Share your cooking disasters

[malkin]

Exploding Pyrex is always dramatic.

Pureed squash popping the not quite seated lid off of the blender can make a pretty orangy stain on on the ceiling.

Oatmeal Flambe, created by boiling over and then catching fire from the gas flame can create an unusual and enduring pattern on the side of a 'stainless' steel pan.

[Irulan]

I don't really have my own story, since I tend to know my limits when it comes to cooking and baking, although I'm a pretty good baker if I do say so myself

When I was a kid, my mom was making Thanksgiving dinner, and she kept commenting on what a "funny looking bird that is", well she put it in the oven to cook and hours ticked by and the same comment kept coming from the kitchen - well dinner time it was and my father went to carve the turkey, yup funny looking bird it was since it was upside down the whole time! LOL...poor mom, but it does make for a funny story.

What makes this really funny is that upside down is an excellent way to cook turkey. I've been doing mine that way for about 20+years now. It guarantees that the breast won't dry out. I do have a funny, not disastrous story about it.
I was doing the usual, cooking the bird upside down, and my hubby's visiting aunt was having a veritable coniption about it. She has a PhD in home ec and just went ballistic about how I was going to ruin the bird. Right, and I mean RIGHT in the middle of her tirade I got a phone call from the previous years' Thanksgiving guests wanting to know how I made my delicious bird. I told him what was going on and he said, I bet you wish you had a speaker phone right now.

[Brandi]

I was making this really yummy tropicl corn bread once. While I was making it I was talking to my sister on the phone. That night I had invited our newly seperated from he's wife neighbor over for dinner. We sat down and started eating. I took a bite of the corn bread and noticed a crunchy texture. I sat there trying to figure out what the crunch was. Then I figured it out. I must have cracked the eggs and then threw the shells in with the eggs! I went to look for the shells and couldn't find them in the trash.
I didn't want to say anything to my neighbor since he seemed to be enjoying he's meal so much. And he commented on yummy the corn bread was and how it had an unusal texture he really liked.
The moral of this story is don't talk on the phone when you are cooking.

[dachshund]

We had an unexpected turkey flambe one Thanksgiving. The lower burner of the oven wasn't working, and daughter-in-law decided to try cooking the turkey by broiling it. Turkeys catch fire, who knew.

[frnz]

Once my sister somehow managed to take a pot only partway off the burner, part way on the counter, and left the burner on. The counter was on fire, and left this HUGE burned semi-circle.

[TJ_Relic]

I tend to use recipes only as rough guidelines, and to change a recipe slightly each time I make it. My husband does not appreciate the creative cooking process. Spoil sport.

I've only had a few real disasters, though.

Burnt cheese soup. It took three months of soaking and scrubbing to get the black off the bottom of the pot.

Baking-soda and salt cookie cake. I mixed up two batches of choc. chip cookie dough and made two large cookies for my birthday, in high school. In one, I added too much baking soda or something, and my grandma tried to "fix" it by adding loads of salt. It was famously disgusting.

Canned air on the edible car. Last month we (Society of Physics Students) hosted an edible car race. I worked for two days to develop my masterpiece of biscotti body, spaghetti bundle axles, and caramel wheels. Race day was HOT and I worried that it would melt before our run, so I used canned air (like for your computer) to chill the wheels right before. It helped, but when time came to eat it tasted horrible! All sugary goodness tasted horrible! I forgot that canned air has added bitterants, to discourage huffing. I was nauseas for several hours.

[TJ_Relic]

Exploding Pyrex is always dramatic.

I knew a munitions guy when I was in the AF. He was cooking something in a pyrex dish and as moved it from oven to counter, he saw that a plastic spoon was about to fall onto the floor. He dropped the hot glass dish and went for (and missed) the spoon. It was quite an impressive shatter, and I never quite felt safe on base ever again, knowing this klutz was working with live munitions.

[Trek420]

In my wayward youth I worked at Mesa Cafe' in Oakland. We were doing a Chinese 5 spice Duck Confit (sp) as one of the daily specials. Alison Negrin (chef) handed me her recipe and spices, off I went to grind the spices and prepare the duck fat. The spice mixture included kosher salt. I forget if that was one of the 5 or it's really 6 ....

Then I started working on the duck breasts, bone and skin them. We were doing something else with the rest of the duck and of course rendering the duck fat.

Another cook had the task of seasoning the duck with the spice mixture, then putting the seasoned duck breast into the duck fat that's also seasoned with Chinese 5 spice. With the more or less traditional duck confit we often did he'd always added salt. Why should this one be different?

For one thing 'cause the chefs 5-spice mixture was already "kosher salted to perfection" I'd also told him all the spices including salt are in there.

Did he try it first? Noooooo. And we ended up with a professional size vat of salty brined inedible virtually pickled duck

[PinkBike]

i dont cook much - i eat very simply - veggies/fruits/chicken.

so my pantry is usually paltry.

my 20-something nephew lived with me for a while, he was a great cook. he did lemon meringue pie from scratch!! he decided to make these great cinnamon rolls to take on a trip with his buds. he used the crisco i had in the cupboard. unfortunately he didnt realize it had been in the cupboard for YEARS. he said they were the NASTIEST things he'd ever tasted.

