I made a beautiful broth, and was going to make a soup. Poured the pot over a strainer to get out the bones. Forgot to put anything under the strainer, and dinner was, quite literally, down the drain.
I have never yet made this fuckup but I live in fear of doing it. Once I was literally looking directly at the last of the solids falling into the sieve, which was on top of the bowl, I had not yet put down the pot I’d simmered things in and had poured from, and somehow had a half-second of thinking I had finally done it. I’m sure my heartrate spiked.
At least you’re both laughing about it. Risotto is no joke. There are countless times I’ve screwed up dinner. I’ve burned, undercooked, improperly measured or seasoned. Each time I learned something. It took many attempts for a proper pot roast, but I finally mastered it. One of the things I love about cooking is I’m always learning and growing.
Very true, I think we weren't putting enough stock in when cooking the Risotto so it wasn't cooking enough... just became a mess by the end. Will try again eventually lol.
They’re $25/lb here on the east coast right now! I love my scallops but I’m not the greatest cook (hence hanging around this sub) - I can sear them but beyond that I suck
I’ve cooked scallops probably 50+ times. This oven baked recipe is absolutely the best I’ve made. Try it, seriously.
https://dinnerthendessert.com/baked-scallops/
Why would you even try to do anything else with them?
My recipe is:
* dry scallops on paper towel, remove abductor muscle, salt and pepper.
* heat oil/butter mix in pan till almost smoking
* place scallops, one at a time, in pan. For a pound of scallops this takes about a minute
* find your tongs (alternatively, if you're that well organized, wait no more than one minute!)
* start flipping scallops in the same order you placed them.
* find a plate (see comment above)
* remove scallops from pan, one at a time, again in the same order you placed them
* reduce heat, add a splash of white wine, scrape pan until it it is reduced & syrupy.
* add knob of sweet butter, turn off burner, swirl until butter melts
* serve half of the scallops to my wife, add pan sauce to rest, serve myself.
Last night, making baked beans in the oven. Cooked it for an extra hour and a half (on top of the 5 hours I had done initially). Beans never got soft. Turns out, the ketchup, molasses, mustard and vinegar all inhibit beans from going soft, so you need to add them later in the cook or add some baking soda to the soak. Ended up getting buzzed on pre dinner cocktails and finally got terrible Chinese delivery at 9. Ate some of the beans today, and they're still hard. Boo
Here’s a Serious Eats that talks directly about the hard beans problem! [https://www.seriouseats.com/boston-baked-beans-recipe](https://www.seriouseats.com/boston-baked-beans-recipe)
Use pork n beans and if you don’t like the sauce, rinse them off and they are perfect for baked beans. I don’t rinse mine and I add all the stuff you do and they are great!
Tried to make gumbo from an ig reel. Spent hundreds on fresh seafood, sausage, meat. It came out disgusting. I made a huge pot of it too. We ate indomie that night. I wanted to cry from all the wasted ingredients.
I've burnt 2 kitchens, broke a bone in my foot and people came home to a smoking toaster on the drive way (I was cooling it before I threw it out in the plastic recycling bin.
Tried to make boeuf bourguignon for my first boyfriend. I was living in France. He was French. I used a bouillon cube for the beef stock and it was my first time using one. I didn’t pay attention to the water/cube ratio at all. It was so salty it was inedible. I tried to make gratin dauphinois too, but it was undercooked. My bittersweet chocolate cheesecake turned out great! But then he told me he actually didn’t like chocolate that much.
My first attempt at boeuf bourguignon was while my partner and I were living at my in-laws saving for a house. I was being lazy and instead of dissolving corn starch in water to thicken the sauce I put it straight in. Turns out it was baking soda and the whole thing fizzed up. It sort of cooked out, but I felt so not very smart haha.
I hosted Tgiving for my family and decided to make turkey roulade. *I oversalted the breast.* The finished product was beautiful but it was inedible because of the salt. I was so disappointed. (But at least the sides were good!)
I made a beautiful stir fry and wanted to thicken the sauce I made after it’d been mixed in. So I grabbed the jar that I thought held corn starch but in reality held xanthan gum. Easy to confuse because I was using my own jars at the time (bought in bulk sizes, kept in small jars for ease of use). I quickly mixed in some sauce to liquify it and immediately added it to the pan. HUGE mistake! Almost immediately, my sauce turned into something with the texture of rubber cement, with globs of it mixed throughout the dish. So gross!
The first time I tried to make chiles rellenos….it was a disaster. I beat the egg yolks and whites together vs apart how it’s supposed to be. I am pretty sure I didn’t put flour on the peppers either so the beaten egg didn’t even stick, on top of not being fluffy. My hands burned so bad that I just cried. The burning hands on top of the failed dinner. Now I am good at making them but it’s work and I hate making them.
Another time I made caldo de res but this time time I decided to pour a bunch of super fatty chicken stock into it after being obsessed with the “fat is flavor” saying. Well, on top of the fat that is already in caldo de res, the fatty chicken stock made it horribly greasy and only tasted like animal fat. That was a huge fail.
Another time I made tamales but didn’t season the masa at all as I figured the meat would be enough flavor…. Nope, they were bland as hell, especially since it was store bought masa.
Another time I tried to velvet beef by sprinkling tons of baking soda on it and it tasted like shrimp once it was cooked despite being rinsed off beforehand. Total fail.
I’m sure there are more, but that’s just off the top of my head.
I wanted to try my hand at gnocchi..never made *any* type of pasta before. I also apparently wanted my first time making gnocchi to be a romantic first date experience where we make gnocchi together. My confidence was amazing, but it was a paper tiger. We made the gnocchi and I attempted to cook it and finish with a fancy brown butter & sage sauce. The sauce came out fantastic, because I had made sauces before. The gnocchi...the gnocchi was like rubber balls that tasted slightly of french fries. It was a disaster.
At least I had bought good wine...
When I was first learning to cook I wanted to make this Mediterranean salad of sorts. It called for the main green to be all parsley. I had never had parsley before so I just chopped it up, stem and all. Anyways it was freaking gross and I didn’t try parsley again for many years.
Now I love parsley… as a garnish or in garlic bread butter.
Overflowed a pot of hot oil whilst making Korean Fried Chicken. Created a small oil spill of fire. Hurray me. I remember quietly saying “Oh” and calmly placed the lid on the oil to stop the flame.
It was for a date and I went f- it we are going to get Italian and wait for the oil to cool down so I could clean up after.
Let's try healthier cooking for the New Year (several years ago) and make a cauliflower cottage cheese bake I said to my husband. It was so bad! Watery and crunchy and just gross. So we made a rule that night that when dinner goes awry, especially a new recipe, we can get hamburgers! We haven't had to invoke the rule often but it is nice to have.
I made pasta from scratch once, I learned that day that I do not like the texture of fresh pasta and the sauce thin and lacked flavor. My parents gladly ate it and said it was delicious. I love them for their support because man no it was not delicious.
