Your most memorable FAILURE at cooking (v.2)
 

Everyone who has attempted the culinary arts knows that it can sometimes lead to horrific failure. In this thread, post the failure story that your brain will simply not let you forget.

Mine would be when I tried to make beef pinwheels a few months back. Basically, a beef pinwheel is steak strips spiraled with lettuce and cheese inside. I recently had them at a restaurant, and they looked easy enough to make. So I then hopped in my car and went to Big Y (the local supermarket) to get the ingredients.

I got the ingriendients, but when I went to checkout, I realized that I forgot my wallet. So I drove back home, got it, then went back to the market and bought them. When I got back home, I realized that I didn't have enough cooking oil. After a fair amount of cursing, I drove back to the market a THIRD time, and bought the oil.

I then proceeded to prepare the pinwheels. Making them was indeed fairly easy and I had completed that in less than 5 minutes. The recipe said you could either bake them or cook them in a pan with oil. I had the baked version, so I deicded to try the pan version. Terrible mistake.

You see, I apparently had grossly overestimated the amount of oil I would need in the pan, and I didn't use a pan with steep enough sides. Needless to say, the pinwheels started cooking and splashing oil all around the stove area. Some of it got by the burner and the whole pan ignited into a grease fire. I tried to grap the pan and put it into the sink, but I spilt a good portion of the brnig oil on the floor, with some landing on my sock. The pan crashed into the sink as I let out a rather loud explicitive, ruining the pinwheels (as the sink was not washed).

Moral of the story: Fanciness without experience leads to pain and ruination.

What's your most memorable cooking failure?

Well, I had this pack of muffin mix, but no muffin pan. In fact, I had no cookware except for a saucepan and a plastic fork. I decided, hey, a saucepan is nothing but a glorified frying pan, I can make pancakes!

Well, they were some ugly ass pancakes, but they were still pancakes. And chocolate-chip pancakes at that. They were pretty good, all things considered.

I tried to make wonton soup when I was about ten and I had my mom's help for the most part, but she had to lie down and left me with written instructions. When it came time to add Soya Sause to the mix I grabbed the bottle I thought was soya and it turned out to be pure vanilla extract :(

I tried to make chicken teriyaki at work last week. I found in the back (Coffee Shop) a bottle of the famous Kikkoman Soy Sauce. It looked VERY old.

Older than me. It smelled awful. That said, I marinated the cihicken and other stuff in it. I sent one person home sick that night and myself a trip to the toilet to give back to the earth that which I soaked in soy sauce.

Two summers ago I spent the summer working/living on my College campus. I got to move into my regular housing early, but the housing lottery stuck me in a rickety wooden house that's slightly off the main campus. I was the only person living there at the time.

So I was cooking a hamburger, because that's all I know how to make. I had the fan on, because that's what you do when you cook things. Nonetheless, I managed to set off the smoke alarm. In a normal house this wouldn't have been a big deal, but since this house was actually a College dorm the "smoke alarm" was actually a Fire Alarm connected to the local Fire Station. Thus, I had to leave the building and be the only person standing outside when the truck came down the street. The firemen looked slightly annoyed.

I distinctly remember the time I thought I would be Joe Cool and put some waffles in the toaster oven while I was watching TV in my room. Ten minutes later, I'm wondering where the burnt smell is coming from. I run in the kitchen and I see smoke pouring from the toaster oven. Somehow I managed to get rid of all that smoke without the smoke detector going off...

I remember one time I was baking salmon. I usually leave it in the oven for thirty minutes on 350. So, about an hour later, I was wondering where my salmon was (I was watching TV again). I run in the kitchen and snatch open the oven. My poor delicious salmon was hard as a rock on the edges, but it was fine in the middle...

One time I was making pancakes, and I was surprised at the fact that they were burning to a crisp upon touching the pan for no apparently reason. Until I finally figured out that, due to being used to boiling water for rice, I'd just flicked the burner on max without thinking. The aftermath wasn't pretty. Burned batter everywhere.

My favorite memory was when I tried to make chicken adobo for the first time. The chicken ended up being too salty because I had put too much soy sauce, and it was too late to neutralize the flavor somehow. I'm just glad I didn't use too much chicken.

Haha, the original story is awesome.

I've never really done anything that badly in the kitchen in terms of burning food. The worst thing I've done I think is knock a blender onto the floor and have it explode in a shower of glass everywhere. The worst part was it was my roommate's blender, and it was a Christmas present from some relative of his that was deceased, or something. =/

I can't really remember a major cooking accident I've had off the top of my head but I do know my sister once tried to make cookies out of cookie dough...with the microwave. The dough got nuked so badly it turned all black and seemed like it fused with the bowl she put the dough in. Plus the dough started smoking and the whole house was just filled with the smell of nuked cookie dough.

Something simple, but still a failure.

Usually i'm a good cook and I watch my time carefully. For some reason this time I didn't. I was baking brownies for my cousin and next door neighbor because I was stuck at home babysitting both of them. After a lunch of popcorn shrimp, we decided to bake some brownies. Long story short, due to a lack of correct time estimation, I undercooked the brownies and messed up the cooking cycle... I really don't think putting it back would've saved it either. I messed up somewhere along the way, I just can't remember.

As far as I could remember, that was my only failure.

One time I got this recipe for a chocolate souffle. It said something about folding. I was not sure what folding was so I started mixing everything together. The result was a wet chocolate wad. It tasted good, but it feels like I was eating a turd. HAHA!!

