S/O Proud kitchen moments -- Kitchen disasters

[GratefulMaria]

I have years of burned food under my belt because I'd get sidetracked reading while I was supposed to be paying attention to what was on the stove.  I've even scorched soup while stirring and reading.

My mother had a spectacular combination Moving Day / Kitchen Disaster.  We were frantically packing and cleaning everything, and she had chicken soup going in a pressure cooker.  The gasket let go, scalding greasy liquid sprayed all over the immaculate kitchen, and the lid embedded itself in the ceiling.  My mother took one look at my shocked face gaping up at it, knew she just wouldn't be able to deal with it if I laughed (I was 14), and hissed, "Run!"

[Thipu1]

This is the story of the Demon Baguette.

It started innocently enough.  We had half a loaf of French bread left over from another meal and intended to serve it with some home-made soup.  We put it in the microwave to warm a little.

All seemed well when we sat down to eat.   Then, we started to experience a burned smell.  As we watched, the crust of the bread eerily darkened as smoke began to rise from the loaf.

A dash to the sink was in order.

We later determined that the bread was a little too dry and had caught fire from the inside. 

[GratefulMaria]

This is the story of the Demon Baguette.

It started innocently enough.  We had half a loaf of French bread left over from another meal and intended to serve it with some home-made soup.  We put it in the microwave to warm a little.

All seemed well when we sat down to eat.   Then, we started to experience a burned smell.  As we watched, the crust of the bread eerily darkened as smoke began to rise from the loaf.

A dash to the sink was in order.

We later determined that the bread was a little too dry and had caught fire from the inside.

Wait, it did this after you took it out of the m-wave???

[Thipu1]

Yes, it did.  I know it's hard to believe.  If we hadn't seen it, we would doubt the story ourselves.

We figured that it was in the microwave just long enough to ignite but not long enough for the damage to show until it got to the table. 

[Shalamar]

This one was courtesy of my daughter ... I had two loaves of banana bread in the oven, and I went downstairs to do some chores.  I'd set the timer to go off after an hour.  The timer went off, but I didn't hear it, because I was too far away.  No problem; daughter was in the livingroom, and she heard it.  However - she didn't call me.  Instead, she turned off the timer.

I suddenly remembered my banana bread a good hour after that, and it was burned to a cinder!

[LadyJaneinMD]

the hallways reeked of garlic for days!!

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

I used to live near a town that had a warehouse for spices.  Every so often, the WHOLE TOWN would smell like garlic.   I called it Heaven.   

[LadyJaneinMD]

A couple of years ago, I had a friend coming for the weekend, and I was cooking her a nice dinner, with Chocolate Chess Pie for dessert.  Note, this was a recipe I had made several times, and it was quick, easy, and foolproof. 

Apparently I'm a bigger fool than that.

I had everything set up on the counter and had my hand blender ready to go, when I burned the butter in the microwave.  Durn.  Oh well, I have more butter, but it's frozen, so I got out my nice big cleaver to hack off a chunk of frozen butter and melt it.  Unfortunately, it was a VERY small counter, and when the cleaver cut off the butter, it also caught the cord to the hand blender, and with a very big smokey SPARK, cut the cord.   

When my friend arrived, I fed her the meal, but said, 'There's no Chocolate Chess Pie tonight.  It just wasn't in the cards.'    (I was afraid to go on cooking after that. When mistakes start to happen, it's time to quit, for me).

[Thipu1]

the hallways reeked of garlic for days!!

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

I used to live near a town that had a warehouse for spices.  Every so often, the WHOLE TOWN would smell like garlic.   I called it Heaven.   

Slightly OT.

When I was dating Mr. Thipu, he lived across the street from a facility that roasted coffee.  You didn't need a cup in the morning.  All you had to do was open the window and inhale.  That was also what we called Heaven 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread. 

[magicdomino]

Baking, in general, is not my best thing.  I am a decent cook, but a generally bad baker.  I have tried again and again and again to make pie crust, and seem to finally have it down so that it comes out a good percentage of the time.  But the failures still stick in my mind.  Dry, overworked, overwetted, soggy, horrible messes that ruined perfectly good pie fillings for a long time.  And we won't even talk about my attempts at biscuits-it is a series of painful memories that I am working hard to repress.

And one from my sister:
She used a very thin (cheap) aluminum pan to make poached eggs.  She boiled off the water and melted the pan and burned the eggs.  A smell I assure you I never want to smell again.   

My mother must have had the same poached egg pan.  One blob of molten aluminum melted into the floor.   

Despite all manner of tricks and tips, I am a firm member of the cardboard pie crust club.  Fortunately, Pillsbury makes better crust than I do.

[lilfox]

The first time my college friends and I decided to make a big multiple course dinner...  We were optimistic and decided on pot roast with potatoes, onions, and carrots, a big green salad, garlic bread, and brownies for dessert.  We also were not in possession of a cookbook and this was pre-internet days, so we decided to wing it.

Bad idea.  A) We didn't brown the roast before putting it in the oven.  B) We had no idea of temp + cooking time + weight, and it still wasn't done four hours after we'd planned for 1.5 hours.  Fortunately we salvaged the veggies after they appeared done (long before the roast).  So dinner went something like this:

5 pm - started prepping all the courses
6 pm - ate salad, added veggies to the roast, in anticipation of roast being done at 7 or so
7:30 - roast still mostly raw inside, veggies were done so we took them out
8 pm - veggies and bread
8-11 pm - check roast every 15 min, still not done.
11 pm - remove roast in defeat, slice, and microwave.

