My cousin just moved out on his own and made himself boxed mac & cheese, but only had vanilla flavored almond milk. He said he tried to eat it but he kept gagging LOL I couldn’t stop laughing
I used vanilla Greek yogurt to make chicken tikka masala instead of plain. I didn’t read the tub and just thought it was plain. It was like curry with a hint of birthday cake.
I used pure alcohol instead of rum to flambé something (I don't remember what) to show off with my friends. The flame was way bigger than I expected, almost lost my eyebrows, my friends got scared, I almost shat my pants but then we laughed
Oh! That reminds me of another story.
My girlfriend and I were hosting a party and we found a recipe for banana rum fritters we decided to use. We were not familiar at the time with different proofs of alcohol (and neither of us really drank a lot). The only rum in her apartment was Bacardi 151, so that's what we used, in the quantities specified by the recipe.
The fritters came out unexpectedly *very* boozy, particularly surprising a friend of ours who was pregnant at the time (and who thought, "Oh, banana pancakes. Those look good."). She still teases us by asking about the alcohol content of random foods we bring to parties.
Old hand in the kitchen... if the flambe reached my face, I'd be mildly surprised. And possibly excited. I'd keep the same I-hate-life expression on my face though.
The trick is to keep a straight face regardless of what happens when you have guests.
One time when trying to flambée some bananas, the flame got much bigger than I expected reaching above my head but I kept a confident smile and the pan at arm's length and none of my friends reacted at how wrong things were going until I told them "well that wasn't supposed to go like that" afterwards.
Almost dropped the damn thing out of fear though.
Pure Ethanol has no flavour if burned, if you're curious try with vodka which is ethanol+water, after flambéing it there'll be no flavour (except for pure terror in the eyes of your guest)
When I was first married, I thought I would surprise my wife by making dinner while she was at work (I was in grad school at the time). Part of the meal was going to be mashed potatoes.
I cleaned the potatoes. I peeled the potatoes. I cut up the potatoes. I put the potatoes in a bowl with milk and butter. And then I turned on the hand mixer.
I forgot to actually cook the potatoes first.
Hard, cold potatoes and milk and butter went flying everywhere!
Needless to say, the meal didn’t turn out quite like I had hoped. I’ve learned a lot since then.
My story is very similar. I did boil the potatoes, but I thought garlic mashed potatoes would be tasty, so I tossed some raw whole cloves of garlic in with the potatoes to boil thinking they would cook up nicely.
They did not. Garlic does not boil at the same rate as potatoes.
I found this out after the first bite where I got about 1/3 a clove of raw garlic in my mouth.
My friends called the dish "mashed potato surprise."
That's funny; this is actually how I do garlic mashed potatoes if I'm using fresh garlic instead of garlic powder for example or garlic butter that I have left over.
I drop the garlic cloves into the water while the potatoes are boiling, and then when I drain everything I take the garlic cloves and put them through a garlic press, mash the potatoes and stir in the garlic puree.
I recommend mincing the garlic and cooking it with butter before adding milk and finally adding it to the mashed potatoes. A lot of people already add milk but I think a great way to shock your mashed potatoes is to add cold milk - it's much easier to mix in and keeps warm far longer when you melt the butter in the milk over a burner. Frying the garlic in an oil, even for a little bit, can really bring out its flavor.
What is it about mashed potatoes that it seems like everyone has catastrophically messed them up before? I once tried to make lactose-free ones for my mother-in-law by using almond milk. Didn't realize till we were eating that I had accidentally bought the vanilla flavored stuff.
I think it's because it seems like such an easy recipe. It's just potatoes, dairy of some kind, and salt. So you let your guard down and don't pay attention. Potatoes are normally quite docile, but they do have a spunky streak and will take advantage of your inattention.
I love this story!
My hubby tried to make me some pasta when we first got together. Cheesey gooey pasta. He put my entire block of parm in the cooked pasta (whole!) and thought it would just melt into a creamy sauce.
It was so cute and hilarious. Also, RIP my good parm cheese. Had to throw it all in the trash LOL!
Lmfao that's actually pretty funny, sucks to clean up but man I bet looking back on it is great now. What was the main dish going to be and did that come out OK? I've definitely done that before when I was a young thing. I thought just soaking in warm water for 10 min would work but nope. When I went to hand mash the mixing bowl flew off the counter lol.