When I was six, I cooked tinned pasta in a saucepan on the stove, I did not stir it or but the heat on low. I ended up with a boiling mess with all the pasta burned at the bottom. Mom had quite the time cleaning it up.

When I used to live at an apartment with my mom and I decided to try and make pancakes for breakfast. Oh the adventures I had.

Venture one - Mix = Bisquick. Needless to say, it tasted like cardboard.

Venture two through like..10 - Mix = Some kind of Pancake Mix. I made a pancake that was about a foot in diameter and it tasted like cardboard.

Needless to say I quit and just stuck with cooking dinner type meals.

Im not a good cook, so half of the time I dont even try, but their was this one time, when I burned my hands making kraft dinner, long story short, I had to keep my hands submerged under water for hours ... heh ^_^'

I was cooking a dinner party and i was preparing the portions of pork chops, instead of gettin the tenderizer i some how grabbed the cheese powder right next to it. Need less to say it made the people at the dinner say wth.

Usually, all of my failures end up being problems with timing. I can never seem to finish the food when I tell everyone it should be done.
One time, I was running pretty much an hour late, because my crock-pot was not cooking as fast as I had hoped. (you would think that 5 hours on high would be enough to cook pork and cream of mushroom soup) So, I take the thing out, and put it in the oven at a rather high temperature.
Needless to say, though pot boiled over, and I cooked off too much water... so we had a very salty meal that day.

And that is pretty much the extent of my bad cooking experiences. I suppose I have been rather fortunate so far in my culinary pursuits.

When I was really little I tried bakeing some cookies, it all went right except for one thing, the flour.

My mom decided to use those little jars with handles to put flour and baking powder and stuff in. So I was searching around for the flour and pulled it out. Well it turned out to be powdered sugar instead of flour. And to say the least, what turned out of the oven was very very very sweet, so sweet it was gross.

Cooking at camp.
We tried to make a chocolate sauce for our fruitcake. Not only did we manage to curdle the sweetened condensed milk, but one guy that we were cooking something savoury and put Italian herbs and spices into it

Well, it was PROBABLY the time that I tried reheating Chinese food in my microwave... in the original packaging (this could also be classified under my "most blonde moment"). On the other hand, the fire it prouced was rather pretty.

Must be local... I loved the Big Y when I was back in college.

ANYWAYS, this weekend I had a horrible failure in the kitchen. I made some floured, pan-fried, steak strips and an artichoke/white wine/parmesan sauce with some pasta. THAT came out fantastic.

What I failed with was using the leftover stuff in the pan afterwards. I thought I'd put on my "I SAW IT ON TV, I CAN DO THIS!" hat and tried to deglaze the pan using some wine. Which I did, that was fine. I tried to now turn this into a gravy. So I poured a little flour into it and mixed it well. Well, apparently I used a little TOO much flour in the pan because not only did it smell like rancid ass, it started to burn and create this awful smelling beefy-cakey substance.

So for the future, I'm gonna have to actually LEARN how to make pan sauces.

You know, once our very own Chaotic Lullaby actually caught water on fire in a pot. She was trying to make rice and somehow caught the oil and water on fire because she forgot about it boiling while playing video games, and when she came back there were flames bursting forth everywhere. She took so damn long with her ADHD that the water entirely evapourated and all that was left with a flaming glob of goo.

THERE WAS NO GOO, ONLY FIRE jls;fdjkasdf.

i hate you so much.

i also made pancakes stick to teflon ;_;

BUT GOO SOUNDS SO MUCH MORE AWESOME.
and yeah, you are obviously some sort of anti-miracle worker messiah because i'm still trying to figure out how you actually made something stick to NEW teflon.

When I was cooking typical mac and cheese from a stove...I poured water in and sat around (played video games or something...waiting for it to boil). Ended up forgetting about it and the water vanished *gasp!* (turned to steam after leaving it on the stove for too long T-T)

Most likely mine was cooking too much rice in too little water. Not good. I had a heck of a time cleaning that stupid pot.

I can cook about everything you can imagine... the weird thing is I can't boil an egg :/ Last time I tried I just threw them in the boiling water and they just started to break up, making a horrible mess... So, now I just put them in an eggboiler... easier.

I think the worse meal I've ever seen made was by my zoology classmates when we went for term trip. When we got to our destination, they went to dutyfree where they bought the the stuff needed for our dinner. They attempted to cook steak, but they forgot to buy oil, so they used butter; forgot to buy salt, so they used msg (gives me nasty headache); forgot to bring a rice cooker so they used a ugly, overused pot; and finally, told themselves they had lots of experience cooking and ended up eating soupy overcooked steak with undercooked rice and bowls of tasteless soupy-snacks. That left a nasty memory of our sixty-year-old professor making smacking noises while he nibbled on pieces of cow meat with his incisors. :cow:

Me, I make dinner rolls that taste like beer. Don't know why but it just ends up that way.

I don't really cook all that often, so my cooking disasters are pretty limited, and fairly tame.

One time I was trying to make some fried rice, you know, to help out. So I made the rice and put it in the pan, then put some eggs I beat over it. Bad idea, of course... the thing barely cooked since the eggs were coating the rice, and it was all some weird sticky yellow consistency. Not too tasty. Oh well!

As an aspiring chef myself, I've had about more accidents and failures at cooking than I can count. My most memorable one would probably have to be the time I was making these muffins from scratch, and I can't exactly remember what I did wrong, but I ended up having to clean out the entire oven, because the muffins literally exploded in the oven.