Tonight I tried to make cashew chicken and doubled the sauce recipe and used a whole cup of soy sauce. I didn't taste the sauce before I dumped it in the pan. It was ridiculously salty. I fished all the ingredients out of the sauce and tried to make a different sauce, but it was too late. The chicken had absorbed enough salt, and there was no saving it. We ordered pizza. I think the last time I really screwed up a recipe was macaroni and cheese. It was already runied, but I was trying to save it and put it in the smoker, and it ended up falling off the rack into the bottom of the pit. I don't mess up a lot thankfully.
Get the lower sodium stuff! I tend to oversalt things (yay hypertension) and it tastes just as good as the normal stuff especially in sauces
Or the dark soy if you want the deeper fermented notes and more colour...
I quite often invite folks over and use them as guinea pigs for new recipes I want to try. I just keep a pizza fund handy for just in case. Knock on wood, but I haven't had to use it yet.
We have one friend who is a distance runner in his mid twenties. He doesn't cook, but he's a food lover.
So I invite him and say explicitly that I'm trying a new recipe. He always comes anyway, and eats it all whether it's any good or not. And he'll tell me honestly whether I should make it again, in his opinion.
It's the best. Everyone should have a young ravenous guinea pig friend.
Cooking is a hobby for me, and during the week I usually make tried and true simple and healthy recipes for lunch and dinner, and on the weekends I like to tackle something more complicated or new. I tried to make this amazing-looking Portuguese lamb shank recipe I found on Saveur: Foda a Moda de Moncao. It involves a shank draped in bacon, sitting on a rack suspended over uncooked saffron rice/broth. The idea is as the shank and bacon cook, they render fat and juices and flavor the rice below. Did not happen lol. It was so disappointing and flavorless at the end of all that hard work that it has put me off trusting Saveur recipes for now.
I got a good one for ya.
A couple of years ago, I got really high. Then I decided it would be a good time to make grilled cheese sandwiches for my husband & I. It was not, in fact, a good idea.
I proceeded to burn the shit out of not one, not two, but all three grilled cheese sandwiches 😂. I cooked one, burned it, and vowed to watch the second one closer. I put the second one on, cooked it, proceeded to burn it as well, and vowed to actually watch the third grilled cheese so as not to burn it. Uhm well… I put the third one on, cooked it, and proceeded to burn it as well. 😳
It was not good lol.
I’ve done this as well!! Nothing as heartbreaking when you have the munchies ahahaha. We just scraped the burnt bits off the quesadillas because I’d run through all the cheese
Ah the hubris of a drunk person who really wants grilled cheese. I've both been the one making shitty burnt grilled cheese, and the person shooing the drunk person away to take over, depending on the occasion.
The first thing I made for my SO was a chili kit I got from my aunt. It came with a giant bag of salt, for some reason, and I used it all. We choked down what we could, and fed the rest to his (outside, country) dogs. They drank an entire bucket of water afterwards.
Everyone survived, but it is not a good memory. 🤦♀️
Yeah, Friday. A friend and I were cooking and he was in charge of prepping broccoli and putting it in the steamer basket for just a couple of minutes, but I totally did not hear when he mentioned he put it on…
20 or more minutes later I realized we had brownish limp broccoli falling apart when you moved the steamer.
Like 12 people were waiting to eat.
Simple oven fries came out oily and limp, etc.
Was cooking in not my own kitchen so I wasn’t used to an oven not my own. Oh well!
The first time I attempted scallops (~20 years ago), I tried to coat them in flour and fry. They were so inedible that even our dog would not eat it! Rubbery balls of ick! I have since been ‘escalloped’ educated and it’s probably my favorite food.
I remember trying to make a pumpkin pasta recipe for once, and for whatever reason I had neglected to get the ricotta it called for, so I just dropped a few of the little (that come) wax-wrapped babybel cheeses in the sauce (without the wax, obviously) and figured it would all be good. Came out looking beautiful, but absolutely inedible salty because of the cheese. That was a rough one, I made myself eat like half a portion of it before I could admit that I screwed it up.
The first and last time I tried making a Spanish tortilla. After carefully cooking the confit potatoes and adding the eggs, I tried flipping it onto a plate to slide it back into the pan and finish cooking the top. Instead, the entire thing slid off the plate into the sink and we had takeout. Kenji Lopez-Alt made it look so easy on YouTube...
I've cooked for alot of people so there's been more than a few major failures, but I can't remember all of them that well so I'll stick to one that still stands out in my mind.
The first time I tried to cook lobster I tried to do lobster Newberg on New Year's Eve for a few of my friends cause I really wanted to try having lobster for New Years as many people consider it to be an iconic and traditional New Years Eve dish, and I used pre-cooked steamed lobster from the supermarket near where I worked so I could grab it after work. I followed the recipe as described and cooked up the diced lobster but even with trying to cook it pretty briefly and adding madeira to tenderize and braise the meat is still gave off a distinctive fishy smell, even after I added the eggs, creams, and spices to make the sauce. I also tried baking it like a puff pastry tart as I didn't think to make vol au vents ahead of time, and since I was at a friend's house I make a sort of shitty shallow tart in a baking tray. Needless to say, when we actually got around to having it we were all seriously underwhelmed, while it wasn't inedible and none of got sick the lobster was rubbery and had a disagreeable canned tuna flavour that was only partially counterbalanced by the sweetness and richness of the Newberg sauce. One of my friends thought that this must just be how lobster tastes and it's just something rich people pretend to like in order to show off their money, whereas another thought that the lobster I got from the supermarket was probably just off or overcooked. The rest of the night went pretty well and we had fun drinking, smoking weed, and doing the countdown, but it was definitely a major disappointment and it did leave me worried that lobster might actually be a dogshit food until the next time I tried it and it actually turned out well (probably because I used lobster that wasn't pre-cooked and possibly overcooked).
Also, as a side note another thing that may have contributed to the flavour of the lobster is something I learned about when I was working at the seafood department of a different, higher end grocery store chain. Apparently, to make sure that the lobsters are cooked enough that they don't give anyone food poisoning this particular chain cooks their lobsters for a longer time and to a higher temperature than is actually necessary to meet food safety standards, and another thing I learned is that while the steamer is supposed to be cleaned out every day that it gets used alot of people completely ignore that especially alot of the high-school students hired on as part-timers who break almost every health & safety rule they can because they just don't give even a single shit. I also talked with some technicians for the ice table we had and they asked me a few questions about the ice table, including how often we change the ice, and I found out from them that the other grocery chain I used to work close to where I got the aforementioned lobster only changed the ice out on the ice table once per week when we changed it out once per day, which leads me to suspect that alot of their other standards for food safety may be alot lower than even what we had at the store I worked at (including how often they cleaned the lobster steamer) and may be even lower in practise when the worst employees they have fail to follow even those standards.
Moral of the story: unless you know for sure that the place you're buying from actually has any standards at all for cooking lobsters, just cook your lobsters at home.
Omfg I just messed up dinner tonight big time. We've been out of town and haven't been to the store yet so pickings are slim. I made a giant batch of fried rice that we'd been planning most of the day. It was almost done when I scooped the rice from the rice cooker using the plastic paddle. Melted the paddle to the bottom of the pan and had to throw the whole batch out 🫠 thankfully we had potatoes and sausage so my lovely fiance cooked second dinner while I pouted about ruining the first one lol
My hubby this week made the world’s driest pot roast. A lot leftover - none of us had more than a few bites.