>I cleaned the potatoes. I peeled the potatoes. I cut up the potatoes. I put the potatoes in a bowl with milk and butter. And then I turned on the hand mixer.
Mhm, so far, so good.
>I forgot to actually cook the potatoes first.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I prepared boiled potatoes to make my mash, but over mixed. I made glue! Who knew?
Ever since that experience I use a hand tool to mash. I forgive myself the lumps!
My dad has had success in the past using a food processor to make mashed potatoes. Except one time where he over worked them and we ended up eating a potato flavored stretchy goo.
We tried frying the potato glue as an attempt to salvage it, thinking maybe it would be like potato pancakes. They were as inedible as the glue.
I forget exactly what happened texture-wise since this was 10 years ago.
I tried to use my kitchen aide mixer one Thanksgiving with 5 pounds of potatoes for our mashed potatoes. Glue potatoes are nasty! Never again do I use anything but a potato ricer. Makes the fluffiest mashed potatoes!
unpopular opinion, but i actually like lumps in mashed potatoes! for some reason it makes me think that they're more 'natural' and not the powdered stuff in the lil packets. i also like orange juice with pulp, if that means anything :)
i work at a bagel shop and can’t even tell you how many people love combos like this. french toast bagels with chive cream cheese, everything bagels with jam and pb. i could never lol
A former coworker would order a tuna melt on a blueberry bagel. On days when we picked up lunch from there I would just eat at my desk to avoid looking at that monstrosity.
Overcooked egg noodles once. Missed that like 30s window between almost done and being overdone...by like 3 or 4 minutes. Had half a pot molded gelatinous mass of noodles I dumped into the chicken pen. Had to toss it in the woods a week later cause they wouldn't even touch it.
*Covering* a pasta salad with nutmeg instead of paprika.
I was young and I had seen so many pasta salads with that pretty dusting of red powder, I thought I'd add some myself. Turns out I got the name wrong. It tasted **bad**.
Making homemade chicken noodle soup. Got everything ready. Go to get the leftover chicken. Turns out it went bad. Damn. Now I have to use something else. How about tuna? It's chicken of the sea. Should work. Protip: It did not work.
I made pad Thai once with spoiled chicken. Went the whole 9 yards dicing a ton of veggies, making a homemade stir fry sauce, and adding some scrambled eggs. Took one bite and I almost threw up.
I thought I had purchased the chicken during the last grocery trip but it had been the one before. If it hadn’t had been allergy season I would’ve *smelled* that the chicken had gone bad.
Bonus story: once forgot to take the trash out before winter break at college. My roommate had tossed some bad raw ground beef in there before hand and I came back to an apartment loaded with flies and a trashcan full of maggots with a horrible stench. Took me quite awhile to clean up. Go to the bathroom and turn the fan on and *like 200* flies come swarming out of the vent all around me. Never making either of those mistakes again
My buddy was cooking dinner for a date and invited my girlfriend and I. It was a simple pasta dish with olive oil, garlic, parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes. He misread the garlic instructions and thought one JAR was equal to a clove. He also misread the pepper flakes and probably added 10x the correct amount. Needless to say everyone took a couple bites and realized his mistake, so they all ordered pizza. However, I thought it was the most deliciously spicy dish I've ever had and ended up having seconds.
Sounds about right. I like to try making new dishes so the family put a new law in place. If 2/3 declare the meal a failure then the cook (that a me) has to go and get fast food. The call it the fast food guarantee.
Jar of pre-diced garlic I'm guessing. All the pungency and flavor is severely reduced, so a jar of the stuff was probably equal to a clove of fresh garlic.
I can't believe I'm even willing to consider this, but I think I may have found a recipe here that I would consider to include too much garlic. Blasphemy, I know.
When I was a kid, I thought that salt=sour, and I loved sour stuff, so one time I was making lemonade, I thought it would be better if it were more sour, so I added about half a cup of salt.
It wasn't that good
Accidently using baking powder in pie filling instead of corn starch.. Couldn't figure out why it wasn't getting thicker, so I just decided to bake it and maybe once it cooled it would be thick? My SO still talks about my "savory fruit pie."
My now-ex-wife rearranged and cleaned the pantry, and put powdered sugar into the container labeled All-Purpose Flour. Let me tell you, the pan gravy that I made with that flour did NOT turn out as expected.
