Cooking disasters. What was your worst?

Question

I'm usually pretty good in the kitchen, but have had a few failures with recipes. What is the worst thing that happened to you when you were making something? Were you able to fix the problem or just throw out the dish?

Additional Details

I'm having so much fun reading everyone's cooking disasters. It's going to be hard to choose a winner.

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Heh heh, I think I'm a pretty good cook too. I've been trained and done it for years. However, accidents do happen! We were cooking 2 Cornish hens for Christmas one year and then my family calls up wanting us to come over. So of course we turned the oven down to low because they weren't quite done yet. We got back a couple hours later...tipsy. I just turned off the oven and we went to bed.

Four days later I wondered what that bizarre smell was in the kitchen. I finally looked in the oven and there were the hens crawling with MAGGOTS!!!! I screamed, called my husband at work screaming, he told me to turn the oven on and roast them. I did, while spraying air freshener and trying not to gag. When they finally stopped wriggling, I took the pan out of the oven, put a kitchen towel over my face and tossed it all out...including the pan!

I will never forget that.

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

I had some great answers, but yours was the funniest by far. I showed this to my husband and he even laughed. I could actually see myself calling my husband also if that had happened to me. Thanks for the laughs!

Answer 2

when i made Oatmeal in a pan and for got to add enough water
it was as hard as a rock

Answer 3

makeing jelow i make a drink and it gave my food poisoining.

Answer 4

THE KITCHEN IS ALWAYS DIRTY. CAN NEVER KEEP IT CLEAN WHILE COOKING. I MAKE A MESS AL OVER TH FLOOR.

Answer 5

When I was four years old, I was making French toast from a recipe in a cookbook and it said to use 1/4tsp salt. Well, I'm four years old, I don't have a friggin clue what "1/4" is, so I put in 14tsp salt. The dog wouldn't even eat it.

Answer 6

i tried to make the bushamn bread from outback with a copy cat recipe. yeah thats was pretty bad. nothing like 6 chunks of overcooked bread.

Answer 7

my cooking disaster was when I made a batch of brownies, I put to much oil in it and it turned out so bad we had to throw our only package of brownies away!!!!

Source(s):

me

Answer 8

The worst actually wasn't me cooking.. it was my then ex-boyfriend. He wanted to make a nice dinner and asked me what I wanted. I LOVE lobster, so I told him to make me that. Well, he had other ideas for the lobster and decided to make a lobster soup. So, he goes out and get the ingredients, one being a fish BROTH. He couldn't find any fish broth, so thinking "fish is fish", he bought fish oil and used that as the broth! It was so salty and disgusting I couldn't eat a bite and actually threw up! He kept telling me to suck it up, all the while he's wincing at the taste! We had to throw it out, and the worst part is my house smelled like fish oil for a week!

OMG! Chefgrille, I just read your story, and you poor woman you! I think I would've puked! I just gag thinking about it!

Answer 9

When I was 22 years old, I was preparing a lasagna dinner for my (then) boyfriend. The lasagna was done and I was making French Onion Soup as an appetizer. I put the cheese on top of the soup bowl and allowed it to cook longer than necessary. I was busy preparing garlic bread when the smoke alarm sounded with smoke pouring out of the oven. Meanwhile, my boyfriend is ringing the doorbell. It was a new relationship so I was very embarrassed when I finally answered the door after removing the "Char-coaled Onion Soup." He was very nice and understanding about it. We only had lasagna and garlic bread. Still, a nice dinner.

Answer 10

I have two dishes that come to mind. I cooked okra in boiling water and when it was done it looked like someone with a bad cold had blown their nose all in the dish. I threw it away because anything that looked like snot was not going in my mouth. the second was fudge. I was in my teens and I decided I wanted to make fudge. it would not thicken up and I knew that flour was used as a thickener and so I kept adding flour to the candy and it was really terrible. that is my worst dishes.

Answer 11

I was BBQing a Tri-tip. My husband told me to throw the eat on the grill. So, I did. I didn't even check the heat. He had it set on high! So, I almost caught my house on fire and the meat had to be thrown out.

Answer 12

I tried to copy a Rachel Ray's spinach meatball dish one night for my family, but it turn out so bad. Not only did it take me 2 1/2 hours to make, compared to her supposed 30 minutes, but it looked like something my dog threw up and tasted worse!! My parents were trying to be reassuring about how it tasted fine, but I knew the truth. I just quickly took all the plates and threw the awful food away. I opted for pizza instead, which no one objected to. Bottom line --I will never trust Rachel Ray again!!

Answer 13

When I was 12, I didn't realize that baking soda and baking powder were two different things, so I just scooped some Arm and Hammer into my muffins.

I still remember how delicious the muffins smelled! And how metallic it tasted - it was wrong. Soooo wrong! I was so embarrassed by the look of my guests faces when they bit into it.

Unfortunately there's no fixing that so I had to throw it out.