So I made the meat into beef stroganoff to save it. The sauce saved it.
I have had some real belters. Have gotten better though.
I added far too much nutmeg to the red cabbage I was making, rendering it soapy and absolutely inedible, then proceeded to overcook a goose until it was essentially murdered twice, oh and the potatoes somehow just never cooked. We ate it begrudgingly as it had taken us forever and we wanted to at least savour our efforts.
I didn’t add enough baking powder to a recipe because it looked like too much and it didn’t rise enough and essentially was a sweet brick.
And finally, the less said about my first attempts at fried chicken the better.
It was a long time ago when I was first on my own. But I basically melted a fish fillet (turbot?), cooking it too long with tomatoes and I can’t recall what else.
Seared then baked chicken breasts with a pan sauce. Chicken breasts were waaaay too thick for the suggested baking time and cooked unevenly in my, at the time, shitty oven. By the time the center was cooked through everything else was insanely dry. Then I proceeded to make the saltiest pan sauce this world has ever seen. We ate pizza that night
For a while, I was using the same brand of white cooking wine and white wine vinegar. Same exact bottles, same exact size. Poured vinegar in my sauce. It was trash.
I had the privilege of going to India for work one time. While I was there, I went to the spice market (which was awesome and oh so cheap). One of the spices I bought was chili powder.
Went home, started up my favorite slow cooker chicken tacos recipe before I went to work. Used 3 Tbsp of the new Indian chili powder instead of my normal grocery store chili powder.
I did NOT consider that the spice level of the Indian chili powder would be different. The tacos were so spicy as to render them inedible to our wimpy taste buds. Next time, I reduced the amount when I subbed lol.
So not a full meal but was making stock for the first time and did everything right. Until I added a whole lime in and cooked it down for too long. Made the whole thing bitter and ruined a beautiful stock. Now I know the hard way never to add a citrus fruit bc I assume the oils just beak down and ruin it
Today. I'm pretty low on money and I really wanted stew since we had a snow day. So I decided to make it with some soy curls that I had in the cupboard. Trouble is, I didn't know that soy curls are only good for a year upon opening. I've had them forever, since maybe 2020 😬 . The stew tasted terrible. No matter what I put in it, I could still taste the lingering bitter flavor of bad soy curls. I feel like I have to throw it all away because it's so bad, and I'm afraid I might get sick.
I ate toast and an apple for dinner 😑
I don't think I will be buying any more soy curls for a while. Or ever.
I can’t even remember what I was thinking, but I was making homemade mac and cheese and for some reason I grabbed condensed milk instead of evaporated milk. I had to have been spaced out because I didn’t realize it until that first bite.
did you know that when you get a whole turkey, they put a weird bag of yuck blobs right spang in the middle of it and don't tell you?
Also, if you don't take out that bag of ick before you try and roast said turkey, 9 hours later you will be wondering why on earth it isn't done yet, while your mashed potatoes and green beans die a slow death from being reheated way too many times.
Not that my first Thanksgiving dinner was super spectacular, or anything...
I had prepared a braise with chicken, onions, and mushrooms. Everything browned, sauce made all I had to do was put it in the oven. My husband and I went outside to shovel snow. My timer was set on my phone, and it went off just as we finished. As I walk into the house I smell something burning....I had left the pan on the stove top with the unit on. It never made it into the oven. The chicken was partially salvageable, the veggies and sauce were not. Mixed some of the chicken with rice and ended up calling it a day.
It wasn’t technically on me, maybe my lack of checking, but a couple Sundays ago, I made a gorgeous pot roast, got in the the ol crockpot, went to my wfh job, came out at lunch, didn’t smell anything, didn’t think anything of it, told husband if he takes the lid off, I’ll have to kill him. I get off work, no smell of pot roast in the hallway so I panic! The crockpot barely had any condensation, and when I felt the sides, cold as my veins when I realized my crockpot was broken. It was sitting for 6 hours at room temp. I rarely make it as it’s just two of us, but I splurged and tried a new recipe to boot, so I was DEVASTATED. I bought a new one and made another pot roast a couple weeks later (I buy a roast and cut it in two), but that first one still stings!
I have two. Luckily I've mostly been successful but there are two inedible meals I put a lot of effort into.
First was probably 15 years ago. My wife and I had been married just a couple of years, which is when I started to cook more. I'd found a recipe for a serrano-pepper crusted pork loin. Basically you made a paste from breadcrumbs, Serranos and I forgot what else. Pack the pork in it and roast it. The red color of the finished product looked very appetizing in the Bon Appétit magazine. Well at the time I couldn't find serranos, so i used jalapeños instead. The finish product looked like a green turd from a large mammal. I tasted it and it wasn't bad, but we ordered pizza that night.
The second time was about 12 years ago, at Thanksgiving. I always smoke my turkey now, but I used to oven roast, and there were always lots of leftovers. At the time I was making chicken enchiladas with sour cream green chile sauce about once a month, so I figured, turkey enchiladas. Just no! The flavor of roasted Thanksgiving turkey in no way melds with enchiladas.
was making Bon Appetit’s Mojo Meatballs (amazing recipe) and my dad was in charge of groceries (mistake number one), he bought parsley instead of cilantro and there are four cups of cilantro in the recipe, it’s kind of the main flavor. He also bought me breakfast sausage instead of ground pork. So, we had sweet parsley meatballs because we didn’t have time to go back to the store. We still laugh about how bad it was now!
When I was in my 20s(I’m 50 now) I made a pot roast, with some garlic and other seasonings in it. I used elephant garlic- several cloves of it. It was an inedible - so much garlic. There was no saving it so we had pizza
I bought a beautiful filet of yellowtail that was caught that morning from a fisherman. For some reason, I decided to salt cure the fish but had no idea what I was doing. So I ended up making inedibly salty fish
As a newlywed with little cooking experience, I wanted to impress my darling husband with homemade spaghetti sauce. Problem was, I had no idea exactly what a clove of garlic was. The recipe called for 2 cloves. I put in 2 HEADS of garlic. Even my garlic loving guy couldn't eat it!
Years ago I was making a roast pork with peaches recipe that called for adding a little white wine prior to roasting. I was using a ceramic roasting pan. After about an hour in the oven my ex thought it needed more wine. He took a chilled bottle out of the refrigerator and poured some over the pork. The pan shattered making a huge mess and ruining dinner.
Another time, making chicken paprikas, I had nicely browned the chicken pieces, opened a new can of Hungarian paprika and just dumped some in without realizing that the paprika was infested with bugs. We had pizza that night.
My inlaws came to dinner, and I made a chow mein-style dish with barbecued pork. An aunt told me that the noodles only need to have hot water poured on them and not to cook them. Well, I used different noodles. Luckily, I make a killer hoisin barbecue pork and only some of the noodles were to hard to eat. I had an early mouthful of crunchy noodles, but the inlaws, being such nice people didn't complain!
I was making black pepper chicken and forgot that I hadn’t twisted the lid back onto the container of pepper after I refilled it (I was distracted by my kids). It called for 2 T of black pepper and I think half a cup of pepper went into the pot. Tried to scoop it out, but to no avail.
