S/O Proud kitchen moments -- Kitchen disasters

[jpcher]

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.

Though your cookies were a failure to eat, I think you win the Ingenuity Award!

Both for the 1/2 milk 1/2 butter to make up buttermilk (to a 5th grade mind, this makes a lot of sense to me!) and for painting/selling the cookies as paperweights!

Kitchen Disaster WIN!

[JeanFromBNA]

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.

Just found out that a small chocolate factory is moving in across the street from the office.  It's like a reward for all of my hard work. 

[norrina]

A few years ago, I was living in a house-share with a woman and her 11 y.o. son. She was the primary tenant, and I had moved in as a sub lessee after she had been living there for a few months already. This is important to the story.

One night, we were snowed in from a horrible storm, so I decided I was going to go ahead and braise the pork roast I had instead of crock potting it like I usually do, since I didn't have anything better to do. It is also important to the story that when I say "snowed in" I mean that the only road into/out of my neighborhood was completely gridlocked with stuck vehicles.

I was raised vegetarian, and don't cook meat very often even now. So I called my now-fiancé to ask how exactly one goes about braising a pork roast. He suggested that I sear it on the stovetop to lock in the juices before putting it in the oven. So I got some oil heated up in the dutch oven, then turned around to move the roast from the counter to the pan. In that instant the smoke detector started going off and there were flames shooting from the pan. My housemate's son was working at the computer in the kitchen when this happened and started freaking out. I was frantically trying to get at the lid to the skillet while at the same time mentally cataloging how quickly I could get to the baking powder in case the lid didn't work, while in the background there is a blaring smoke detector and a screaming child. I throw the lid on the pan and get the pan off the heat, and the fire instantly goes out, but the kid is still terrified, and the smoke detector has gone to a fire alarm because I didn't get the fire/smoke stopped quickly enough. I'm hollering for my housemate, both because her son needs her and (this is where me being a subletter/moving in later becomes important) because I was never told that the house had a fire alarm so I need her to disable it before the alarm company sends out the fire brigade.

The housemate finally comes downstairs (if there had been a real fire she would have been dead, and her son too if he had waited for her), but by then the fire company had already been notified. We tried to call the alarm company, but were told the fire company had to come out to confirm that everything was okay. Except, remember the storm and the clogged roads? 5 hours later we got a call from the fire company that they were very sorry but they simply couldn't get to our house.

[LadyJaneinMD]

Oh that reminds me of another story!!

I was making cinnamon rolls one day.  I lived in an apartment where the smoke alarms went off every time I cooked, probably due to bad placement or something. Anyway, I kept hand fans near the one alarm and just fanned it off everytime I cooked.  So after taking the rolls out of the oven, I turned it off, and went to fan off the smoke alarm.   It came back on, and I fanned it off again.  Then the one in the bedroom started in, and it became clear that something was very, very wrong. 

As a little background, my apartment complex had been victimized by an arsonist lately, along with some very real fires, so we'd had at least 18 fires in the last year.  Knowing this,  I took my cell phone and headed down to the laundry room to see if he'd struck again.  Nope, no fire.  So, on the way back upstairs, I called 911 and explained the problem.  She told me to get out of the apartment, but I wasn't leaving without my cat, so I got out her travel box and started looking for her.  In the kitchen, I noticed that I had turned the oven to BROIL instead of OFF!   Ah-ha, mystery solved!!  (The heat was setting off the smoke alarms!)

The operator was still telling me to get out of the house, and I told her 'There Is No Fire!', and the fire trucks were on their way, sirens blaring.   I was turning on fans and opening windows when they showed up and so I opened the door and let them in and explained the problem.  I was so embarrassed.  I did offer the cute firemen some cinnamon rolls, but they weren't interested.  *sigh* 

To this day, I call them my FireHouse Cinnamon Rolls.
For what it's worth, the firemen weren't angry at all.  They said they'd rather rush to a false alarm then not get called for a very real emergency.   

[Twik]

One of my friends got married at university. She had a punch and appetizers reception in a small hall on campus.

The appetizers were heated in the oven, and one tray decided to smoke. The alarms went off. Firemen arrived. It was an exciting reception! (Fortunately, she had a great sense of humour about the event, and made jokes afterwards about the Halifax Fire Department arriving to object to her marriage.)

[hermanne]

Not a complete disaster, as I was able to salvage it...

