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

ouch

Stjynnkii membörd dummpsjterd
Face it: not every meal is a home run. Sometimes dinner is a dud. Feel free to add your hoorendous experiences at restaurants, but bear in mind that a ruined meal is particularly distressing when you yourself do the cooking.

So with no further ado, it's time to fess up.
 

ouch

Stjynnkii membörd dummpsjterd
Linguini carbonara.

I must have made this dish 200 times. A few days ago I whipped it up for lunch, and for whatever reason, it wasn't suitable for Fido. Ugh! What the hell happened? It was absolutely disgusting.
 
I'll win this one right now:

Caught the stove ON FIRE with oil...making some Italian doughnuts I had made before...just with a different oil. I heated the oil up, dropped in some dough and BOOM...flames everywhere.

Apparently, Canola oil's flame temp is MUCH lower than vegetable oil. Now I know.





We got to repaint the kitchen though. The oven hood was the only major casualty...sucked up the flames and burnt out the insides, so there were two separate fires to put out.

Fire extinguisher powder is a real pain in the butt to clean up and tough to breath. However, let this be a lesson to you...always keep one handy in the kitchen. I'm usually an incredible cook (not bragging), but accidents can happen to the best of us.

I will never deep fry again. The scar on my hand will remind me not to if my wife's not around.

She was scared out of her mind, I just grabbed the extinguisher and started cleaning up. She wanted to paint the kitchen anyways.
 
My wife and I had only been married for a few months. I get a bright idea to whip up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies while my little bride was out shopping. Those things baked up like little puffs.

Went over the recipe 3 or 4 times and still couldn't figure it out.

My wife got home, took one look at them and said "guess you use baking powder right?"

That day, I learned the difference between baking powder and baking soda. :lol:
 
When I was a kid, probably around 10 or so, my buddy and I baked his mom a cake for her birthday.

We used Icing sugar by mistake instead of flour. Didn't turn out so well.

A few years back cooking for an ex-girlfriend I made some stir fry noodles that turned out to be nothing more than a glorified asian flavoured salt-lick. Years of using natural brewed soy sauce made me forget how salty the commercial stuff can be, and that's all she had on hand.
 
Well the meal wasn't ruined, but the smell of charred flesh kind of killed everyone's appetite. I am an avid griller and I was loading up the grill with hot coals out of a chimney starter. I had a lot of meat to cook, so I had light two chimney starters of coal. Dumped the first one in and set the starter on the ground. When I dumped the second one in a bunch of sparks flew into my face so I jumped back . . . right into the first chimney starter. It seared a patch off my leg (yes, I was wearing shorts) about the size of a saucer. That made me lose my grip on the other chimney starter and then I stepped on the hot coals (no, I wasn't wearing shoes). :scared:

Let's just say after some colorful language and ice, I proceeded to grill the steaks. Not one of my best meals however.
 
My wife and I had only been married for a few months. I get a bright idea to whip up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies while my little bride was out shopping. Those things baked up like little puffs.

Went over the recipe 3 or 4 times and still couldn't figure it out.

My wife got home, took one look at them and said "guess you use baking powder right?"

That day, I learned the difference between baking powder and baking soda. :lol:

Oh yeah, I made some pancakes for my current girlfriend and used baking soda instead of baking powder, and to make it worse, tablespoons instead of teaspoons. They were quite literally inedible, but they probably would have made half decent toothpaste or fridge deodorizers.
 
I was at my Mum's for tea, she had some left over roast pork. So I shredded it and caramelized some onions, added the pork then asked her to pass me the gravy, I put 2 tablespoons in before realizing it was actually sticky toffee sauce! Needless to say it was disgusting......
EDIT:that just happened tonight.
 
Ponce.

I prepared Ponce to impress my Cajun friends. I tied it closed and put in the oven. It sounds gross, but it is amazing.

I did not know I was supposed to vent the Ponce. It heated and inflated like a rubber balloon in the oven. BOOM. Ponce the size of a volleyball exploded in the oven like a bomb. It was a hideous mess.


// Ponce is a Cajun food tradition little known outside of Southern Louisiana. Ponce is a kind of sausage made by fresh pork, spices, rice, and vegetables sewn up inside a pig's stomach and baked or steamed for several hours. As the stomach contracts, the mixture becomes taut like a sausage and it is sliced and eaten cold or reheated. This meat can be served fresh or smoked, depending on where in Louisiana you are. Ponce is still mainly produced by a handful of producers in Southwest Louisiana, and is a legendary local delicacy.
 