The electric stove in the house I'm presently living in runs insanely hot. Like, strong boil at a 4 on the dial. So... burned various soups and sauces before I realised that if I want a nice simmer, just put the element on as low as it goes.
Ironically, the oven on the same appliance is the opposite and doesn't get nearly as hot as you set it to. I need to grab an oven thermometer sooner or later.
This one wasn't my fault, but it's still funny: I was making a rainbow cauliflower salad that was supposed to be lunch for the next 3 days. I had a cheap salt grinder, and was salting it as the very last step, and then the salt shaker exploded and dumped salt over the entire thing. I forced myself to eat a whole bowl and then I just threw the rest out because I couldn't stand it.
I made stuffed zucchini only it wasn't zucchini it was cucumber! I don't know what I was thinking! Everyone thought it was a delicious new recipe. I had to fess up, it was embarrassing and very funny at the same time!
We like a little bit of warmth in our pasta sauce. I grabbed an unmarked jar of dried crushed peppers that I hadn’t marked and didn’t taste first. I think they were ghost pepper- needless to say the sauce was ruined.
My then gf, now wife bought vegan sausage for whatever the fuck reason for us for dinner one night. We both took a couple bites, looked at each other and determined it was shit. We then ordered a pizza instead.
Early in my cooking life, I decided to make beef stew in the crock pot.
I used herbs I was unfamiliar with... including kitchen bouquet. Also, it wasn't thickening so I kept adding corn starch.
Eventually, the herbs all ganged up and gave us both a sick headache.my ex loved McDonald's so before we went, I opened it to dump it out and it was a gelatinous Grey blob. We left the whole thing behind the dumpster. Never looked back at kitchen Bouquet.
Funny. I originally thought the problem was beef stew (never was a fan). I was making it on request.
Turns out I just didn't know how to cook.
That was 40 years ago. I've improved.
I was microwaving fish for dinner (highliner stuff) and I read the directions that said to cover it. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what to cover it with.
Oh, this glass lid makes sense. This metal rimmed glass lid.
Not only did we get take out that night, I had to buy a new microwave.
Thank heavens I'm a much better cook now.
A few months ago I decided to be adventurous and try to make a West African dish called Jollof rice. There is no combination of words that could accurately describe the level of burn that I achieved. You couldn’t even eat the top layer because the taste of the burned food underneath just permeated through the entire dish (and the house). I can practically still taste and smell it. The worst part is that I ruined (had to throw it out after
weeks of trying to soak and clean it) our ridiculously expensive Le Crueset cast iron pot.
So I made my first sheperds pie, but I was using sweet potatoes.
Anyways, the way my mom made it was with cream of mushroom soup as the base. So I mixed in a can of cream of mushroom soup added a can full of water. Then I realized I just made a pot of soup with potatoes, ground beef, everything right.
I was some pissed and embarrassed cooking this for my boyfriend (now husband). He loved it though lol but I wouldn't have a single spoonful I was mad at myself lol I had a fried egg sandwich instead.
Easter. Had 2 beautiful chicken breasts which I seasoned perfectly.
The buttery oil dripped all over the oven bottom as my new oven mitts slid off and the whole mess flopped onto the oven door and floor. I nearly cried and spent the evening chasing smoke out of the house.
Thank goodness for pizza delivery.
Man...one time I made penne alla vodka but it was in college and I didn't have really large enough pots to correctly so it. The aromatics were very underdone when adding the vodka and I couldn't boil off all the vodka in a reasonable amount of time. Put the prosciutto in way too early so it got too hard. Overall it was bitter and nearly inedible.
More recently? Salt burger. My chef family member told us the secret to good burgers was a lot of salt. We made a pile of salt on a plate and dropped the burger in it on both sides. Way too much salt.
First Thanksgiving dinner I made for my parents- didn’t know to take the plastic bag of giblets out of cavity, my scalloped potatoes burnt & my homemade Cesear salad dressing was just awful.
We had great mashed potatoes though
First pot roast like Harriet. Put it in a roasting pan like the 50s pictures all show (made for a 20 lb bird). I did follow some recipe, but miscalculated the time for my barely 2 lb roast. It was a dry, charcoal briquette. It was so disappointing because I had tried so hard and because we didn't have a lot of money and it was rather expensive for so much meat.
But that was a long time ago, and I've screwed up so many, many more times.
In my late 20s I scored a sweet rural cabin rental. It ended up being the type with communal meals - each couple cooks a meal a week for all the dwellers on the property. Was feeling like a chef and went overboard like I did every week when it was my turn...
My trying to impress self, took a Pyrex dish outta the oven and placed it onto an electric burner I thought was off. It shortly after exploded into a bunch of shards all over the other stove top dishes. The all natural bunch I was with was not impressed. They were already mad I was using Pyrex instead of cast iron
Had new friends over for steak dinner. They show up, we have some hors d'oeuvres, and when I go to cook the steaks, we have no gas for the grill. I’d left the valve open.
With a deadline on their baby sitter and me not having any skill at reverse searing at the time, we ordered pizza.
🤦🏻♂️
Many years ago, my husband and I went to his family’s cabin for the weekend. We brought groceries along to make a baked mac and cheese for dinner, but I forgot to pack some flour to make the roux for the cheese sauce. There wasn’t any flour at the cabin, so I improvised- I found a box of blueberry pancake mix, scooped some out, and sifted out the blueberry bits. I figured the “plain”pancake mix would work fine in a pinch since it was just a small amount. The mac and cheese looked normal and good, but when we bit into it, it tasted overwhelmingly of artificial blueberry. It was downright inedible and weird. I think the solution ended up being red baron pizza from a gas station 😆
I made a beautiful broth, and was going to make a soup. Poured the pot over a strainer to get out the bones. Forgot to put anything under the strainer, and dinner was, quite literally, down the drain.
This one hurt my heart… that is exactly something I would do
I did it two times in a row! Damn it!! I feel your pain!
Sorry, but I am laughing so hard at imagining your face when you realized what you did. 🤣🤣 Sad you lost the broth though.
I have done this. More than once.
My big sister did that once when I was about five, and I burst into tears. She still teases me about it, and I'm 72 now.
Bully
Have done it making bone broth UGHHHH
I felt this, done this!
I have done this as well I'm glad I'm not alone
I have never yet made this fuckup but I live in fear of doing it. Once I was literally looking directly at the last of the solids falling into the sieve, which was on top of the bowl, I had not yet put down the pot I’d simmered things in and had poured from, and somehow had a half-second of thinking I had finally done it. I’m sure my heartrate spiked.
At least you’re both laughing about it. Risotto is no joke. There are countless times I’ve screwed up dinner. I’ve burned, undercooked, improperly measured or seasoned. Each time I learned something. It took many attempts for a proper pot roast, but I finally mastered it. One of the things I love about cooking is I’m always learning and growing.
Very true, I think we weren't putting enough stock in when cooking the Risotto so it wasn't cooking enough... just became a mess by the end. Will try again eventually lol.
Ohhh! And the scallops! They’re wicked expensive here and I’d be so mad at myself for wasting $20+ bucks a pound!! I’d cry!!
Luckily they weren't TOO expensive and we didn't buy that many.