I once charred a cake and the bowl it was in by cookign it in the microwave

i've never had any culinary accidents, just mistakes here and there, most recent one was when i forgot to stir the congee i was making last week and ended up with about an inch of burnt rice and goo on the bottom of the pan.

There were many times where I failed at cooking but my most favorite one has to be when I accidently grabbed my cat and shaked him a couple of times, putting all his hair into the food. Make things worst is that I had no time to change the dish I was creating which was my specialty: bell peppers and beef, so I had to serve the cat-filled hair food to my family and got them very sick. My sister actually had to go to the hospital to get the cat hair out of her because she is sort of allergic to it.

Salmon is not supposed to be CRISPY when its baked in the oven. This resulted in me paying more attention to whatever anime I was watching at the time versus actually watching the clock. :(

little introduction: everytime I go to a friends house, her mom always make me taste something, she's a very good cook! and one time she made me some wonderful raspberry jam, now almost everytime I go there, she give me some toast with raspberry jam XD so one day she gave me the recipe to do it.

and herte we go just now an hour ago I finaly decide to make some, the recipe is so simple what could go wrong?

1 bag of 600g of raspberry
1 cup of sugar

wait till it's all liquid and start boiling, after it start boiling, let simmer(?) for about 20min

everything is fine, I taste it now and than. OMG it was so good.

now the 20min is finish I start to pour it into "jam pot" and, omg! the raspberries burn at the bottom of the cauldron!! >.<

I still didn't taste my jam to see if I will "taste" the burn raspberries ; ; but the chauldron is now a total lost and is now in the garbage >.> I'm not sure if i'll do this again, or if so, I'll be sure to look every 5sec if it's not burning...

edit: oh yes! my jam is good! I first I think it was tasting a little of the burn, but after mixing it a little, it taste really good ^^

well the only advice i can give for anyone that want to make jam for the first time, just take a chauldron that you don't care to lose >.> (if you burn them like I did XD)

I only cooked 1 thing in my life and thats a 'chapati'. its cooked wheat and flour, an indian dish. i tried to cook an egg but it was a disaster. I was really in trouble. I had accidently added spinach instead of green chillies and it all burned up when i fried it.:borg:

I've once concocted vilest substance known to man.

I cook vegetables my way; with vegetable spices, bak choy, some carrots, some onions, a bit of garlic, celery and a bit of water for gravy. I usually eat this with rice, and it tastes pretty good especially with fried chicken.

On many occasions I use sweet soy sauce to add flavour to the vegetable cooking. Usually it helps with the flavour, and the resulting cuisine turns out to be pretty nice.

On one occasion however, I was down with a cold. There wasn't anyone around to cook, so I myself had to cook. I couldn't really concentrate with what I was cooking though.

It happened that I had placed two bottles of sweet soy sauce and salty soy sauce on the table next to the stove. Without my knowing, because they both looked similar save for the hardly-noticeable differently coloured bottle caps, I grabbed the bottle of salty soy sauce and poured it all over my cooking. The resulting vegetable turned out to be extremely painful/bitter.

I wasn't in a mood to complain though, so I dug the vegetable out of the frying pan and poured it onto a plate. I forced myself to swallow the vegetables with rice. I couldn't continue after the second bite. Thinking oh-so-geniusly that I might be able to repair my cooking if if I added sweet soy sauce to counter the saltiness and achieve equilibrium (heh, I couldn't think straight at the time), I cooked the damn veggies again.

I forced myself to swallow 5 bites of the resulting item. Then I threw the whole thing out and ate instant noodles.

I tell you, if any culinary apprentice or master was there with me, he would have rather stabbed his tongue with a scalding hot knife than eat another bite of my cooking.

When I started to cook here in my apartment, I tried to make spicy chicken. Basically, I marinated chicken in tabasco sauce. Yeah. Then I seasoned with curry powder, chili powder and black pepper. Finally I doused it with tabasco again. It was pretty spicy all right, but it was also pretty nasty. =/ It sure looked good though. XD

Luckily, I've never had anything chaotic happen to me. :p

I think my worst experience, though, was the first time I made flan. I followed the instructions on the recipe as well as I could, and I don't think I did anything horrible wrong, although I probably did. ;) When it was done, the carmelized sugar on top of the flan did something rather strange. When I took the flans out, none of them had the sugar on top. When I looked at the bottom of the pan (which was more like one used for muffins), I found either liquidly puddles of carmelized sugar or hard chunks glued to the bottom of the pan. The flan itself turned our overly-eggy, and the texture was pretty strange.

i was baking some bread in the small oven.
i couldn't be bothered watching over it, so I went upstairs and went on the net.
after a while, the power cut off, and there was no electricity in the house.
wondering what the hell was going on, i went to go check the circut breakers, only to find that the whole of downstairs was in smoke.

the oven was on fire, and it had melted through the power cord and caused the short.

it was then that i realised that it had been 5 hours since i put the bread in the oven.
i had totally forgotten about it.

-------------------------------

here's another story, this time about my friend.

i brought fried rice to school about once a week, and it became a sort of tradition with my friends. they brought spoons with them to school to get some off me. lol.
one of my friends, Matt, asked me how you make fried rice.
I told him you get some rice, put it in a frying pan or wok, put in some diced meat and veggies, a couple of eggs, mix it together and voila! Fried rice!

He came back to me the next day, and told me that he made it exactly the way i told him to, but the rice was.....crunchy.

