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The Confessional: the hall of blown dinners, ruined meals, and other disasters

I wanted to make a classic chocolate cake for a friend's birthday and smelted chocolate and butter in a bowl placed in a pan of hot water.

Mixed egg yolk, flour, and whipped eggwites at the end...

When I tasted the mixture before pouring it in the mold, I thinked "What's going wrong with that chocolate, what's that strange taste that I can't explain :001_huh:"

I didn't see on the package that my butter was salted butter.

Fortunately, I had just enough time and ingredients to make another one...

The moral of this history, and one cooking golden rule : Allways taste what you are doing :biggrin1:
 
Being a rather poor college student, and willing to experiment, I combined a can of tuna fish, with some spaghetti noodles, and spaghetti sauce. The resulting concoction was so horrible, that it nearly made me vomit just attempting to eat it. :scared::scared:

Actually, spaghetti with a tomato-tuna sauce can be quite good. I don't know how well it would go over with canned sauce, but it's one of my favorite easy, hearty lunches.
 
I was once at a fancy-schmancy Bar Mitzvah, and when they served coffee after the meal, I mistook the salt for sugar, and put a teaspoon of it in my coffee.

My cousin pointed out my error, and said "You know, that's salt. Not sugar."

Rather than appear stupid, I said "I know. I like my coffee this way." And I drank the whole cup.
 
When I was somewhat smaller, I got the brilliant idea to make breakfast in bed for my mother on Mother's Day. I stuck to eggs and toast, two things I was allowed to cook by myself at that age, and I decided to make her a cup of coffee to go with it. Unfortunately, I didn't know the difference between instant coffee and ground coffee, so I just dumped a heaping tablespoon full of coffee in a mug of hot water and stirred it a little, reasoning that it would shortly dissolve. My mother, gods bless her, drank her coffee and thanked me for the breakfast while picking grounds out of her teeth.

That's funny, my wife once used INSTANT coffee in a coffee maker. Tasted horrible, was strong enough to strip paint. I drank the whole pot. :laugh:
 
I was once at a fancy-schmancy Bar Mitzvah, and when they served coffee after the meal, I mistook the salt for sugar, and put a teaspoon of it in my coffee.

My cousin pointed out my error, and said "You know, that's salt. Not sugar."

Rather than appear stupid, I said "I know. I like my coffee this way." And I drank the whole cup.

Alton Brown uses salt in coffee. I tried it once.
 
I don't think you should worry about your cooking skills. My grandfather has a similar story from when he and my grandmother were first married- they roasted two ducks of two different types, and one stunk so badly it ruined the other and they had to throw them both out and open the windows, etc- and he maintains it's because the stinky duck was a fish-eating type. He says that only the grain- and plant-eating ducks are any good. I'm not sure this is scientifically proven, but he says all the old-timers he talked to afterwards confirmed it.

I have heard something similar. Some ducks just taste terrible, he calls them mud hens.



alton brown uses salt in anything, i suspect he plans to be buried in a vat of kosher salt,

You say that like its a bad thing :tongue_sm
 
Once when i was a young boy,my grandfather wanted an icecream sundae but did not feel like going to get one,so I decided to make him one.Bear in mind i was only six so I did not know what went well together.I got vanilla icecream out and,tuna,tobasco,cheddar cheese and worcestershire sauce,he tasted the concoction and he had the most cringed look on his face but he kept eating it:laugh:.
 
I was in a dinner group in college. We all like to cook and took turns at each others' places for meals a couple times a month. My turn came around, and being of Cajun descent, I decided to prepare shrimp creole, which I had made a couple times before with my mom's supervision. One of the ingredients was 2 cloves of garlic, minced. I wasn't sure what a "clove" was, and put in 2 heads of garlic! A few bites into the meal, everyone was sweating bullets. No vampires bothered anyone in the group for weeks... Despite my misstep, I wasn't kicked out and we all laughed after the burn and stink wore off.
 

Alacrity59

Wanting for wisdom
I try not to make new things for the first time when entertaining. I did get caught a bit at Christmas doing some of the veg in the microwave due to lack of stove top space and pots. It takes a heck of a lot longer to cook carrots for 8 people than it does for just my wife and I. Not a total disaster but a bit of a delay on a day that some folk really needed to leave early for a long trip home to avoid an impending ice storm.

Occasionally I land a sirloin roast that has a line of gristle running through it . . .
 
I try not to make new things for the first time when entertaining. I did get caught a bit at Christmas doing some of the veg in the microwave due to lack of stove top space and pots. It takes a heck of a lot longer to cook carrots for 8 people than it does for just my wife and I. Not a total disaster but a bit of a delay on a day that some folk really needed to leave early for a long trip home to avoid an impending ice storm.

Occasionally I land a sirloin roast that has a line of gristle running through it . . .

Did you have any trouble with the carrots in the microwave? I saw a show where they warned against it because they throw sparks. I of course had to try it and there were indeed sparks.
 

Alacrity59

Wanting for wisdom
Did you have any trouble with the carrots in the microwave? I saw a show where they warned against it because they throw sparks. I of course had to try it and there were indeed sparks.