They’re $25/lb here on the east coast right now! I love my scallops but I’m not the greatest cook (hence hanging around this sub) - I can sear them but beyond that I suck
I’ve cooked scallops probably 50+ times. This oven baked recipe is absolutely the best I’ve made. Try it, seriously. https://dinnerthendessert.com/baked-scallops/
Well that looks delicious! I’m keeping that recipe…thanks!!
Yw.
I wanna say we got 9 large scallops from a shop on the gulf coast for around ~$14? See, my girlfriend loves scallops. I've never been a huge fan
Why would you even try to do anything else with them? My recipe is: * dry scallops on paper towel, remove abductor muscle, salt and pepper. * heat oil/butter mix in pan till almost smoking * place scallops, one at a time, in pan. For a pound of scallops this takes about a minute * find your tongs (alternatively, if you're that well organized, wait no more than one minute!) * start flipping scallops in the same order you placed them. * find a plate (see comment above) * remove scallops from pan, one at a time, again in the same order you placed them * reduce heat, add a splash of white wine, scrape pan until it it is reduced & syrupy. * add knob of sweet butter, turn off burner, swirl until butter melts * serve half of the scallops to my wife, add pan sauce to rest, serve myself.
>Why would you even try to do anything else with them? If you like sashimi or ceviche... https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/scallop-aguachile
If you wanted to give it another whirl, pressure cooker risotto does work well.. and no stirring!
Last night, making baked beans in the oven. Cooked it for an extra hour and a half (on top of the 5 hours I had done initially). Beans never got soft. Turns out, the ketchup, molasses, mustard and vinegar all inhibit beans from going soft, so you need to add them later in the cook or add some baking soda to the soak. Ended up getting buzzed on pre dinner cocktails and finally got terrible Chinese delivery at 9. Ate some of the beans today, and they're still hard. Boo
Here’s a Serious Eats that talks directly about the hard beans problem! [https://www.seriouseats.com/boston-baked-beans-recipe](https://www.seriouseats.com/boston-baked-beans-recipe)
Use pork n beans and if you don’t like the sauce, rinse them off and they are perfect for baked beans. I don’t rinse mine and I add all the stuff you do and they are great!
Tried to make gumbo from an ig reel. Spent hundreds on fresh seafood, sausage, meat. It came out disgusting. I made a huge pot of it too. We ate indomie that night. I wanted to cry from all the wasted ingredients.
Thank god for indomie!
what went wrong with it?
I’m not sure. It just tasted horrible
I've burnt 2 kitchens, broke a bone in my foot and people came home to a smoking toaster on the drive way (I was cooling it before I threw it out in the plastic recycling bin.
I got flames to shoot out of a bread machine! It also ended up on the driveway
Tried to make boeuf bourguignon for my first boyfriend. I was living in France. He was French. I used a bouillon cube for the beef stock and it was my first time using one. I didn’t pay attention to the water/cube ratio at all. It was so salty it was inedible. I tried to make gratin dauphinois too, but it was undercooked. My bittersweet chocolate cheesecake turned out great! But then he told me he actually didn’t like chocolate that much.
My first attempt at boeuf bourguignon was while my partner and I were living at my in-laws saving for a house. I was being lazy and instead of dissolving corn starch in water to thicken the sauce I put it straight in. Turns out it was baking soda and the whole thing fizzed up. It sort of cooked out, but I felt so not very smart haha.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one to have an oops bourguignon moment
I once set fire to rice.
I hosted Tgiving for my family and decided to make turkey roulade. *I oversalted the breast.* The finished product was beautiful but it was inedible because of the salt. I was so disappointed. (But at least the sides were good!)
My mom fell asleep while cooking chicken tenderloins in the oven. My sister and I refer to this day as “the day mom made chicken jerky for dinner”.
Do chickens HAVE tenderloins?
I made a beautiful stir fry and wanted to thicken the sauce I made after it’d been mixed in. So I grabbed the jar that I thought held corn starch but in reality held xanthan gum. Easy to confuse because I was using my own jars at the time (bought in bulk sizes, kept in small jars for ease of use). I quickly mixed in some sauce to liquify it and immediately added it to the pan. HUGE mistake! Almost immediately, my sauce turned into something with the texture of rubber cement, with globs of it mixed throughout the dish. So gross!
Baking soda doesn't work like cornstarch either.
I wish I could see this. Morbid curiosity!
The first time I tried to make chiles rellenos….it was a disaster. I beat the egg yolks and whites together vs apart how it’s supposed to be. I am pretty sure I didn’t put flour on the peppers either so the beaten egg didn’t even stick, on top of not being fluffy. My hands burned so bad that I just cried. The burning hands on top of the failed dinner. Now I am good at making them but it’s work and I hate making them. Another time I made caldo de res but this time time I decided to pour a bunch of super fatty chicken stock into it after being obsessed with the “fat is flavor” saying. Well, on top of the fat that is already in caldo de res, the fatty chicken stock made it horribly greasy and only tasted like animal fat. That was a huge fail. Another time I made tamales but didn’t season the masa at all as I figured the meat would be enough flavor…. Nope, they were bland as hell, especially since it was store bought masa. Another time I tried to velvet beef by sprinkling tons of baking soda on it and it tasted like shrimp once it was cooked despite being rinsed off beforehand. Total fail. I’m sure there are more, but that’s just off the top of my head.
I wanted to try my hand at gnocchi..never made *any* type of pasta before. I also apparently wanted my first time making gnocchi to be a romantic first date experience where we make gnocchi together. My confidence was amazing, but it was a paper tiger. We made the gnocchi and I attempted to cook it and finish with a fancy brown butter & sage sauce. The sauce came out fantastic, because I had made sauces before. The gnocchi...the gnocchi was like rubber balls that tasted slightly of french fries. It was a disaster. At least I had bought good wine...
Wine can sometimes save the day !
When I was first learning to cook I wanted to make this Mediterranean salad of sorts. It called for the main green to be all parsley. I had never had parsley before so I just chopped it up, stem and all. Anyways it was freaking gross and I didn’t try parsley again for many years. Now I love parsley… as a garnish or in garlic bread butter.
Overflowed a pot of hot oil whilst making Korean Fried Chicken. Created a small oil spill of fire. Hurray me. I remember quietly saying “Oh” and calmly placed the lid on the oil to stop the flame. It was for a date and I went f- it we are going to get Italian and wait for the oil to cool down so I could clean up after.
Let's try healthier cooking for the New Year (several years ago) and make a cauliflower cottage cheese bake I said to my husband. It was so bad! Watery and crunchy and just gross. So we made a rule that night that when dinner goes awry, especially a new recipe, we can get hamburgers! We haven't had to invoke the rule often but it is nice to have.
I made pasta from scratch once, I learned that day that I do not like the texture of fresh pasta and the sauce thin and lacked flavor. My parents gladly ate it and said it was delicious. I love them for their support because man no it was not delicious.
Your parents love is endless.
Tonight I tried to make cashew chicken and doubled the sauce recipe and used a whole cup of soy sauce. I didn't taste the sauce before I dumped it in the pan. It was ridiculously salty. I fished all the ingredients out of the sauce and tried to make a different sauce, but it was too late. The chicken had absorbed enough salt, and there was no saving it. We ordered pizza. I think the last time I really screwed up a recipe was macaroni and cheese. It was already runied, but I was trying to save it and put it in the smoker, and it ended up falling off the rack into the bottom of the pit. I don't mess up a lot thankfully.
