behooves us all to remember that different locations use different scales of temperature. I thought 200 degrees Celsius was high for a meringue cookie. It was 200 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius). I cooked those babies at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. After fifteen minutes I thought they smelled rather cooked for something that should take an hour. They were utterly cremated.

[faithlessone]

My latest one involved making garlic bread for a big family dinner.  There was 1 piece that wasn't quite done so I stuck it back in the oven while I was serving up everything else.  About half way through dinner, we notice that something seems a little off but just put off at to leftover smells from the BBQ.  After dinner, I noticed that the oven was still on and then pull out what used to be a piece of garlic bread and is now a piece of carbon.  It took me two hours of scrubbing to get the oven cleaned. 

Somewhere there is a photo of me with a similarly cremated bit of garlic bread, and a very sad look on my face. It was the first time I'd cooked dinner for my housemates. I managed to make awesome pizza from scratch (including the base), a nice salad and a pretty good tiramisu, but somehow I totally forgot about the garlic bread in the oven.

[Diane AKA Traska]

Similar to the Pyrex dishes, once the glass plate on the bottom of my microwave shattered.  To this day, I don't know why, but have you ever tried to use a microwave without one?  It doesn't seem like a vital component...

[Amara]

the hallways reeked of garlic for days!!

This sounds fantastic! I would have loved to come home from work to that lovely scent.

[Shalamar]

My in-laws were once steaming a Christmas pudding.  They put the pudding in its ceramic basin in a saucepan, added water, turned on the heat - then went for a nice long walk.  BAD IDEA - they hadn't added enough water.  They returned to find firefighters about to bash down their apartment door with an axe, because the hallway was full of smoke!

[bo]

Kitchen disasters? Where do I start? I moved from my mother's house to with my husband, and I came from a single parent house hold where my mom worked a lot of hours. So I never had anyone to show me how to cook, so a lot wa trial and error. Now I am a decent cook, but my poor husband had to deal with a lot of bad meals in the start.

1. This one wasn't my fault, but my husband would count this as a disaster. I made tuna casserole one night with cooked celery. My husband is not a picky eater, but the few things he hate is cooked tuna. Now this man was raised to eat whatever was put in front of him and be polite about it. He couldn't even bring himself to eat the tuna casserole.

2. I too also had a disaster with cooked barely. I made in the crock pot beef and barely soup. I emptied the WHOLE bag in the crockpot. Imagine to my suprise when I went to check on the soup and found my crock pot overflowing with cooked barely. I had extra beef broth but a whole bag of barely makes a lot of barely soup!

3. Why I had extra beef broth is because of this. I made chicken and rice soup. It turned out wonderful, my husband wasn't home so I put the pot of soup covered away. When he came home and was starving I proudly took the soup out and you can tell what happend. I looked into the pot and wondered what happend to all my soup? The rice absorbed all the chicken broth.

4. I make pretty good chili and in order to save money instead of canned kindey beans I bought a bag of dried kidney. I never knew you had to soak them overnight or soak them at all So I threw them in with the rest of the chili to be cooked. And cooked and cooked. Anyone ever tried cooking unsoaked dried kidney beans? Yeah well it doesn't cook in a few hours    The chili was wonderful tasting except the crunchy beans

[Shalamar]

I made toffee for my dad once.  I was supposed to add one teaspoon of vinegar - instead, I added one cup.  YUCK!  He gamely ate piece after piece, despite the fact that it tasted like pickles, while I yelled "DON'T, Dad, just throw it out!"

[redsfan]

I once got rice a roni to make with some hamburgers.  To do this, you first brown the rice in a little butter and then add water.  My mistake was making this in the larger pot of an old glass double boiler.  Water+hot glass= shards all over the kitchen.  DH said he came in and I was holding a handle with nothing attached. 

Luckily he has a sense of humor and ordered pizza for us while I scrubbed everything in the kitchen. 

[stitchygreyanonymouse]

To this day I still don’t know what I did wrong, but I tried making brownies out of a box mix one day when I was a teenager (something I’d done many times before), and must have accidentally substituted something, because the result was glued to the pan—we ended up having to throw it out, because the mixture was rock hard and wouldn’t even chip out of the pan.