It took me a while to actually realise what he was on about - then it hit me.
I asked him:
"did you boil the rice?"
"no......"

i lolled.

I almost burned up some Eggo waffles earlier. When I took them out of the oven, they were a bit more "crispy" and "brown" than I prefer. That's what I get for leaving them in there three minutes too long.

Other than making messes which isn't a big deal, the worst I have done while cooking was attempting to fry a fish in a toaster oven because the pan I had wasn't big enough.

I ended up with a cooked fish encrusted with a soggy, greasy, blackened breading. Needless to say, I removed the breading before I ate the fish.

Another not-so-disastrous episode involved me baking brownies for a bake sale. I used round pans for baking them and this resulted in some rather inelegant looking brownies. I had to sell them as "irrational brownies for irrational minds".

I also have the talent to turn garlic bread into carbon.

My friend and I tried to make donuts with my friend's dad's donut kit. Basically the "donuts" turned out to be stringy, burnt-fried crap. We tried adding some Strawberry Quick syrup, but that didn't help - so we went outside and burned the mess - with gasoline.

I attempeted to make a Brautwurst and saurkraut with a dark sweet brazillion beer. I turned out feces brown and tasting like I'd dumped burned sugar into it.

I know it's not one of mine but one time my mother accidentally made a coconut curry goat cheese macaroon the size of a softball. Just think about how good that one would taste for a moment.

AAAh... back in French class, I remember we had a food project for a chapter.

So I decided to make a lovely white chocolate cake for the first time. I had the recipe book, all you had to do was dump in some ingredients and bake it. How hard could it be? When buying the ingredients I skipped the wussy-cake-mix and came home confident I WILL bake that cake.

Everything was going fine I guess, until that glazing. Read the directions wrong, poured it the wrong way, and it was waaaay to liquidy. I dumped some on the cake. It dripped and wouldn't stay on, it wasn't thick enough. I tried to put some more and scrape it to the top of the cake. But no, the glazing dripped down into a puddly mess.

So I decided to add some honey to thicken it up. I think I dumped half the bottle in? Still not thick enough, more butter! Still not thick enough, some more honey! In the end, I ran out of honey and my small container of butter. It was still dripping and liquidy. AAAAAAAHHH, milk chocolate, make it thick! Nope, didn't work. I just dumped it over the cake and left it overnight.

Needless to say, the next day it was just a nasty brown way-too-sweet puddle of glazing in a cake-baking pan. No one touched it in French class and I dumped it.

I'm usually a pretty good cook but everyone makes mistakes XD

I was baking my first cheesecake and I decided to add strawberries to it since I had some....not a good idea unless you have add gelatin too. The cake was sooo liquidy that I was dripping out of the springform pan the whole time it baked. and even after baking for 2 hours *sooo over baked* it still wouldn't set. Eventually I gave up - took it out and stuck it in the fridge.

It was nasty since the cheese and strawberries had been overdone - it was like sweet mush...with a slightly sour aftertaste >.<

Needless to say it met mr.trashcan soon after.

Yesterday I made some little pancake thingys in the microwave, but I put them in there for 2 min...i was gonna come and get them sooner than that though.

I guess I forgot. The house got all smoked up.

Someone had decided to leave a pack of wrapped popped tarts in the toaster over that morning. For dinner we had pizza, and I put the box down in front of the toaster over, flipping the power switch on. This caused the foil wrapper to catch on fire, then the oven started to flame up and it had to be thrown out the backdoor before the kitchen cabinets could catch of fire.

I can't warm solid chocolate into sauce. It's not a disaster exactly, but it just never works out.

Do you use a double boiler to melt the chocolate?

Well..... for me that's everytime I cook. Last time i made instant pudding, I went wrong ^_^. So basically, i'm a bad cook.

XD, how did you mess up on instant pudding?? well, it is true about you. Hope ya find a good wife that can cook :D. There are a couple of times where I do forget to check the food even though I did it right. I just don't pay attention and then my food burns..:(

You all fail. Here is my now famous MAC AND CHEESE OF DEATH story. BEHOLD.

Now this involves my friend Kurtis, as he's just as inept (if not more so) than I am.

So he calls me up one day.

"Hey Frans, I'm hungry. Come over and we'll cook up some food." he says. "Well, ok then, sounds like a plan to me!" is my response.

But he only had mac and cheese in his place, so he asked me to bring something. But WHAT. Well, I had a package of bacon in the fridge. AWESOME. I'll bring that!

So I do. And I get to his place and by this point, we're both famished. So we immediately go into the whole cooking process. We are boiling two packages of macaroni here. And we're also cooking up the bacon at the same time. Since we're so hungry, we're basically eating it straight out of the pan.

As we are doing this, and waiting for the water to boil, we realize we've eaten all the bacon. So while we are slightly saddened by this, it only makes our resolve to consume the tasty mac and cheese that much higher.

But when we get to the cruicial phase, the one where oyu add the milk and cheese powder, we stopped.

"Do you smell that Kurt? What is it? Why does it smell so good?" I asked. "I think it's the bacon grease!" was the response I got. And damn, I tell you, it smelled DELCIOUS.

"I just got an idea. Why don't we put this into the mac and cheese?" "Ok, but how much do we put in?" "It' sonly about a cup of grease or so, just put it all in." So we did.

And holy SHIT, did that mac and cheese smell amazing. If love has a smell, that's what it was. So we plopped it down on our plates, and we went at it HARDCORE. Just chwoing down on this shit like no tomorrow.