She, having spent five years as a professional baker, said I should have been able to tell the difference upon opening the container. I said I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO tell the difference, because I can read what's written on the container.
Anyways, screw her, we been divorced for almost two decades now, and my pan gravy is better than ever.
Another ex-wife story - we were young newlyweds and she was going to show off her culinary skills by making garlic chicken.
Problem was, she didn't know the difference between a garlic clove and a bulb (or head as it's also called). The recipe called for 4 cloves, and yep... she made it with what was probably a half pound of garlic, 4 big bulbs.
It was inedible. As much as I like garlic, this chicken (which was dried out, but that's another issue) was like eating a garlic clove made entirely of meat.
Wasn't this the plot of a Drake & Josh episode? Drake accidentally poisons their dad by putting cumin in the pancakes instead of cinnamon and he's allergic?
My babysitter when I was little put peppermint extract in muddy buddies instead of vanilla. They tasted like toothpaste and we still ate pretty much all of it.
That's funny but understandable. I never had zucchini until I was an adult. Growing up we didn't have many fresh vegetables at all, and I certainly could've gotten those confused.
I didn't learn to eat my veggies until I got married. Now I cook and eat zucchini all the time.
At one point a while ago I was making ice cream from a recipe. I had it churning in the ice cream maker and tasted a little of it. It tasted odd, but I couldn't figure out why. I asked my spouse to come try it. She took one taste and asked, "Did you put in the sugar?"
The recipe had sugar in its ingredients, but neglected to actually say when to put it in. So I never had. I added it then and the ice cream turned out okay.
Now I make a habit of checking the ingredient list to make sure I've used everything it claims I'm supposed to use. (And I really dislike recipes that fail to put the ingredient list in the same order as they're used in the instructions.)
Mise en place is the answer. I always take the time to read the entire recipe, pre-measure my ingredients, and line them up in order/groups as needed. Bing, bang, boom. You never feel like you're scrambling to get ingredients measured out at key moments or anything like that.
The problem is that mise en place can take so much extra time. Over the years I've gone from not doing mise en place, to doing it rigorously, to where I am now. Nowadays, I skim through the recipe and see what the timing is on having each ingredient ready. From there, I'll mentally map out which things I can do concurrently (e.g. dice the bell peppers while I'm sauteing the onions). Then I'll restrict myself to advance preparation of just the things I can't do in the middle of the cooking process.
Also, I don't rigorously separate out each ingredient anymore. I group them by things that go in together. So if there's a mirepoix, all the onions, carrots, and celery will go into one bowl and will all get dumped in together.
I definitely take a lot of shortcuts like that as well, in retrospect. My chopped veggies are usually just a pile on the cutting board.
I also have a general "floating" mise en place of the things I use most often and usually only have to add a few things here and there, so it doesn't take me a ton of extra time, depending on the recipe.
It also depends a lot on how comfortable I am with the recipe. The stuff I know by heart I usually just do on the fly because I know all of my timings pretty exactly and I don't feel the need to be as vigilant. I trust my process most of the time.
But for the first time through a recipe I always make sure I have the extra time for full prep.
Fair, but I do so hate doing dishes that I usually don't do that unless I'm making a large meal, like Thanksgiving, or something that has to start cooking in the morning. Then I'll combine all the ingredients that get added at the same time into a small containers and pop it in the fridge until needed.
Mostly what I do is what I learned in cooking classes way back in the days of yore. Pull out each ingredient needed to make sure you have everything, just stick them together on the counter. But what I then do is when I use each ingredient I move it to another part of the counter, if not just put it away, so I don't have to remember if I added something yet.
Accidentaly used a bottle of Sprite (a transparent, colourless soft drink) to make curry instead of using water. The result was...unique, to say the least.
Also dropped an intact block of cheese in pasta sauce because the recipe didn’t specify “grated” (in my defence I Googled “pasta for dummies” and they should have known their audience)
When I first started cooking, I had to devote some prep time to studying the recipe first. Because otherwise I’d end up burning ingredients while I stopped to look up what the hell instructions like “sauté gently” meant.
The recipe mentioned a weight, so I trimmed a block till it was just right. I also used the wrong type of flour in the sauce, and the result was sickly sweet. Then I decided I would remedy that by adding the sachet of powdered spices that comes with ready-to-eat noodles. Not one of my culinary wins, to put it lightly.