[BabylonSister]

4. I make pretty good chili and in order to save money instead of canned kindey beans I bought a bag of dried kidney. I never knew you had to soak them overnight or soak them at all So I threw them in with the rest of the chili to be cooked. And cooked and cooked. Anyone ever tried cooking unsoaked dried kidney beans? Yeah well it doesn't cook in a few hours    The chili was wonderful tasting except the crunchy beans

Only a few weeks ago, I decided to make myself some cabbage and split pea soup, one of my favorite cold weather dishes.  I grabbed the bag of split peas that was lurking in my pantry, and put everything in the crock pot.  Several hours later, everything was cooked but the split peas, instead of mushy, were still rock hard.  I allowed the soup to cook overnight and the next morning, they were still like little pebbles.  I gave up and blended the soup.  It was ... grainy.  And then I googled "why did my split peas stay hard?" and found out that old split peas will do that.  I guess they must have been lurking in my pantry for a long while. 

[rose red]

One time I was making canned soup and wondered why it was so salty.  After I finished, I realised I forgot to add one can of water. 

Just last week, I was making frozen dumplings.  I put them in a pan with a little bit of water to steam them up before frying.  I forgot and the water evaporated and the dumplings burned.  Wouldn't be so bad except for the smell that lingered for hours.

[snowfire]

I once tried making Ina Garten's roasted potato soup recipe.  I ended up with a very large pot containing what looked and tasted like a mix of wallpaper paste and hagfish mucus.  Another recipe that was never tried again.

I, too, would have LOVED the uber-garlic.  (My favorite pizza place has one called Death by Garlic...I love it!)

I've had the thermostat on the oven go on the fritz.  The smoke alarm went off before the timer did.  I had a carbonized manhole cover instead of a pizza. 

Also had a shocking experience with a waffle iron.  Apparently there was a short or something in the wiring and when I went to pour the batter in, I got zapped and flung waffle batter all around the kitchen....twice.  The large CLANG heard next was that waffle iron hitting the trash.

I was once making a red velvet cake from scratch and used AP flour instead of cake flour.  Three red frisbees.

We sometimes put a teaspoon of powdered ginger into the chili when we are making it.  This is for approx. 2 gallons of chili.  The top came off the spice jar and somewhere around 1/4 cup went in.  I tried to scoop it out but the chili was so bad the dog tried to bury it.    She wouldn't eat even a little bit, and this dog was usually a mobile garbage disposal.

Not mine, but Aunt.  She was a so-so cook, good candy maker, but incredibly lousy baker.  Her pie crusts were so thick and tough that when I was cutting a pie that she made during a family thanksgiving dinner, I cut through the pan too. (I was having to use the point of the knife to perforate the crust before I could slice it.) Luckily, it was just a cheap foil pie pan.

Then there was the Great Pickle Boilover.  My GM's old stove had what we called a "cooker well".  It was a burner recessed into the stove top with a specific pot which fit down into it.  It was lovely for cooking things low and slow as the well held the heat well.  We were cooking the pickling solution for a batch of zucchini pickles which had a LOT of sugar in it.  It was happily simmering away when we turned away to do something else.  When we looked again, the solution had boiled up and over the pot, down the side of the stove, on the floor, down in the cooker well.  It took HOURS to scrub all that stuff off.  The sugar in it made it really stick badly.

[Emmy]

Most of my cooking fails come from misreading the directions.

I was making a new recipe that was chicken in a sauce with grapes and a little bit of heat.  I misread teaspoons for tablespoons and added 3 tablespoons of red pepper.  It was inedible.  DH and I were newlyweds and he was kind enough to say it wasn't too bad.

I got a new coffee maker as a wedding gift and used it for the first time a few friends stopped in.  The directions on the coffee said 'add a tablespoon of coffee per 6 oz water' and I misread it as a teaspoon.  Friends kindly drank their coffee without saying a word.  I poured myself a cup and it tasted like hot brown water.

Not enough liquid in the crockpot so the beef in my beef stew was all dry and chewy.