But then something happened. About halfway into the mac and cheese mountains, we both looked up and stopped eating. And we just knew it by the look in each others faces that we were totally fucked. See, this was the magical point where the stomach wakes up and says "Are you retarded? FUCK YOU".

So we BOLTED for the bathrooms. Thankfully he has two in his place, and we literally shit our entire insides out. I was on that toilet for what felt like forever, and I was basically shitting out water by the end of it all. It was gross.

We couldn't sleep, we were in such pain. I was on the spare bed and shaking, he was on his bed and having convulsions of some sort. My stomach ached like a bitch. I think we were both awake for about 48 hours. We seriously thought we were going to die. It was HORRIBLE.

But we survived, and later on after asking m dad (who's a doctor), it turns out we should have had our stomaches pumped. :( Oh well though, it was fun. And it was by far the tastiest mac and cheese ever created by man. It was AMAZING and wonderful. It's just a shame eating it probably took 10 years off my lifespan.

I'd make it again if it wouldn't have the horrible side effects too.

Nope. That would make it much easier, but I don't own one.

So, when I was about 12 a friend and I decided that we should fry up some bacon. I don't know why, but bacon had to be consumed at this point. So we cook some up. Grease is flying all over the place. Painful bacon.

After we fish the burnt pork strips out of thier greasy grave, we need to find a way to dispose of said grease. We tried to find a pop can to empty it into. No such luck. Perhaps a used tin can. Nope. "Ah!" we said. A styrofoam cup! Then after the grease cooled, we could simply throw the whole thing out, hassle free!

Damn near boiling grease does not play well with others. Damn near boiling grease melts styrofoam. It doesn't even melt it in the conventional sense. It vaporizes it. So now we have bacon grease everywhere. Counter, floor, cupboards. Everywhere.

On the plus side, the bacon was not too bad.

You sir, have won the internet...yet again. Great story though. Brought me a giggle or two.

I tried cooking some macaroni & cheese (the kind that comes in a box) and ended up spilling boiling water on my chest, causing 2nd degree burns =/.

nowhere near as bad as the above (shudders)

OK well i only have 2 that i can distinctly remember...one I had this guy friend over when i was like 15/16ish and i wanted to make some EASY MAC to eat...well i had NEVER made it before cause we just don't eat that stuff in my house...its homemade all the way...so i tried to make it in the microwave, but i went back downstairs cause we were watching a movie...and lo and behold i forgot about it...and i burnt it... all the while my friend is asking me how do you possibly BURN EASY MAC...? I just shrugged my shoulders...and simply said i dunno and threw it out...

The next scenario was when i was about 13ish i was over my bestfriends house and she's 5yrs older than me and was absolutely boy crazy at the time... SO i was over her house and we decided that we wanted to make some cookies...not the kind that you spoon out of the roll or break and stick on the cookie sheet...that's cheating.. i mean really hard core home made cookies...but my friend wasn't the brightest light bulb in the pack, and at the time i was only a couple of watts brighter...

So we realized that we didn't have all of the proper ingredients...so we started substituting...oils, and flours...and flavorings... well we made it and stuck it in the oven to cook...well she goes back into her room to talk to some guy, and i'm sitting talking too, well some time goes by, and i try to get her off the phone to get the cookies, but she won't budge...this is likea good 20 mins later...well i sat there, and then about 10 mins later i see smoke drifting down the hallway...and then the alarm goes off....NOW she gets off the phone, but by then her mtoher had come upstairs and pulled out the "cookies" which were nothing more than a large balck glob of goo that resembled nothing close to a cookie...

I've only attempted real cookies twice. My first try wasn't as successful as the second one because I forgot to add salt. A friend of mine gave me a modified chocolate chip cookie recipe. Rather than use normal flour, she recommended using yellow cake mix, and it actually tasted much better.

Ohh speaking of rice above...i have a more recent story...

I was supossed to be cooking rice for my mother about a month or so ago when i was at home visiting...well she left, and i stirred the rice a bit, then got distracted when a friend of mine called, and i got on the computer...well i remembered about 45mins later... i went to the kitchen, and was met with this god-awful smell, and a pot of black solid material...which was the rice...haha well I tried to soak the pot to get the rice out and wash it....no good I ended up throwing the pot out... :(

I made some boiled herbal eggs earlier in the week and then kept it in the fridge. Wanted to microwave one up yesterday and apparently a minute on high is too long... the egg blew up into smithereens in the microwave and i spent ages trying to clean it up... not too mention I was cleaning up some dishes in the sink at that time and the sound of the egg blowing up at that time was so loud that i dropped the plate I was washing and cracked it :(

i remember one time in 8th grade i was trying to make pancakes and decided to be cool and try to flip the pancakes the way they do on TV with all the cooking pros instead of keeping it nice and low...

needless to say, i missed the pan completely and the pancake became a spectacular decoration on the floor.

Another rice story, but not as disastrous or interesting. The first time I tried to cook rice, I thought that the only purpose of water was to wash the rice. So I drained the bowl completely and set the rice cooker to "cook". Then when I came back later, I was baffled to see why my rice was hard, stale, and basically uncooked. Whoops.

I remember i once made something with treacle in it, and i managed to melt a plastic spoon into it.

I have also cooked up rice without any water.
Two of us spent nearly an hour trying to scrape the pan clean before we realised it wasn't getting us anywhere and gave up.