No . . . I did have water in the dish as well . . . and I know things microwaved take a mostly mass to time proportion . . . but the carrots took somehow longer than I thought.
 
I was in a dinner group in college. We all like to cook and took turns at each others' places for meals a couple times a month. My turn came around, and being of Cajun descent, I decided to prepare shrimp creole, which I had made a couple times before with my mom's supervision. One of the ingredients was 2 cloves of garlic, minced. I wasn't sure what a "clove" was, and put in 2 heads of garlic! A few bites into the meal, everyone was sweating bullets. No vampires bothered anyone in the group for weeks... Despite my misstep, I wasn't kicked out and we all laughed after the burn and stink wore off.

That reminds me of the time I made a stir-fry and put 6 large cloves of garlic in it. It tasted wonderful, but when I went to the gym the next day I became aware of that side-effect the instant I broke a sweat :lol:
I had a nutrition teacher mistake a question and tell the class that a head of garlic was a clove. I'll bet that made for a lot of ended relationships.

Probably the worst culinary mistake I made involved playing God with Bear River instant soup. My friend and I (we must have been maybe 13) decided to "make it better" by tossing in a huge amount of spices (curry, red pepper, cumin, you name it) and at least 1/2 a block of cheese. The resulting mixture was so thick that I tipped a bowl off the table which landed face-down and didn't spill a drop.
That soup is pretty tough on the lower GI system anyway. And when our mixture began to process.....I think the only reason my family didn't drive us into the mountains and leave, was that they would have to risk being in a car together and they were afraid we would kill everything in the wilderness around us.

I should note, WE thought the concoction was delicious and tended to make it many times:ohmy:
 
Tried pork shoulder with guiness, dried cherries, and sweet potatoes. I've done this before and it's sickly sweet, so I subbed cranberries for the cherries and made a couple of adjustments to tone down the sweetness.

Fortunately, the nastiness and sickly sweetness doesn't penetrate the pork, which was edible. But the sauce... Can't tell whether the cranberries that subbed for the cherries made it too bitter, or if I burned the shoulder when browning--it tastes a bit like burnt pepper--or if it just went wrong because the adjusted recipe was unbalanced. Since it was bitter, I added vinegar, and anyway I didn't use as much as was specified in the recipe. But that just brought out the saltiness and heightened the sweetness even more. What do you do with a dish that's at once bitter, too salty, and too sweet? I guess that's a lot of sauce that goes in the trash. At least it'll make a few sandwiches.
 
what a goodly thread resurrection.

Once made a Thai green curry that I'd made a dozen times before, sauce lovingly prepared from a jar (I was younger then....). I used a different sauce and did not notice that one tablespoon, not the usual whole jar was to be used.
Inedible, tongue felt like it was blistering on contact.
 
I tried to make pan seared tuna encrusted with cashews or some nut. Totally forgot about it and nuts burned and tuna was cooked well done.. What a waste.
 
I used to travel a great deal. At the time this happened my passport had two extra inserts to hold the in/out stamps. I've eaten meals at every type of restaurant you can imagine and enjoyed most of them. After our first ten years of marriage my wife said I was only home for three of those ten years.

This event happened at an expensive but relatively casual Houston, Texas fish restaurant.

Mike and I were having an early dinner after a day full of meetings. All we wanted to do was eat, get back to the hotel, call our wives and go to bed.

The restaurant was crowded and rowdy. Gulf shrimp cocktails were the restaurant's calling card. They had a great red sauce full of horseradish to go with unbelievably fresh, tender boiled shrimp! Waitstaff piled trays with stacks of empty and partially empty sauce bowls. They stacked the bowls at least a foot high. They trays must have been extremely heavy to move. A waitress picked up one of the heavy trays and as she approached our table she stumbled.

Mike and I had taken off our suit jackets and loosened our ties. We were halfway through our dinner when the tray and the waitress landed on us, our dinner, and our table. When the sauce settled it looked like we had been sprayed with an automatic weapon. We were drenched in bright red shrimp sauce. It was dripping down our faces. I blew it out of my nose. It was dripping off our ears. Our white shirts were covered in red gore. Later, when I put my arm into my jacket, I found sauce had made it almost up to my elbow.

The waitress was horrified. We were so stunned we couldn't say a word. When I saw Mike take off his glasses so he could see what happened I started laughing. When I blew red sauce out of my nose Mike started laughing too. The guy at the table next to ours said, "you guys need something stronger than beer". The waitress called the manager. The manager called the owner. To their credit, the manager and the owner did not offer to fire the waitress. Allowing the trays to get that loaded and asking waitstaff to manoeuvre them around a crowded restaurant was not her fault. They did buy our meal and our beers. They looked at our suits and said, "please try to clean them, when that doesn't work, buy new suits, ties, shirts, socks, and underwear and send us the bill". We went back the next evening, said hello, got a surprised look from the manager and a free dinner. The waitress that drenched us in sauce served us that evening.

The food there is really good.
 
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