For DD's first birthday, I decided to make her a layer cake. My pans are the silocon kind, where you have to put a baking pan under the cake pan. One of the baking pans I used was thin and old, and it kind of warped in the oven. Thus one end of the cake pan was much higer than the other, resulting in the cake being waffer-thin on one side.

I sliced off the thicker end to patch the thin one, and hid it with frosting.

[Snooks]

Every time I have attempted to make éclairs I have failed miserably.  I follow the recipe to the letter yet they always end up flat as a pancake.  It really irks me that I can't make them.

[littlelauraj]

There are some things that I'm pretty good at, and canning is one of them.  Last year I made a recipe for cranberry mustard to can and it was great.  So a couple of days ago I thought I'd give the beer mustard recipe I have a try.  It said to try different types of beer, so I used the vanilla porter that I've been drinking.  Well, vanilla porter + brown mustard seed = ear wax flavored mustard.  I went ahead and added the rest of the ingredients, just in case the malt vinegar and brown sugar were what makes the recipe.  Ooh, vinegary, sweet earwax flavored mustard.  I was disappointed to have to throw it out.   

[Seraphia]

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.

There's something about that age, isn't there.

It wasn't exactly a disaster on the score of shattering pans, but I once screwed up a seriously easy recipe, thanks to 12-year-old logic.

I was trying to make layer cookies. Basically, you make brownies in a pan, frost, then press rice crispy treats over the top and add sprinkles. So, doot de do, my brownies come out great, and I'm feeling pretty smart. I start getting down the ingredients for the rice crispy treats. Cereal, butter, sugar, corn syrup? What's corn syrup? Huh... Well, it's yellow liquid in the picture - what's yellow liquid in this cupboard? Oh hey! Here we go. Vegetable oil. Corn's a vegetable, right? And oil and syrup are synonyms, so they must be the same thing. This will totally work.

...

It did not work. I had about two gallons of oiled cereal before I finally called Mom at work to ask why my rice crispy treats wouldn't thicken, and were flying around the bowl when I tried to stir. At least I didn't burn the brownies.

[Thipu1]

This is a story a friend tells about his own kitchen disaster.  I wasn't there to see it and can't vouch for it's authenticity but it's a great tale.

BG/. Joe is very careful about his appearance.  His trousers always have creases that are knife-sharp.  His ties always have the perfect dimple.  His expensive, leather-soled shoes are always shined to within an inch of their lives.  Joe is also quite a good cook.  (end of BG)

Joe was hosting Thanksgiving dinner for his mother, his brother and several friends.  The bird was a bit too large for Joe's roasting pan.  He didn't feel like investing in a new one so he bought a foil pan for the occasion. 

The company was assembled and the turkey was resting. The house was filled with good cheer and the aromas of delicious food.  Glasses of wine were being enjoyed at the table. 

  Mother was to do the honors and had possession of the carving knife and fork when Joe entered the kitchen to make the gravy.  He took the pan out of the oven...

...and it broke...

...all over rhe floor.

Joe slipped and fell into the morass of drippings. 

His brother ran to help and also fell. Mother heard the commotion and, still holding the carving fork ran to the kitchen to see her sons pleading on their knees, 'Don't take another step forward!'

A gravy-less dinner was eventually served.  Fastidious Joe and his brother attended in bathrobes and slippers.   

[Julia Mercer]

Well, vanilla porter + brown mustard seed = ear wax flavored mustard. and  Ooh, vinegary, sweet earwax flavored mustard.

Thank you, you owe me a new laptop, lol!

[gramma dishes]

...   Ooh, vinegary, sweet earwax flavored mustard.  I was disappointed to have to throw it out.   

Just curious ... how does one know the flavor of earwax?   

[Adelaide]

The food was relatively edible, but this was more of a logistical failure on my part. I decided to fry some squash in my apartment. The kitchen has a lower ceiling than the main room (I live in a studio) and after awhile I happened to glance up at the ceiling to see so much smoke that it looked like I was having a rave. The alarm went off and the fire department had to come out. It was humiliating having 5 guys in full fire gear walk into my 500-square foot apartment and ask me things like "Did you have the fan on?" No. "Did you have a window open?" No.

[redsfan]

...   Ooh, vinegary, sweet earwax flavored mustard.  I was disappointed to have to throw it out.   

Just curious ... how does one know the flavor of earwax?   

Bernie Botts Every Flavor Beans, of course   

[Rohanna]

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.

When we lived in Carlisle you could smell the cracker factory (Carr's, I think) baking. Used to make me hungry as heck cause it smelled *fantastic*.,