Amazingly, it was still edible and actually tasted pretty good (I chalk this up to low standards and hunger).  And the brownies made for an excellent midnight snack.

However, I don't learn quickly from experience and about every few years, I decide to make some multiple course meal where one dish unexpectedly takes 3x longer than the others.

Also let me just say, minced ginger does not belong in hummus.  Yuck.

[Outdoor Girl]

My youngest nephew was turning 2.  And absolutely loved Barney.  So I'd bought the character pan and a cake mix and was making him a Barney cake for his birthday.

But I was making it at my Mom's place, when she wasn't home.  With an unfamiliar stove.  One of those ones with two dials, one to choose the temperature and one to choose the cooking style (bake or broil).  Not knowing the stove, I set it to the right temperature but put it on broil.

It finally finished baking and I pulled it out.  When I flipped it out of the pan, the cake completely fell apart.  My SIL looked at me and said, 'Barney died.'  I had to run to town to the 24 hour grocery store and buy another cake mix.

But nephew did get his Barney cake.

[2littlemonkeys]

Well, just yesterday, I was making yellow cake cupcakes and the ingredients call for melted butter, eggs and milk.  I forgot to temper the eggs.  I don't think scrambled eggs work well with cake.  The second round was much more successful!

Then there was the time I was making fudge.  Instead of paying attention and reading the directions, which called for 2/3 cup of evaporated milk, I just used the whole can.  I didn't discover my mistake until it just wouldn't set.  I re-read the directions and realized what I'd done.  It made great chocolate fudge sauce though!

[siamesecat2965]

 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.

While I don't ahve anything to add as I've never really had a major kitchen disaster, youre descirption of the soup had me in tears of laughter.

[Snooks]

When I was in high school, I had a friend who I had many "adventures" with. One day we were at her house and we decided to make some cookies. I was on board with this, because I was really interested in her brother, and what teenage boy doesn't love cookies? (I met him at school and was starting to be 'friends' with him when I met her. I didn't know they were related for about a month and a half)
So, back to these cookies. We were using her mom's go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe, guaranteed to be delicious. I was reading the ingredient list, and Friend was grabbing everything and putting it on the counter. It's important to note that Friend was child #5 of 6 in her family, so her mom bought almost everything in bulk. Things like flour/sugar/rice were in smaller, plastic bins.
We got to work, mixed up our dough, but we could only find one cookie sheet, so we resigned ourselves to baking several batches. But the first batch turned out really weird. Picture a fried egg. The center mass of each cookie (where the chocolate chips and nuts were) was bigger, but where the cookies had spread, was almost paper thin. Friend called her mom, described the problem we were having, and Mom said it sounded like we needed more flour. So, we added more flour. And more flour. And More flour. It was still not working. If anything our cookies looked worse. So we decided it didn't matter how the cookies looked, we would eat the misshapen monstrosities anyway. I mentioned that I liked her brother, right? Around the time we decided to just eat them, he came home. Before tasting them myself, I offered him a cookie. He took one bite, then ran to the sink and not only spat it out, but he kind of retched a bit as well. I was almost in tears, until I absently nibbled on a cookie, and ran to the garbage can. As it turns out, our cookies were indeed lacking flour. Friend had mistakenly grabbed powdered sugar instead. We made cookie dough with no flour at all, and about 8 cups of powdered sugar. They were terrible. I was embarrassed that I had offered one to the Love of My Life.

I don't think I'll ever live that one down. You see, Friend is now my SIL; I married her brother, and my MIL knows far too many embarrassing Teen Twiggy stories since SIL and I got into a great many interesting situations together.

*Edited to remove huge emoticons

This reminds me of when I was at school, there was a truly awful project we had to do in cookery class which involved us all setting up cake stalls and selling to other pupils, so basically a huge popularity contest which my group lost badly every week.  One week a member of my group was off so two of us decided we'd make what she usually made, chocolate chip cookies, because everyone likes cookies and we thought they'd sell.  In a classic case of too many cooks spoil the broth we forgot the sugar from the mix.  Those were not nice cookies, unsurprisingly they didn't help us with our quest to be the "winning" team.

[twiggy]

This reminds me of when I was at school, there was a truly awful project we had to do in cookery class which involved us all setting up cake stalls and selling to other pupils, so basically a huge popularity contest which my group lost badly every week.  One week a member of my group was off so two of us decided we'd make what she usually made, chocolate chip cookies, because everyone likes cookies and we thought they'd sell.  In a classic case of too many cooks spoil the broth we forgot the sugar from the mix.  Those were not nice cookies, unsurprisingly they didn't help us with our quest to be the "winning" team.

That reminds me of the 5th grade class store. We had a currency system, though I don't remember how we earned/spent the money. I do remember that once per quarter we had a class store day. Students, or groups of students set up booths and sold stuff to each other. I decided that I was going to make sugar cookies, but I couldn't find Grandma's recipe, and she didn't answer when I called. So I looked through a couple of Mom's cookbooks until I found a recipe with a pretty picture. Unfortunately I was unfamiliar with the recipe and some of the ingredients. Instead of buttermilk, I used a mixture of 1/2 milk, 1/2 butter. And I didn't have cream of tarter, so I just added more baking powder. Also, those cookies didn't get as golden brown as I was used to, so I kept them in the oven. They were terrible. Like little hockey pucks of floury rocks. I ended up painting them and selling them as paperweights. I don't know that I really sold very many though.