I was experimenting one time (I was probably about 17), trying to mix and match different foods in an attempt to come up with a new dish. I tried to make a real blend of meats with mushrooms. Basically, I thought it'd be interesting to try and wrap chicken in beef and stuff mushrooms in as well. Needless to say, it didn't turn out well.

I baked it, and the outside was charred and the inside was raw and gooey. Not pleasant. PHAIL!

Not cooking as such, but when I was six I tried making a cup of tea.

I filled the teapot with warm water, put it in the microwave and one minute later poured the lukewarm microwaved water into a kettle containing milk. Then I added a teabag.

I didn't try again for five years because of how hard my brother laughed at me. :(

One memorable mistake wasn't by me exactly. I was at my father's place, and he was telling me of his new method of cooking eggs in the microwave.

"Just crack the egg on a plate, then heat it up in the microwave."

I was skeptical, but shrugged to watch. Heat... about 30 seconds. Not enough - yolk is still transparent. So back into the microwave.

At some point in time, we heard a "pop" and can no longer see the egg. Well, technically all we CAN see inside the microwave is the egg, which was AAALLL over it....... eh... fun stuff.

I'd say it would have to be the time I attempted to make toffee at home. I was 8 at the time and thought it'd be good to make some toffee while my family was out for when they got back.

My family returned home to see my 4 attempts at making toffee each filling up and stuck to all the saucepans I could find. From memory we had to leave them under a running tap outside till it wore away the toffee from pots. I unfortunately, managed to cover my hair with toffee when I got some on my hands making the 2nd lot and went to scratch an itch on my head.

I was not allowed to stay at home during family expeditions for quite some time after this.

My friend and I tried to cook cookies from scratch once, I think it was just plain old sugar cookies. We bought icing and everything for them. We started doing this because cooking is quite fun when done right.

Anyway, we measured, we stirred, we baked....someone in the measuring we did something horribly wrong. As we cooked the cookies they were flat. I said "We should weight a little longer, in a few minutes the cookies should rise and be normal size"

That never came to be as the cookies flattened out even more, covering and getting stuck to the entire cookie sheet and making the house smell horrible. We tried to get the cookies off of the pan but they were stuck quite good, it wouldn't even come off as we scraped spatulas against the cookies to get them off.

In the end, we threw everything away, and felt sick that we ate the cookie dough before we cooked the cookies.

This one time, I tried to mix ramen and peach juice.
No clue why.
It was friggin terrible.

Well, what do you know. It was THIS MORNING that I wanted to cook myself some breakfast. I went grocery shopping Friday to pick up some pancake mix, some sausages, hashbrowns, and some eggs (for another morning). This morning I was getting all ready, and made the pancake mix all great. I got the other pot ready for the sausages, and started to put oil on the skillet on the already heated pan. So I pour in my first batch of pancake mix. All's fine and dandy . I start to work on the sausages and come back to the pancakes to flip them. THEN I reached for a METAL spatula, but there were none, but the FOOD WAS GOING TO BURN OUT, so I grabbed the nearest thing which was a PLASTIC Spatula. Useless thing as it basically melted the plastic all over the skillet and pancake. This was partly due to absent mindedness and sorta in a rush that common logic fails me.

WHY IN GOD'S NAME ARE THERE PLASTIC SPATULAS? They must be my evil twin. Metal forever.

I know...I know...;___;

Plastic/silicone utensils are useful on nonstick surfaces so you don't scratch it off. Since, you know, the stuff isn't exactly healthy for you to eat (and once your teflon is off the surface it's far from nonstick).

If you managed to completely melt a plastic spatula, then you've got bigger problems going on in your kitchen than not having a metal spatula.

Nah, not completely melt it. I obviously threw out the now useless thing (is this an omen) and the pancakes. After scrubbing off all the plastic crap from the skillet, I started from sqaure one.

Actually, from way back in junior high days, the cooking instructor in home econ said that THIS:

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i6...c20Spatula.jpg

Is called a "scraper" (which I still say is a plastic spatula for scraping the last bits of stuff in a jar and such)

...while THIS:

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i6...6A/spatula.jpg

is a spatula.

My mom often just used these terms interchangibly and call them both spatulas, and so do I.

The food turned out okay, after using a wooden/bamboo spatula my mom usually uses for stir fries, so it works.

I just had a cooking failure. My mother just bought a waffle maker, so I decided to give it a whirl. I made my mix, buttered both surfaces and splashed some mix on when it was heated.

Mistake #1 - too much mix. As the stuff started to cook, mix started pouring out of the sides of the waffle maker, oozing onto the kitchen counter top. This was not a good sign.

Mistake #2 - opening the lid too quickly. Half of my waffle was stuck to the top and the other half on the bottom.

I wish that I had a digital camera to show you guys this. Cleaning it took a good 20 minutes.

Ooh boy. I'm usually a level-headed person, but I sometimes lose rational sense when I'm in the kitchen. About a year ago, I remember eating a monte cristo sandwich from Bennigan's, so I decided to re-create the experience. Of course, I didn't dip it in egg or anything. I made myself a sandwich like I sometimes do, only this time I threw it in a deep fryer. The meat and cheese came out soo good....but they were sandwiched between two now oily sponges. It tasted pretty nice going down, but not so much when it came back up. I couldn't keep it down because I basically consumed a pint of oil or so. O_o

More recently, the missus and I were making chicken parmesan. I accidentely cooked the chicken in the microwave instead of defrosting it, so we cut it up, egged and floured the cubes, fried them, and put 'em in some spaghetti. It was her idea, but I'd like to think my absent-mindedness helped in the creation of a new tasty recipe.