I had a group of guests over. I was serving NY strip steaks off the grill.
Home run right? done it a million times.
Every one was a dog, tough as shoe leather. 16 steaks in the garbage! :sad:
 

Doc4

Stumpy in cold weather
Staff member
When I was a kid, mum often made pancakes for weekend breakfast. She made them from scratch, and they were fantastic. One weekend I took it upon myself to cook the pancakes ... I got out the recipie and began.

As mum usually did, I doubled the recipie. When it came to adding the salt, I got confused between the shortform of "teaspoon" and "tablespoon", and my math was a bit off so I doubled the number twice, and used tablespoons instead of teaspoons.

Oh, and the recipie called for baking powder. Well, mum had baking powder and baking soda in the cupboard, and I was confused ... but since the recipie only wanted a little bit of it, aw heck, that stuff must not be that important so I'll just leave it out and things will be fine.


:blink::blink::blink:


... I never made pancakes again.
 
I think the worst I ever did was absolutely destroy a couple steaks by attempting to country-fry them. They were black as charcoal briquettes when I got to them.

My wife, on the other hand, is the Queen of Kitchen Drama, despite being an excellent cook. In our first month of marriage, she managed not only to set the cooktop on fire by breaking spaghetti all over the hot burner, but also managed to set the inside of the oven on fire by leaving out an essential ingredient whilst making whoopie pies. Scorched chocolate is not an appetizing smell.
 
Before I knew how to cook, I decided that I would make duck for my wife for Mothers Day. I had a friend who had a freezer full of duck, he was an avid hunter. He gave me two ducks for this "special meal". I tried roasting them like a chicken on bed of vegetables. I think he must have given me mud hens, either that or I was an even worse cook then I thought I was. It was horrible. It stank worse then dog food. We ended up throwing both ducks and all the vegetables in the trash, taking the trash out and opening up the house to try and air it out. Then we went out to eat. Ever try and eat out on Mothers day with out reservations? Once I discovered duck con fit I never looked back.

About a year ago my kids and I were making breakfast. My youngest son asks me what spices go in pancake batter. At the time we were making pancakes for breakfast every single weekend. I tell him to just use the spices that we usually use. Later while we were eating the pancakes, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with them. Cumin, smoked paprika, chili powder and white pepper pancakes are not nearly as good as they sound.
 
Read about how yummy a Turkey on the Weber can be. Had family over for Thanksgiving. Smugly trusted in the recipe and an instant read thermometer. At the appointed time, took absolutely gorgeous, beautiful brown bird out of kettle.

Carving revealed thin layer of cooked turkey encasing gelatinous layer of uncooked bloody flesh, wrapped around an ice cold core. Hard to describe in words, but the sight was so sickening that one of the ladies present got the dry heaves.
 
When I was first married, we had some friends over for dinner. The plan was to grill some chicken. This was about twenty years ago--when the Frugal Gourmet was still popular (before he went up the river). Anyway, we had copied down a recipe for a spicy chicken marinade that he made and decided to use it. It had a bunch of different things in it, including fresh lemon juice, olive oil, Tabasco sauces and a bunch of other things that I can't remember. The chicken was well-marinated, the coals were hot, and on it went. I don't know what happened, but the skin of the chicken began to pulse and swell. Before I could do anything, the whole thing exploded in a fireball. The bird that remained on the grill looked like it had been pulled out of a plane crash. Fortunately, there was a pretty good Chinese take-out place down the street and we gave them a call.
 
Many years ago, the missus bought a really nice ham for Christmas. She spent hours cooking it to perfection.

She left it on the work top to cool, made a cup of tea and went through to the living room. At this point, our dog came in and ate it!

It was my fault of course...

Gareth
 
This cooking mis-adventure starts as many good stories do......when I was in college......

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:

I am sure some of the best recipes were perfected via similar experimentation, but certain ingredients just should never be put together.....:lol::lol:
 
The Bishop of our small church was visiting and we were having a covered-dish dinner on Sunday evening. Our minister ask me to bring a couple of cobblers. No problem!

Friends of ours were moving and left us a bunch of pantry items that they did not want to move, including about 10 pounds of sugar......

The sugar turned out to be salt and the cobblers each had two cups of salt vs two cups of sugar. NOT GOOD -- NOT GOOD AT ALL!!!!
 
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.
 
Before I knew how to cook, I decided that I would make duck for my wife for Mothers Day. I had a friend who had a freezer full of duck, he was an avid hunter. He gave me two ducks for this "special meal". I tried roasting them like a chicken on bed of vegetables. I think he must have given me mud hens, either that or I was an even worse cook then I thought I was. It was horrible. It stank worse then dog food. We ended up throwing both ducks and all the vegetables in the trash, taking the trash out and opening up the house to try and air it out. Then we went out to eat. Ever try and eat out on Mothers day with out reservations? Once I discovered duck con fit I never looked back.

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.
 
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