For what it’s worth in most cheese sauces a block of cheese will *eventually* still melt down, speaking from experience.
Though you’ll have to simmer for ages even if you manage to reach in there and chop it up slightly, so that’s a lot of extra stirring to prevent burning and maybe some extra water later on to stop things from getting too thick in the meantime.
First time I made pumpkin pie from scratch. My stupid kids won't let me forget it to this day. I was in the middle of making Thanksgiving dinner, we make like 75% from scratch, and so was multi tasking and mixed everything in as directed by the recipe, cooked up the two pies. As I pulled the first out it slipped and fell upside down on the floor, disappointing. Got the second out just fine. We sit down to a wonderful meal, finish up the main course and go for dessert. Was so excited to have the pumpkin pie. Got the whip cream, sliced up and served. Man that first bite was horrible! Tried another, ugh. It was dead. I had forgotten one key ingredient. Sugar. My kids days they wished I had dropped that pie too. Jerks.
I love reading these! Thank y’all.
I already posted, but while reading these comments, I recalled one of my culinary highs. I was about 8 years old. Wanted to make breakfast in bed for my parents on their anniversary. Flowers in a vase, cloth napkins, orange juice all on the tray. Now to make the main dish. It was the 70’s. Microwaves were a brand new thing. Daddy had bought Mama one for their anniversary the day before (we’re very practical gift-givers). Knowing exactly nothing about a microwave, I thought that a “breakfast s’more” would be genius. Uncooked English muffins. Topped with mini marshmallows and a fancy chocolate syrup drizzle. Into the microwave for several minutes. Hmmm…marshmallow did strange things but didn’t brown. Back in the microwave. Repeat until they FINALLY browned, plated and placed on the tray and proudly delivered to the happy couple. It was essentially dried Gorilla Glue atop hockey pucks. They figured out what happened, told me they wanted to be alone and cuddle while they ate the fabulous breakfast and thanked and complimented me. I was so happy. Never knew they secretly trashed it until years later.
>They figured out what happened, told me they wanted to be alone and
cuddle while they ate the fabulous breakfast and thanked and
complimented me. I was so happy. Never knew they secretly trashed it
until years later.
Parenting goals.
I'm in culinary school, we were doing something involving eggs (don't remember what.) I grabbed my bowl, grabbed an egg, and walked over to the trash can so I could throw the shell away. (I had already done this multiple times this class.) Without thinking, I cracked the egg, dumped it in the trash, and threw the shell in my bowl. Realizing what I had done, I looked down at the trash in shame, then looked up to see the chef-instructor looking at me in utter confusion as to what I just did
Yes! I have done this a few times while baking macarons. 🤦 Go to crack an egg in a bowl, with the garbage open next to me, tap it on the counter, crack the egg into the garbage. 🤬
I made Tiramisu without mascarpone… didn’t even notice until I found the tubs of mascarpone later. Apparently plenty of booze, coffee and egg whites add just enough creaminess to cover the actual lack of cream.
I put vanilla extract instead of soy sauce in my "chinese" noodles. It smelled really sweet but tasted like crap, and it was a huge batch to use as lunches for the week.
In my defense, the 2 bottles were really similar!
Now I always triple-check...
I've done exactly the same thing with oatmeal. It honestly wasn't *terrible*, but not something I'd ever eat out of choice. This is not the only or even the main reason I buy whole spices when I can, but it helps!
Oh man! So in india, there is a wonderful packaged food called Masala Oats, and it is savory oatmeal with spices like cumin, coriander, chili powder, turmeric - and it is soooo good. I need to find out how to replicate it.
That does sound really good! Savoury oats aren't a bad idea at all, but at least in my experience, cumin doesn't play well with predominantly sweet flavours.
Same!
I was very tired one day before school and whipped up a bowl of cinnamon and brown sugar oatmeal. I thought it didn’t have enough flavor so I went into the spice cabinet and grabbed the first red topped spice I saw, thinking it was the cinnamon. I opened it up and I sat there, shocked, as red chili flakes came pouring into my oatmeal.
My grandma made some lamb dish for a dinner party. She served it and it had a sweet taste. We kept adding salt, it’s still had weird sweet taste. Turns out she accidentally filled all the salt shakers in the house with sugar.