I have no idea why I did this, but I was preparing salmon. I stuck it in the oven. It was suppose to be there for about 25-30 minutes. About two hours later, I just remembered it was still there. I just ruined a perfectly good piece of salmon... :(

LOL, you burned water too, ne? I managed to ruin the pot as a result of deciding to play a little FFVIII after setting the water to boil. Little meaning a full hour or so.

This wasn't exactly my fault, but I stillshould've known better. I once decided it might be a good idea to teach my little brother to make clam chowder. I gave him very specific instructions, stressed to him the importance of not leaving the pot for any period of time, then went outside to feed the animals. We lived quite literally on a farm, so this task took about 15 minutes. When I returned, I was greeted by the scent of blackened clam chowder, and the sight of my brother playing Megaman X2. I haven't had any faith in him whatsoever ever since.

Again, not really my fault, but still...
My mom decided to bake some chicken in the oven. Unfortunately, the oven was missing a pan to catch the grease at the bottom, where the only heating units were located (this was an old-ass oven, mind you). My mom put sheets of aluminum foil at the bottom to remedy the situation. I considered suggesting we put them on the 2nd, lower rack, but decided not to. She started the oven and the timer, then went to take a nap, telling me to wake her when the buzzer went off. So I sat and waited, waited even when I smelled smoke coming out, waited even when I saw small grease fires erupting in the oven. Waited until the timer buzzed, and woke my mother. When she saw the gray, ashen pieces of chicken, she asked why I hadn't woken her up. I replied that she told me to wake her up when the buzzer went off. Oh, what a good boy was I.

Just tonight was something that I doubt I'll ever forget. It was my turn to cook dinner for my roomates (read: for the 7th time in a row), so I went with Rice a Roni with cheese sauce and sliced hot dogs. Just like mac n cheese, only with rice. So I boiled the rice up, then added the cheese sauce. After stirring the mix, I noticed some little dark bits in the sauce, which I took for herbs, as Rice a Roni tends to have those. So, I finish cooking, announce the meal's readiness, and dish some up for myself and return to my room. As I am sitting, browsing these very forums, I hear an exclamation from the kitchen and my name being called. I enter and ask what's wrong. One word. "Bugs!" Yes, ladies and gentlemen, those dark flecks were not in fact seasoning, but little tiny insects. Upon further inspection of the cupboard, it is revealed that there were quite a few boxes of food that had been infested by the little critters, which we believe to be tiny, possibly infant cockroaches. At this point I sat down and started feeling sick. You see, I was very hungry. So hungry, in fact, that I had already finished my plate of food. All of it. I had even licked my plate clean.
Words cannot possibly convey to you how unnerved I am right now.

I decided to make kettle-cooked popcorn one day. I put the pot on the stove, put some oil in, and put a few kernels in and waited for them to pop... in the other room. After not hearing anything for about 10 minutes, I came back and lifted the lid... which promptly created a massive FIRE that spewed out of the pot.

Yes, that's right, I set a pot on fire with 3 kernels of popcorn. Grabbed the fire extinguisher and put it out, getting extinguisher dust on half the entire kitchen and ruining $100 of food that was sitting out. My parents were SO pissed.

Oh. :shh: That was shuddertastic. I'm sure that I'll freak out at the slightest hint of a speck now! :(


None of my horrible experiences were absolutely terrible, but I'll share a few anyways!

Not too long ago, I decided to make Spanish rice from scratch. After leaving it in the skillet for five minutes to simmer, I smelled something burning. Well, I checked the rice, and the entire bottom was completely burnt. Oops.


And then there was the biscuit incident! I threw a leftover biscuit (Popeyes!) into the microwave on high power for 2 minutes. Now, the biscuit came out fine, if not a little cold, the last billion times I did that. This time, however, I'm sure it started smoldering. The entire biscuit took on an unearthly and pasty shade of gray, and black wisps of smoke starting coming out. I threw the biscuit into a tub of water, and the water turned amber brown. The smell, I should add, was atrocious.

Well, I'm still alive. If anything, it's probably just a little more protein in my diet. And that biscuit incident reminds me of one time when I tried to heat up some french bread. If it's a little dry, the trick is to rub a little water on it and put it in the oven for about a minute. Well, I was impatient, and decided to use the mircowave. Long story short, the outside looked fine, but smoke was leaking out from the center. I tossed it into the sink and blasted the water before the thing could ignite. All in all, pretty entertaining in retrospect.

i've never burned the house down or anything. I just try screwed up flavors that end up ruining my dinner. I think the worse one I did was using olive oil and mint extract as a chicken marinade. Did not turn out well. and it was the last chicken breast I had.

err.. i boiled potatoes, and the water dried up. @____@ leaving a burnt, roasted potato stuck to the pan. not exactly tasty, if i may ay so.

but then again, i don't have much experience at cooking. XDDD

I can't really cook, but one time, after waiting 45 minutes for a lasagne in the oven, it was ready I took it out by the edge of the plastic container was too hot and dropped it on the floor. I'd only also prepared boiled rice, so I had that with plenty of soya sauce.

I was making pasta a few minutes ago. I was in process of draining it right from the pot over the sink while using the lid. In the middle of draining, the lid pops off and all the pasta lands in the sink. A whole bag of pasta has gone to waste. :(

Mac 'n cheese:

I was so excited to be actually cooking (and I had broccoli to go with it), and I had the water all boiled and such and had put the macaroni in. Then I opened up the packet of cheese and... lo and behold! It was all brown and clumpy!