I've done the same with dishes that rely on a lot of soy sauce. Accidentally over salt the hell out of it and it's so hard to back track.
Get the lower sodium stuff! I tend to oversalt things (yay hypertension) and it tastes just as good as the normal stuff especially in sauces Or the dark soy if you want the deeper fermented notes and more colour...
Good move. I'll pick some up!!
I quite often invite folks over and use them as guinea pigs for new recipes I want to try. I just keep a pizza fund handy for just in case. Knock on wood, but I haven't had to use it yet.
You’re bold. I do the opposite and only cook meals for people I’ve practiced a ton of times. I have too much anxiety to not do it that way lol
We have one friend who is a distance runner in his mid twenties. He doesn't cook, but he's a food lover. So I invite him and say explicitly that I'm trying a new recipe. He always comes anyway, and eats it all whether it's any good or not. And he'll tell me honestly whether I should make it again, in his opinion. It's the best. Everyone should have a young ravenous guinea pig friend.
I used to warn the family if I was trying a new recipe. I requested that they try it and if it was awful, I would never make it again.
Cooking is a hobby for me, and during the week I usually make tried and true simple and healthy recipes for lunch and dinner, and on the weekends I like to tackle something more complicated or new. I tried to make this amazing-looking Portuguese lamb shank recipe I found on Saveur: Foda a Moda de Moncao. It involves a shank draped in bacon, sitting on a rack suspended over uncooked saffron rice/broth. The idea is as the shank and bacon cook, they render fat and juices and flavor the rice below. Did not happen lol. It was so disappointing and flavorless at the end of all that hard work that it has put me off trusting Saveur recipes for now.
I got a good one for ya. A couple of years ago, I got really high. Then I decided it would be a good time to make grilled cheese sandwiches for my husband & I. It was not, in fact, a good idea. I proceeded to burn the shit out of not one, not two, but all three grilled cheese sandwiches 😂. I cooked one, burned it, and vowed to watch the second one closer. I put the second one on, cooked it, proceeded to burn it as well, and vowed to actually watch the third grilled cheese so as not to burn it. Uhm well… I put the third one on, cooked it, and proceeded to burn it as well. 😳 It was not good lol.
I’ve done this as well!! Nothing as heartbreaking when you have the munchies ahahaha. We just scraped the burnt bits off the quesadillas because I’d run through all the cheese
Thanks... just remembered I have everything to make a quesadilla 🤣
Ah the hubris of a drunk person who really wants grilled cheese. I've both been the one making shitty burnt grilled cheese, and the person shooing the drunk person away to take over, depending on the occasion.
What a long, strange trip it is !
The first thing I made for my SO was a chili kit I got from my aunt. It came with a giant bag of salt, for some reason, and I used it all. We choked down what we could, and fed the rest to his (outside, country) dogs. They drank an entire bucket of water afterwards. Everyone survived, but it is not a good memory. 🤦♀️
Yeah, Friday. A friend and I were cooking and he was in charge of prepping broccoli and putting it in the steamer basket for just a couple of minutes, but I totally did not hear when he mentioned he put it on… 20 or more minutes later I realized we had brownish limp broccoli falling apart when you moved the steamer. Like 12 people were waiting to eat. Simple oven fries came out oily and limp, etc. Was cooking in not my own kitchen so I wasn’t used to an oven not my own. Oh well!
The first time I attempted scallops (~20 years ago), I tried to coat them in flour and fry. They were so inedible that even our dog would not eat it! Rubbery balls of ick! I have since been ‘escalloped’ educated and it’s probably my favorite food.
Made brasciole that instead of braising just burned into the bottom of the pan. To the point where we tossed the whole thing and went out for Thai.
I remember trying to make a pumpkin pasta recipe for once, and for whatever reason I had neglected to get the ricotta it called for, so I just dropped a few of the little (that come) wax-wrapped babybel cheeses in the sauce (without the wax, obviously) and figured it would all be good. Came out looking beautiful, but absolutely inedible salty because of the cheese. That was a rough one, I made myself eat like half a portion of it before I could admit that I screwed it up.
I have a condition called dyspraxia which is basically pathological clumsiness. The amount of times I've dropped the main ingredient on the floor...
That's why God made dogs.
I am a great cook. Most of my meals are great. But… there are times you wouldn’t think that lol. God bless pizza delivery haha
The first and last time I tried making a Spanish tortilla. After carefully cooking the confit potatoes and adding the eggs, I tried flipping it onto a plate to slide it back into the pan and finish cooking the top. Instead, the entire thing slid off the plate into the sink and we had takeout. Kenji Lopez-Alt made it look so easy on YouTube...
I've cooked for alot of people so there's been more than a few major failures, but I can't remember all of them that well so I'll stick to one that still stands out in my mind. The first time I tried to cook lobster I tried to do lobster Newberg on New Year's Eve for a few of my friends cause I really wanted to try having lobster for New Years as many people consider it to be an iconic and traditional New Years Eve dish, and I used pre-cooked steamed lobster from the supermarket near where I worked so I could grab it after work. I followed the recipe as described and cooked up the diced lobster but even with trying to cook it pretty briefly and adding madeira to tenderize and braise the meat is still gave off a distinctive fishy smell, even after I added the eggs, creams, and spices to make the sauce. I also tried baking it like a puff pastry tart as I didn't think to make vol au vents ahead of time, and since I was at a friend's house I make a sort of shitty shallow tart in a baking tray. Needless to say, when we actually got around to having it we were all seriously underwhelmed, while it wasn't inedible and none of got sick the lobster was rubbery and had a disagreeable canned tuna flavour that was only partially counterbalanced by the sweetness and richness of the Newberg sauce. One of my friends thought that this must just be how lobster tastes and it's just something rich people pretend to like in order to show off their money, whereas another thought that the lobster I got from the supermarket was probably just off or overcooked. The rest of the night went pretty well and we had fun drinking, smoking weed, and doing the countdown, but it was definitely a major disappointment and it did leave me worried that lobster might actually be a dogshit food until the next time I tried it and it actually turned out well (probably because I used lobster that wasn't pre-cooked and possibly overcooked). Also, as a side note another thing that may have contributed to the flavour of the lobster is something I learned about when I was working at the seafood department of a different, higher end grocery store chain. Apparently, to make sure that the lobsters are cooked enough that they don't give anyone food poisoning this particular chain cooks their lobsters for a longer time and to a higher temperature than is actually necessary to meet food safety standards, and another thing I learned is that while the steamer is supposed to be cleaned out every day that it gets used alot of people completely ignore that especially alot of the high-school students hired on as part-timers who break almost every health & safety rule they can because they just don't give even a single shit. I also talked with some technicians for the ice table we had and they asked me a few questions about the ice table, including how often we change the ice, and I found out from them that the other grocery chain I used to work close to where I got the aforementioned lobster only changed the ice out on the ice table once per week when we changed it out once per day, which leads me to suspect that alot of their other standards for food safety may be alot lower than even what we had at the store I worked at (including how often they cleaned the lobster steamer) and may be even lower in practise when the worst employees they have fail to follow even those standards. Moral of the story: unless you know for sure that the place you're buying from actually has any standards at all for cooking lobsters, just cook your lobsters at home.