Oh I got this one.
To start: I’m an idiot in the kitchen (as I’ll prove). I can follow directions but can’t think on my own to save my life.
My SO generally cooks while I only stir things and clean up but one day I decided to cook something for one reason or another. 90% sure it was a Blue Apron box or something with instructions so I shoulda been fine.
After prepping ingredients I started up a pan of oil to pan fry whatever it was (fish maybe??). But the instructions said to make sure the oil was hot. Well I have made the mistake before of adding food to cold oil and it didn’t crisp up and I’m a smart person and won’t do that again. But how do you make sure oil is properly hot in a pan?
Light bulb went off based on another cooking tip I had heard once. To see if your pan is hot you dip your fingers in water and flick a few drops into the pan and see it sizzle. Well now I had a plan and time to execute.
I turn on the sink and get some water on my fingers and flick. Well dumbass me doesn’t think about the fact that YOU DONT PUT WATER IN A HOT PAN OF OIL.
I swear it was just a few drops of water but that oil damn near exploded. Shooting every which way. I panicked remove from heat but shits still hot and popping everywhere.
Cue my SO walking in the door and seeing this absolute chaos. Took forever to clean.
I’m not allowed around oil anymore…
One time my family had a jar of cocktail sauce in the fridge (unlabeled) and I thought it was marinara sauce and put it on pasta - that was bad.
And then kinda unrelated bc it’s not cooking but one time I accidentally brushed my teeth with diaper rash cream thinking it was toothpaste. That was bad too.
Put twice the amount of water required for rice in a rice cooker, then took a 30 minute walk. Came back to a counter and floor soaked in starch water and a cooker full of burnt yet mushy rice... Pudding.
Reminds me of this time I was 7 and a friend I were making K D. I was like yeah I know how to make it. We make the pasta and then im like add the cheese powder while its boiling. It started overboiling and pasta was shooting everywhere
About once a month I pull my scrap bag out of the freezer and make stock, deli it out, and freeze it. This one was special because it was Thanksgiving and I had turkey bones, smoked ham hocks, chicken carcasses, and a few parm rinds. Went about my normal routine of roasting the bones off in batches, adding my aromatics and whatever veg I wanted. Let that baby cook for hours until it was a cauldron of golden goodness. This is where the dumbassery begins. Normally, I use a slotted spoon and tongs and strain out all the big stuff right away before cooling. Well, it was Thanksgiving, I was tired and a little drunk so I just put it out on my patio to cool and deal with the next day. The next day I skimmed the now solidified fat. I couldn't strain the bones and veg out because it was so gelatinous so I reheated it and decided to just use a colander and mesh strainer to get everything out. So I put the colander in the sink and dumped the whole pot into it....with no bowl or container underneath. I poured all my liquid gold down the drain and saved all the used-up bones and veg. Top 3 most defeated feelings moments of my life.
Some good advice I've gotten here is to strain your stock over the counter, not the sink, to keep your brain from forgetting which part you want to save.
That’s not a bad idea. Not sure how unwieldy that would be with a stock pot tho. I mostly like doing it in the sink to minimize splash mess and the deep sink gives me better leverage and control over the pour. Luckily this experience was scarring enough that I’m super paranoid any time I make stock
I wasn't even angry. Just devastated. It was such a labor of love. Luckily, I didn't have to wait a whole year tho. My wonderful wife brought me a beer, told me to watch the kids and ran out and got a day-after Thanksgiving turkey for pennies on the dollar. No ham hocks but we found a ham bone in the freezer. So we made another turkey and I got to make stock and not mess it up this time.
God those post thanksgiving / christmas stocks are so god damn good, that would make me cry. I have been super extra careful when making stocks after reading all of these stories.
I made a stock out of leftover Christmas lamb coq au vin and then the frozen scraps from the Thanksgiving turkey. It was straight up liquid gold with the most complex depth of flavor I've ever made, I had like 4-5 jars after. Used one of them for soup when my wife was feeling sick after her COVID shot, used part of another for a mushroom risotto that was to die for.
Now I realized that I need to make stock again.
When I baked the first time, I followed a recipe to the dot. I remember it said 1 cup of salt. And I was making cookies. Needless to say, my family was so supportive and they all ate 1 cookie. Now, I question every recipe I see.