[lph]

She had to pull four loaves' worth of bread dough out of the cooker through the 1/4" vent hole.

Ok, this thread is killing me, but this quote got me chortling LOUDLY at my desk.

Best I can come up with are the mundane exploding oatmeal all over the microwave/ added too much fresh chili/ served undercooked fish to guests kind of thing, nothing really tale-worthy.

But re turkey: my mother does have a long history of struggling with Christmas turkey. Being American-born and all, she really tried to keep up with serving turkey every Christmas Day when I was a child, even though in Norway we celebrate Christmas Eve. For many years we lived in a fairly remote place with no running water and mostly woodstove heating (read: chilly), and simple cooking to match. So every Christmas morning my mother would be going hysterical checking on the turkey (which was gigantic even though there were max 4 of us to eat it, cos she always waited til the last minute and got whatever they had left) defrosting in a bucket of water in front of the woodstove. Then she'd find out it didn't fit into our tiny, early 50's style oven, and then she'd have to start dismembering it.

We always got turkey, but it took a while.

[Duck on Wheels]

My mom used to have one cooking disaster episode per year. Only one. (She's a really good cook!) One lemon cookie "disaster" even turned out better than the original recipe, but then could never be reproduced. I think her greatest disaster ever was the year she put a rolled-up-and-tied beef roast on the automatic rotisserie spit in the oven, then left for some last minute shopping. We were having friends over who did not eat rare meat. Had to be well done. Our family, on the other hand, liked our roast beef red. So mom had put a thermometer in the roast to get it done just so, with the ends cooked through and the center medium rare. While mom was off shopping, we kids started hearing a tick tick tick sound from the oven. The ties on the roast had loosened and the thermometer was banging against the grill element as the spit turned. Before we could figure out what to do, the thermometer broke. It was a glass thermometer, mercury filled. We called and called all the stores where we thought mom was headed, and when we found one where she hadn't been yet we left a message. Mom got the message and called us back. Throw out the roast, she said, and get some ground chuck out of the freezer. We'll make hamburger patties instead. She got home, marinated the meat, had the patties on the grill ... but no guests. The meat was done. Still no guests. Now these were not folks to miss, or even arrive late for one of mom's meals (they actually had a knack for turning up just before dinner time on, say, Thanksgiving). So finally mom checked the calender. She was a day early. The rest of us had a great hamburger meal, and the next day she served chicken.

Now my disasters, on the other hand, are numerous and repressed from my memory. Just the usual stuff -- burnt stews, runny pies, forgotten ingredients in this or that. Nothing memorable. Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Move along.

[limewave]

I seem to have the most problems making popcorn. We pop it in oil (I should probably switch to microwave . . .)

One night I was making popcorn and I was wearing an oversized sweatshirt. I grabbed the pot and shook it over the stovetop to evenly distribute the kernels. Next thing I knew, the sleeve of my sweatshirt had caught on fire! Fortunately, I kept my head and stopped-dropped-and rolled (yes, I really did that) and managed to put it out safely The sweatshirt did not make it. However, the popcorn was great!

Two weeks ago I was making a huge batch for DH and I. He was outside working at the time. I went out to ask him a question, we got to talking, I forgot about the popcorn. When I came back in I was knocked over by the scent of burnt popcorn, it was a mess. Don't leave popcorn unattended and definitely not for 30 minutes.

[bmccasland]

I had a tea kettle that even had a whistle...
Put the kettle on my electric stove to boil some water for tea, then went to the bedroom to do something, got side-tracked and didn't hear the whistle. I eventually realized I had totally forgotten the tea kettle. Ran to the kitchen where the kettle was becoming one with the stove, long boiled dry and beginning to melt. So I grabbed a wooden cooking spoon, slid under the kettle handle and made a mad dash for the nearest door. I was married at the time, to a fireman, and lived in Phoenix with desert landscaping out front (non-flamable). I chucked the semi-melted kettle to ground out the front door and hosed it down. Fortunately for me my husband was on-duty at the time, and I didn't have a kitchen fire. It is not good to have careless fires at a firefighter's house. Went out and bought myself a new kettle, and made sure it looked a lot like the melted one did in it's pre-melted state. Husband never noticed the difference.

I now make it a point to stay in the kitchen when I put a kettle on the stove. And a watched pot does actually boil, it just takes a long time.

[Tuckervill]

I use cast iron skillets, and I dry them the old fashioned way--turn the burner on under them. So one sunny day I cleaned up the eggs in the skillet and turned the burner on under it. Started wiping the counter, and then dear son called me outside to play whiffle ball.

We played whiffle ball for about 30 minutes. I kept hearing this faint whistle in the background over the noise of the windchimes outside. When I finally got tired of whiffle ball, I approached the door only to realize the SMOKE ALARM was singing at full tilt, and had been for about 25 minutes!

I, of course, had left the skillet on the burner and never turned it off. The skillet was almost red-hot. There was no smoke at all (my smoke alarm is a kitchen-version and very sensitive). Whew, that was scary.

Karen

[Flybye]

Nothing to see here folks. Move along. Move along.

Thanks!