So I checked the mac 'n cheese box and... it had expired in 1991. This was definitely last year. I recall being very ticked off at the time...

I was actually going to make a thread on my personal cooking failure, but in the end I don't think it's really warranted. I say this because it's one of those things that should be as natural as breathing

Yet, it makes me feel pretty stupid that I can NEVER get bacon to cook right. Either I burn it or it's still raw. BACON! Do you guys know how fucking culinarily-challenged you gotta be to FUCK BACON UP?

Am I doing something wrong here?

okay 10th grade we had to make some kind of food for religions class that had to do with the religion we were assigned too. so i had to make Latkas (sp? i duno it's crazy jewish potato pancakes)
i got the recipe off the net and then called up my friend to help me. She was coming over in, oh, about thirty minutes, so i got all the ingrdients together.
i guess it was something STUPID i was doing, but i put EVERYTHING in a blender and just turned it into paste.
i guess that was the wrong way to do it too.

by the time addrienne got to my place, i dropped the mixture onto the ground. disgusting smelling pancake batter EVERYWHERE.

We ended up discarding that shit and doing it over again. this time the right way, making potatoes into hashbrowns, putting it in the batter, frying it, etc.

the kitchen smelled of disgusting potatoe pancake batter all day D: and week.

oh hey after reading mac'n'cheese posting i am reminded of going to cook macncheese and finding BUGS in the fucking thing after pouring it into the boiling water. i was no longer hungry afterwards.

When I was younger, probably 13 or so, I was making a [frozen] pizza for myself and my younger brother cause my mom was out for a few hours. So I read the directions, popped it in the oven, checked the time.

Then I proceed to play a game that we'd rented. Turok something, I think. About forty-five minutes later... way longer than what was needed ...I remembered that I was cooking. Shit.

The pizza crust was rock-hard burnt. We managed to eat some of the non-burnt toppings, and some out of the middle, but it was really hard. XD

I havn't really cooked in a while, but when I was in 8th grade, after having gone through home ec, I decided to make pretzels from scratch. Now, I had done this once before in class, had the directions, did everything correctly. Forgot to grease the pan. When I pried the pretzels off, they all had a shiny metallic coating on the bottom, and the pan was pretty much ruined. For health reasons, I didn't eat the pretzels.

Once i tried to make Gu lo yuk (some Chinese stuff) all by myself, I saw someone else doing it and i thought i could remember how to make it. At first it went quite good. but then i had to fry the pickled chicken :-S. So i heated up the frying pan+fat. And threw in the chicken. The pan didn't take that quite well and the food was disgusting.

Afterward i spent an hour scrubbbing the pan clean again:P

The first time I grilled a steak turned out horrible. I use a charcoal grill so you can't really time it since the heat isn't controlled. It came out charred.

I don't know if I'd call it a failure, so much as it not turning out the way it's supposed to be.

My cousin and I had decided to make biscuits (From scratch, not the tubed kind.) while my mom was out. We got all the ingredients together, mixed everything properly, and all that was needed was the proper pan/sheet/whatever. We couldn't find the one that's supposed to be used for biscuits, so we ended up piling the whole thing onto a large cookie sheet and made one big uber-biscuit. It turned out pretty good. It was just hilariously big and unwieldy. Took half a week to eat the whole thing.

Hey - thats just "LOL" - I'll just use your brilliant idea for my next biscuit-baking, because .. yeah.. big huge biscuits are damn great! ;)

Well - yet my biggest mistake had been a lot of bad eggs in my last cheesecake-dough - That cake turned out so horrible!... at least the filling was delicious =D

I remember one time I was making this corn soup thingy, but the soup wasn't clear, so when I added pepper, it kept disappearing. I ended up making pepper soup. Couldn't even eat it, every spoonful burned my throat ;_;

Another time my mom told me to watch a pot of chili while she went off somewhere, but I was watching TV and didn't notice it burning. Cleaning the pot was not fun.

And then there was the time my friend and I tried to make our own ice capps. Ice and milk everywhere. Blenders are scary. @.@

I was trying to cook home made macaroni cheese. I tried wheat flour in the sauce, but it didn't seem to work. So I added more, and more, and more... until it got so thick I almsot burnt the saucer.

Piece of advice: unless you're making pastery/bread, use white flour :p

ahh... Well My story begins like this...
One day we have a lab test.. in our cooking class. So we gotta make some soup or something. At first we sorta mess it up but we make up for i t later on. But the one thing we don't know is that WE'RE not drinking it. SOMEONE eles is.... turns out to be some senior chef whos looking for new guys for his resturant. We kinda are.... really suprised. So we work our asses off to make the soup good and yea.

We taste test it and we find it isn't salt enough so we send one member to add salt. But he adds in pepper.... lots of it... Second taste test... turns out horrible. cuz the 4 of us are running around gasping and looking for something to drink. But guess what?

Times up. and we hafta turn in one bowl of soup to the chef to taste. ugh boy oh boy... We're freaking out. As he test each bowl one by one. He says the pros and cons about it. As he sniffs our soup hes a bit curious of the taste.... You guys hafta see the look on his face.... bright red... we were yelled at so much you could hear it throughout the school

note- if u want things done. Do it yourself.

Some stupid recipe on the internet told me to put too much salt in my sushi rice, yeah, I should have known better.