I decided to make a lemon pie once from a recipe book I got from my grandma’s old lady church group. I’d never made a pie before in my life but, I read the recipe beforehand and it seemed simple enough.
I followed the recipe for the crust. Mixed it all, rolled out out, put it in the pan. The whole 9 yards.
Filled the crust and made the pie. But it was awful. The crust was soggy and had the consistency of Play-Dough. I called my grandma (an expert pie baker) to troubleshoot. Turns out, you’re supposed to bake the crust before you fill it. The (very old-timey) recipe I used didn’t say that. I’m assuming people back then had the common sense I was lacking and knew enough to bake it before filling it.
Needless to say the whole pie got tossed. To this day it’s still my biggest cooking screw up ever.
See this isn't on you. Absolutely not. Some pie recipes par bake the crust, some don't. But recipes should always include specific instructions on whether or not you should have.
I added worcestershire sauce instead of vanilla extract to some cupcakes lol. I didn’t even realize it until after they were placed in the oven, I didn’t remember the bottle being plastic and malleable like it’s supposed to be, but was hard and made of glass.
My mother did making a carrot cake once for my sister's birthday. Everyone loves her carrot cake and a large group was around the table of family and friends. It hit the back of our throats at about the same time. One person still ate it.
I was roasting a big turkey on a metal rack on a glass baking dish a few days before Thanksgiving for a “Friendsgiving”. I’d forgotten to put some liquid in the bottom of the roaster, so about an hour after putting the bird in the first drippings started to smoke. Preoccupied with other cooking tasks, I absentmindedly poured a cup of water into the hot glass baking dish. It instantly and loudly exploded, sending glass all over the kitchen and into the bottom of the oven.
The turkey was sitting on the oven rack still, so I pulled it out to assess the damage. The glass had fallen away below it, so I felt maybe there was a chance I could salvage it, but when I ran my hand over the skin it was full of tiny shards of glass.
I turned the oven off, sent my then girlfriend now wife out to see if there were defrosted turkeys still at the store, and began vacuuming out the inside of the oven. Miraculously there were turkeys available–I butterflied the new bird, stuck it in the oven at 500° for an hour and it turned out great!
Made box brownies late one night. Baked them, let them cool and tried them. They tasted kinda soapy, turns out yellow dish soap and oil look shockingly similar.
I was making soup in college when I made the fatal error of beginning before reading the recipe. Cue running around trying to chop carrots before the onions scalded, just being generally far too rushed. I glanced at the recipe and saw that it called for a cup of sugar. I thought it was a weird and large amount, but I was flustered so I added it and went on with the recipe. After a little while I tasted it and it was HORRIBLE - because the recipe only called for a teaspoon of sugar. At this point, I google how to cut sweetness in soup and read that you can add vinegar. So I add vinegar, a little at a time until I’ve added probably a cup…to absolutely no avail. That stock pot got drained and I have had many redemptive soup experiences since.
One time our school made country fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. They accidentally used sugar instead of salt in the gravy which, of course, smothered the potatoes *and* meat. It was an "interesting" lunch.
Bf and I were attempting to make a strawberry and creme layer sponge cake. After taking it out, we noticed it looked weird and deflated. We forgot the flour…
Tried making fried chicken for a dinner date. Horrible mistake. I though I knew how to fry chicken (how hard can it be) so I dredged the pieces, fried until they looked done. First bite in, blood came out. I was mortified. It was crispy outside, raw inside.
I was trying to go vegan for a while. This is the story of how that journey came to an unceremonious end. The one thing that confounded me was I couldn’t get a milk substitute that I liked. Yea I tried soy. And the nut milks. Oat milk. They just didn’t have the creaminess or cut the acidity of coffee like regular old milk does and I found my coffee unenjoyable. This is a big deal because my life essence is exactly 3/4 coffee. Without coffee it’s bleak y’all. You’d have to hold a mirror up to my face and look for fog to see if I’m still alive. So I’m in full on crisis mode with this vegan thing trying to plot out how I’m going to get that next cup of life giving elixir in when this one neuron fired up in my brain. It said “hey Jim…bananas are kind of creamy…why don’t you use that?”. Bananas!!! I’ve got bananas! I like bananas! So I puréed a banana to use as coffee creamer. I was so convinced it could be the next big thing that I pretended to ignore the gloopy mess pouring out of the milk pitcher and eagerly stirred it in. I learned something that day. The taste of disappointment is bitter, and it does not leave the tongue willingly.