Not only do I know the difference now, I make sure I'm the one who tastes the product first!

Answer 14

I always screw up when I'm adding foods at two different temperatures. For instance, I fried/browned some rice and then added it to a pot of boiling water to finish it off. BIG mistake! It boiled over the top and blue smoke set the fire detector off. Second time was when I had warmed some vegetable oil up on the stove and added in frozen shrimp. The oil was spattering and popping everywhere, including onto the burner where a small flame started.

Other than those two times, I'm a decent cook.

Answer 15

I've had to throw out 3 of my 5 dishes of baked mac and cheese. The other 2 were palatable, but not good in my opinion. The first time I made it.......the macaroni fried in the obviously excessive amount of butter I put in it, and the cheese seemed to disinergrate. I'll still keep trying, until then, I'll just eat my aunt's and my cousin's mac and cheese. Its the best in the world.......I don't eat anyone else's.

Answer 16

I invited my entire family over for dinner, we're talking aunts, uncles, grandparents, the whole family and I made this huge dinner. Everything went well until I decided to make biscuits from scratch, they were so small and hard that all of my younger cousins took them outside and used them as weapons after dinner.

Answer 17

I am usually pretty careful with recipes and only use ones that have received good ratings (at allrecipes.com) or are handed down from friends and family.

But several times I've forgotten I've got eggs boiling on the stove and have let the water boil out until the eggs scorch. I've also done that with potatoes. The stench is awful.

Answer 18

made brownies and my friend was reading the ingredients...she told me 2 tbls of bakind powder...it was suppose to be 2 tsp....they smelt like bacon

Answer 19

I once forgot to put baking soda in my banana cake batter. It tasted & smelled good but the whole cake was about an inch tall.

The sad thing was, it was for a party. I don't think I'll ever live that one down.

Usually I'm a really good cook & baker. I just forgot the baking soda. Probably skipped right over it when I was making it. :-)

Answer 20

When I was a newlywed; I wanted to surprise my husband for his birthday with a Black Forest Cake. So, I mixed the batter and poured one box into each round cake pan and placed both in the oven. The result was an overflow of cake batter onto the bottom of the oven. It was a disaster and to make it worse my husband also fell on the floor laughing literally. He then ran into the bedroom and got the camera and took a picture of it ! Later sending it to everyone in the family. It was quite humiliating and I cried.
I now see the humor in it and have since made many many Black Forest Cakes.

Answer 21

Was trying to impress my future mother in law and wife to be with a nice afternoon tea.
Every think was going well, the Club sandwiches were good, so were the muffins BUT when it came to the cup of tea it tasted salty.
To impress them I had filled up the sugar bowl with salt instead of sugar.
As a bachelor I had used identical empty coffee jars to store salt and sugar in and I grabbed the wrong one

The moral is to put a label on or in the jar.

As long as I was married it was never forgotten, but with humour.

Answer 22

My worst experience was cooking meringues.

My batter was all broken up and when I cooked it,it still had some batter in the center and it was inflated....not one part of it was hard,I couldn't fix it so I threw it away.

Answer 23

I was young with my first apartment. I was having friends over for dinner. Having very little experience cooking dinner, I didn't know what to prepare. When i went to the grocery store, they had a neat little package of all the ingredients required for spaghetti sauce. A few tomatoes, a small eggplant, a zucchini, an onion, a green pepper and a bulb of garlic. I naively assumed that they had packaged the correct amount of everything, so I just chopped everything, yes, everything up and put it in a pot.
One whole bulb of garlic.... I nearly killed my guests! Thankfully I was living in Paris. So I quickly ran downstairs and purchased more a some more bottles of red wine to wash it all down.

Answer 24

The worst cooking disaster was actually my sister-in-law's.
When she and my brother were newlyweds, they decided to host Christmas dinner. 12 guests.
My sister-in-law was the only person there who had no experience cooking a turkey. But in her steadfast fashion, she refused help and advice.
When I arrived at their house, I noticed that there was no fabulous roast turkey smell. That should have been the first clue. After a few hours we sat down for dinner. My sister-in-law paraded the turkey to the table with much pride. It didn't look right. The skin didn't look browned and crispy. My brother carved. Yikes! It was pink!
No one said a word. My sister-in-law is very fragile. We knew she would burst into tears or throw a fit, if we said anything about the uncooked bird.
Some of us managed to sneak out to the kitchen to pop it in the microwave. The rest of us cut it up small and tried to hide it under vegetables.
No one asked for seconds.

Answer 25

When I was a newly married woman, my husband invited 2 couples and 2 singles over for Thanksgiving dinner. I was proud of all my cooking - pies and home made bread and all the fixings - and a very large turkey. That turkey was so beautiful - cooked to perfection. Then my husband cut it to serve it - and found all the giblets and neck, heart and gizzard, still in the little bags inside the turkey.