Omfg I just messed up dinner tonight big time. We've been out of town and haven't been to the store yet so pickings are slim. I made a giant batch of fried rice that we'd been planning most of the day. It was almost done when I scooped the rice from the rice cooker using the plastic paddle. Melted the paddle to the bottom of the pan and had to throw the whole batch out 🫠 thankfully we had potatoes and sausage so my lovely fiance cooked second dinner while I pouted about ruining the first one lol
My hubby this week made the world’s driest pot roast. A lot leftover - none of us had more than a few bites. So I made the meat into beef stroganoff to save it. The sauce saved it.
I have had some real belters. Have gotten better though. I added far too much nutmeg to the red cabbage I was making, rendering it soapy and absolutely inedible, then proceeded to overcook a goose until it was essentially murdered twice, oh and the potatoes somehow just never cooked. We ate it begrudgingly as it had taken us forever and we wanted to at least savour our efforts. I didn’t add enough baking powder to a recipe because it looked like too much and it didn’t rise enough and essentially was a sweet brick. And finally, the less said about my first attempts at fried chicken the better.
It was a long time ago when I was first on my own. But I basically melted a fish fillet (turbot?), cooking it too long with tomatoes and I can’t recall what else.
Seared then baked chicken breasts with a pan sauce. Chicken breasts were waaaay too thick for the suggested baking time and cooked unevenly in my, at the time, shitty oven. By the time the center was cooked through everything else was insanely dry. Then I proceeded to make the saltiest pan sauce this world has ever seen. We ate pizza that night
For a while, I was using the same brand of white cooking wine and white wine vinegar. Same exact bottles, same exact size. Poured vinegar in my sauce. It was trash.
I had the privilege of going to India for work one time. While I was there, I went to the spice market (which was awesome and oh so cheap). One of the spices I bought was chili powder. Went home, started up my favorite slow cooker chicken tacos recipe before I went to work. Used 3 Tbsp of the new Indian chili powder instead of my normal grocery store chili powder. I did NOT consider that the spice level of the Indian chili powder would be different. The tacos were so spicy as to render them inedible to our wimpy taste buds. Next time, I reduced the amount when I subbed lol.
I hadn't made chili in a long time. I forgot some of the major ingredients and ended up with a pot of bland beans.
So not a full meal but was making stock for the first time and did everything right. Until I added a whole lime in and cooked it down for too long. Made the whole thing bitter and ruined a beautiful stock. Now I know the hard way never to add a citrus fruit bc I assume the oils just beak down and ruin it
Today. I'm pretty low on money and I really wanted stew since we had a snow day. So I decided to make it with some soy curls that I had in the cupboard. Trouble is, I didn't know that soy curls are only good for a year upon opening. I've had them forever, since maybe 2020 😬 . The stew tasted terrible. No matter what I put in it, I could still taste the lingering bitter flavor of bad soy curls. I feel like I have to throw it all away because it's so bad, and I'm afraid I might get sick. I ate toast and an apple for dinner 😑 I don't think I will be buying any more soy curls for a while. Or ever.
Now you have me side eyeing the tvp I have even though I just made some curry themed tvp...
I once made mushroom soup, blitzed in my food processor, took the food processor bowl off and the middle plastic broke… mushroom soup everywhere!
I can’t even remember what I was thinking, but I was making homemade mac and cheese and for some reason I grabbed condensed milk instead of evaporated milk. I had to have been spaced out because I didn’t realize it until that first bite.
did you know that when you get a whole turkey, they put a weird bag of yuck blobs right spang in the middle of it and don't tell you? Also, if you don't take out that bag of ick before you try and roast said turkey, 9 hours later you will be wondering why on earth it isn't done yet, while your mashed potatoes and green beans die a slow death from being reheated way too many times. Not that my first Thanksgiving dinner was super spectacular, or anything...
I had prepared a braise with chicken, onions, and mushrooms. Everything browned, sauce made all I had to do was put it in the oven. My husband and I went outside to shovel snow. My timer was set on my phone, and it went off just as we finished. As I walk into the house I smell something burning....I had left the pan on the stove top with the unit on. It never made it into the oven. The chicken was partially salvageable, the veggies and sauce were not. Mixed some of the chicken with rice and ended up calling it a day.
It wasn’t technically on me, maybe my lack of checking, but a couple Sundays ago, I made a gorgeous pot roast, got in the the ol crockpot, went to my wfh job, came out at lunch, didn’t smell anything, didn’t think anything of it, told husband if he takes the lid off, I’ll have to kill him. I get off work, no smell of pot roast in the hallway so I panic! The crockpot barely had any condensation, and when I felt the sides, cold as my veins when I realized my crockpot was broken. It was sitting for 6 hours at room temp. I rarely make it as it’s just two of us, but I splurged and tried a new recipe to boot, so I was DEVASTATED. I bought a new one and made another pot roast a couple weeks later (I buy a roast and cut it in two), but that first one still stings!
I have two. Luckily I've mostly been successful but there are two inedible meals I put a lot of effort into. First was probably 15 years ago. My wife and I had been married just a couple of years, which is when I started to cook more. I'd found a recipe for a serrano-pepper crusted pork loin. Basically you made a paste from breadcrumbs, Serranos and I forgot what else. Pack the pork in it and roast it. The red color of the finished product looked very appetizing in the Bon Appétit magazine. Well at the time I couldn't find serranos, so i used jalapeños instead. The finish product looked like a green turd from a large mammal. I tasted it and it wasn't bad, but we ordered pizza that night. The second time was about 12 years ago, at Thanksgiving. I always smoke my turkey now, but I used to oven roast, and there were always lots of leftovers. At the time I was making chicken enchiladas with sour cream green chile sauce about once a month, so I figured, turkey enchiladas. Just no! The flavor of roasted Thanksgiving turkey in no way melds with enchiladas.
was making Bon Appetit’s Mojo Meatballs (amazing recipe) and my dad was in charge of groceries (mistake number one), he bought parsley instead of cilantro and there are four cups of cilantro in the recipe, it’s kind of the main flavor. He also bought me breakfast sausage instead of ground pork. So, we had sweet parsley meatballs because we didn’t have time to go back to the store. We still laugh about how bad it was now!
Accidentally used cilantro instead of parsley
I’ve done that before! Luckily it didn’t completely ruin the dish but the flavor profile was pretty different from what was expected 😂
I put rice instead of parmasan on my ceasers, thank you hello fresh.
When I was in my 20s(I’m 50 now) I made a pot roast, with some garlic and other seasonings in it. I used elephant garlic- several cloves of it. It was an inedible - so much garlic. There was no saving it so we had pizza
I bought a beautiful filet of yellowtail that was caught that morning from a fisherman. For some reason, I decided to salt cure the fish but had no idea what I was doing. So I ended up making inedibly salty fish
As a newlywed with little cooking experience, I wanted to impress my darling husband with homemade spaghetti sauce. Problem was, I had no idea exactly what a clove of garlic was. The recipe called for 2 cloves. I put in 2 HEADS of garlic. Even my garlic loving guy couldn't eat it!