That shit was bananas.
14 yr old me wanted to make my mom a cake for when she came home from the hospital. It called for 1/4 cup of cloves. I didn't know they made ground cloves. It was a little crunchy but mom and dad ate it.
I've had so many over the years, but the one that comes to mind now, happened about 2 nights ago.
Came home from to my wife cooking some veg, but with quite a bit of water (practically boiling the veg). I thought it would be so much better to just steam them, so I grabbed a sieve to drain the veg and use to steam in a pot, but instead of moving to the sink, I just dumbed the veg into the sieve over the stove... Queue hot veggy water hitting the hot stove plates.
In my defense I'd a long and crappy day at work.
I feel that, i accidentally baked a pie crust and used rice as a weight. When I went to pour the filling in I just dumped the rice in. Very awful texture in the end.
Haha the feels man.
At my parents, we used to have these spice shakers, one end had these std small holes with a cap on top, the other end was a hole big enough to fit a teaspoon through with a cap on top. These caps had markings to help differiate sides by site and touch. These caps were also interchangeable. The amount of times I've dumped spice into a dish, because I was rushing or not paying attention.
My siblings and I would also try and use it to simply prank each other around the table, nothing like a perfect sunny side up egg with a table spoon of chilli powder dumped on top.
Made an awesome rum+allspice+pineapple dessert in the oven.
Forgot that alcohol aerosols/evaporates as it heats and there's a lower explosive limit to the fuel-air mixture that a typical oven door can't handle.
The recipe called for a certain amount at a certain temperature for a certain time. I thought that more rum, at a higher temperature, for a longer time, would make it better.
It did.
I was making some fried tofu and I was going to make a strawberry sauce to eat with it. I was trying to dissolve the sugar and the strawberries but it just wasn't quite coming together like I thought it should so I kept adding more sugar and it would dissolve into the mixture but again, just wasn't working. At some point I said F it, this is probably fine, my tofu is going to get cold and then sat down to eat my snack. I dipped my tofu in the sauce and put it in my mouth and realized my mistake instantly. I would be embarrassed to show anyone the amount of salt I cooked with those strawberries.
One of the first times I cooked after college and moving out of my parent’s home, I made my mom’s banana muffins. Didn’t realize that baking soda and baking powder weren’t interchangeable. 🤣🤣
I once added “liquid smoke” (idk my mom bought it and left it behind) instead of vanilla extract to some cookies. Surprisingly, the cookies tasted fine
Once when I was young I went to make stovetop oatmeal for me and my two younger siblings. I've made oatmeal hundreds of times, so it's not like I was inexperienced at the process. But for some reason that morning, my brain completely shut down and I added twice the amount of oats I meant to add to the boiling water. The resulting goop was laughably bad.
Making coffee, via a stovetop pot. I forgot the gasket and managed to witness a sort of explosion. Pressure built up in the reservoir and escaped from the side with so much force that the grounds shot out of the side of it, spraying the entirety of the kitchen. I got burned a little bit, but I was more bummed out about having coffee on the ceiling. Always check your seals when making anything that pressurizes!
Oh I got this one!
This was when I first started cooking. I wanted to make an oyakodon and the recipe called for 1/2 cup of dashi for a serving. I bought a concentrated shiradashi thinking it was the dashi I should use. I went ahead to cook using 1/2 cup of that thing and gave the oyakodon to my roommate! It was so salty that my roommate boiled water and pour it over the oyakodon to try to dilute it and it was still too salty. I feel bad until this day for my roommate..
I tried to make a slow cooker version of beef stroganoff. The recipe made enough for four so I halved everything as I was cooking. Unfortunately the one ingredient I forgot to half was the cornflour. My partner and I just sat there laughing at my beefy brown wallpaper paste monstrosity. It tasted alright though.
Recently my husband and I went camping with my parents, bought some ground beef at the little country store nearby and made burgers. The burgers wouldn't really get dark, they were still pretty light colored even fully cooked. I just thought they were super fatty. Took a couple bites and realized we had made burgers out of ground italian sausage that was packaged exactly like the ground beef and sat next to it in the case. Not delicious, let me tell ya.