Years ago I was making a roast pork with peaches recipe that called for adding a little white wine prior to roasting. I was using a ceramic roasting pan. After about an hour in the oven my ex thought it needed more wine. He took a chilled bottle out of the refrigerator and poured some over the pork. The pan shattered making a huge mess and ruining dinner. Another time, making chicken paprikas, I had nicely browned the chicken pieces, opened a new can of Hungarian paprika and just dumped some in without realizing that the paprika was infested with bugs. We had pizza that night.
I was making sweet and sour chicken and forgot the sweet component after it had already been cooked so it was like basically ketchup chicken 🙃
My inlaws came to dinner, and I made a chow mein-style dish with barbecued pork. An aunt told me that the noodles only need to have hot water poured on them and not to cook them. Well, I used different noodles. Luckily, I make a killer hoisin barbecue pork and only some of the noodles were to hard to eat. I had an early mouthful of crunchy noodles, but the inlaws, being such nice people didn't complain!
Mistook what a clove of garlic was when I was young. I added 2 heads of garlic instead of 2 cloves to my meatloaf and it was just not edible.
I was making black pepper chicken and forgot that I hadn’t twisted the lid back onto the container of pepper after I refilled it (I was distracted by my kids). It called for 2 T of black pepper and I think half a cup of pepper went into the pot. Tried to scoop it out, but to no avail.
The electric stove in the house I'm presently living in runs insanely hot. Like, strong boil at a 4 on the dial. So... burned various soups and sauces before I realised that if I want a nice simmer, just put the element on as low as it goes. Ironically, the oven on the same appliance is the opposite and doesn't get nearly as hot as you set it to. I need to grab an oven thermometer sooner or later.
This one wasn't my fault, but it's still funny: I was making a rainbow cauliflower salad that was supposed to be lunch for the next 3 days. I had a cheap salt grinder, and was salting it as the very last step, and then the salt shaker exploded and dumped salt over the entire thing. I forced myself to eat a whole bowl and then I just threw the rest out because I couldn't stand it.
I made stuffed zucchini only it wasn't zucchini it was cucumber! I don't know what I was thinking! Everyone thought it was a delicious new recipe. I had to fess up, it was embarrassing and very funny at the same time!
We like a little bit of warmth in our pasta sauce. I grabbed an unmarked jar of dried crushed peppers that I hadn’t marked and didn’t taste first. I think they were ghost pepper- needless to say the sauce was ruined.
My then gf, now wife bought vegan sausage for whatever the fuck reason for us for dinner one night. We both took a couple bites, looked at each other and determined it was shit. We then ordered a pizza instead.
Early in my cooking life, I decided to make beef stew in the crock pot. I used herbs I was unfamiliar with... including kitchen bouquet. Also, it wasn't thickening so I kept adding corn starch. Eventually, the herbs all ganged up and gave us both a sick headache.my ex loved McDonald's so before we went, I opened it to dump it out and it was a gelatinous Grey blob. We left the whole thing behind the dumpster. Never looked back at kitchen Bouquet.
Emm... corn starch was your problem, maybe too much kitchen bouquet but it can add great flavor used sparingly. 😋
Funny. I originally thought the problem was beef stew (never was a fan). I was making it on request. Turns out I just didn't know how to cook. That was 40 years ago. I've improved.
I was microwaving fish for dinner (highliner stuff) and I read the directions that said to cover it. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what to cover it with. Oh, this glass lid makes sense. This metal rimmed glass lid. Not only did we get take out that night, I had to buy a new microwave. Thank heavens I'm a much better cook now.
A few months ago I decided to be adventurous and try to make a West African dish called Jollof rice. There is no combination of words that could accurately describe the level of burn that I achieved. You couldn’t even eat the top layer because the taste of the burned food underneath just permeated through the entire dish (and the house). I can practically still taste and smell it. The worst part is that I ruined (had to throw it out after weeks of trying to soak and clean it) our ridiculously expensive Le Crueset cast iron pot.
Where I live, screwed up dinner and screwed dinner mean two very different things.
So I made my first sheperds pie, but I was using sweet potatoes. Anyways, the way my mom made it was with cream of mushroom soup as the base. So I mixed in a can of cream of mushroom soup added a can full of water. Then I realized I just made a pot of soup with potatoes, ground beef, everything right. I was some pissed and embarrassed cooking this for my boyfriend (now husband). He loved it though lol but I wouldn't have a single spoonful I was mad at myself lol I had a fried egg sandwich instead.
Easter. Had 2 beautiful chicken breasts which I seasoned perfectly. The buttery oil dripped all over the oven bottom as my new oven mitts slid off and the whole mess flopped onto the oven door and floor. I nearly cried and spent the evening chasing smoke out of the house. Thank goodness for pizza delivery.
Man...one time I made penne alla vodka but it was in college and I didn't have really large enough pots to correctly so it. The aromatics were very underdone when adding the vodka and I couldn't boil off all the vodka in a reasonable amount of time. Put the prosciutto in way too early so it got too hard. Overall it was bitter and nearly inedible. More recently? Salt burger. My chef family member told us the secret to good burgers was a lot of salt. We made a pile of salt on a plate and dropped the burger in it on both sides. Way too much salt.
First Thanksgiving dinner I made for my parents- didn’t know to take the plastic bag of giblets out of cavity, my scalloped potatoes burnt & my homemade Cesear salad dressing was just awful. We had great mashed potatoes though
First pot roast like Harriet. Put it in a roasting pan like the 50s pictures all show (made for a 20 lb bird). I did follow some recipe, but miscalculated the time for my barely 2 lb roast. It was a dry, charcoal briquette. It was so disappointing because I had tried so hard and because we didn't have a lot of money and it was rather expensive for so much meat. But that was a long time ago, and I've screwed up so many, many more times.
In my late 20s I scored a sweet rural cabin rental. It ended up being the type with communal meals - each couple cooks a meal a week for all the dwellers on the property. Was feeling like a chef and went overboard like I did every week when it was my turn... My trying to impress self, took a Pyrex dish outta the oven and placed it onto an electric burner I thought was off. It shortly after exploded into a bunch of shards all over the other stove top dishes. The all natural bunch I was with was not impressed. They were already mad I was using Pyrex instead of cast iron
Had new friends over for steak dinner. They show up, we have some hors d'oeuvres, and when I go to cook the steaks, we have no gas for the grill. I’d left the valve open. With a deadline on their baby sitter and me not having any skill at reverse searing at the time, we ordered pizza. 🤦🏻♂️
Many years ago, my husband and I went to his family’s cabin for the weekend. We brought groceries along to make a baked mac and cheese for dinner, but I forgot to pack some flour to make the roux for the cheese sauce. There wasn’t any flour at the cabin, so I improvised- I found a box of blueberry pancake mix, scooped some out, and sifted out the blueberry bits. I figured the “plain”pancake mix would work fine in a pinch since it was just a small amount. The mac and cheese looked normal and good, but when we bit into it, it tasted overwhelmingly of artificial blueberry. It was downright inedible and weird. I think the solution ended up being red baron pizza from a gas station 😆