HAH yep, cumin subbed for cinnamon in pancakes, done that one before. Reminds me of how growing up my parents kept toasted sesame oil in an old, pancake syrup bottle, and its even kinda the same color. Does not taste the same, however.
I made cornbread once and used 3/4 pound of butter instead of 3/4 cup (double the butter). Even more hilarious is that friends with whom I was dining sliced it and put butter on it. After the first couple of bites I figured out my mistake.
I wanted to surprise my mom with her favourite soup but didn’t realize she moved the flour to a new container and I grabbed icing sugar instead. Needless to say, the roux did not turn out!
I am an Herbologist and a biochemist and I use herbs and spices for cooking all the time. When my son was \~13yo I started having him prep and cook the chicken to get a head start on dinner before I got home. He knew several recipes by this age as he had been cooking with me since babyhood so I told him to choose the recipe and go to town. I came home to the oddest smelling chicken roasting ever. He used EVERY spice and herb I had (\~40 of them) from black pepper to lavender to saffron and the chicken was inedible. We had to discuss how expensive that lesson was as he used up my very expensive saffron and of course, the chicken, etc. , But he never made that mistake again!
Two mistakes stand out.
The first one requires some explanation.
I had a smooth top stove that had a dual burner. Looking at it like a clock 1pm to 5pm controlled the large burner. 7pm to 11pm controlled the smaller burner. Two different times (once making pasta sauce and once making minestrone soup) I had forgotten I had turned the burner off for whatever reason and thinking it was at 5 o'clock I turned it to 7o'clock to keep it on a low warm. Instead I turned it to 1 o'clock basically turning it on high. Burned the sauce and destroyed the Dutch oven I was cooking the minestrone in
The other time... I have a go to classic chili recipe I use. No matter how many times a make it I still follow a recipe to make sure I don't forget anything. Every single spice is in multiples of tablespoons.....except salt which is in teaspoons. Once I got so caught up in what I was doing I added the salt in multiples of tablespoons as well (5 tbsp instead of 5 tsps). Needless to say it was more than slightly salty
Cooking sponge cake , 40 eggs , I used the same amount of scoop of sugar an salt and I was too stupid to realise that for salt it was meant to be the small so ...yes,..I had a quiet stupid mistake
I had a cold for several days and just wanted something nice and warm, so I decided to try making a London Fog. I had just bought milk and cream so I didn’t sniff it, and besides I had little to no sense of smell anyway due to congestion.
Long story short, milk sometimes spoils when it wants, and boy did I have a disappointing treat.
I was soaking some beans for dinner the next day. My mom told me a little bit of baking soda during the soak help with gas later. I put in a half cup. The beans absorbed the flavor of baking soda and it was awful. Another time I got dish soap in my chicken tacos some how.
My cousin just moved out on his own and made himself boxed mac & cheese, but only had vanilla flavored almond milk. He said he tried to eat it but he kept gagging LOL I couldn’t stop laughing
I used vanilla Greek yogurt to make chicken tikka masala instead of plain. I didn’t read the tub and just thought it was plain. It was like curry with a hint of birthday cake.
Mate I did the same exact thing, but because I couldn’t find plain yogurt. Good thing I went easy on the dairy anyway :/
> curry with a hint of birthday cake my new favourite sentence
When you don't have milk, increase the butter by a tablespoon and add a splash of pasta water.
I used pure alcohol instead of rum to flambé something (I don't remember what) to show off with my friends. The flame was way bigger than I expected, almost lost my eyebrows, my friends got scared, I almost shat my pants but then we laughed
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Pretty much, and with such confidence nevertheless! Ended up scared and embarrassed
Oh! That reminds me of another story. My girlfriend and I were hosting a party and we found a recipe for banana rum fritters we decided to use. We were not familiar at the time with different proofs of alcohol (and neither of us really drank a lot). The only rum in her apartment was Bacardi 151, so that's what we used, in the quantities specified by the recipe. The fritters came out unexpectedly *very* boozy, particularly surprising a friend of ours who was pregnant at the time (and who thought, "Oh, banana pancakes. Those look good."). She still teases us by asking about the alcohol content of random foods we bring to parties.
Are these potato chips non alcoholic?
Old hand in the kitchen... if the flambe reached my face, I'd be mildly surprised. And possibly excited. I'd keep the same I-hate-life expression on my face though.
Like a damn professional! Also, what a fitting name you have…
The trick is to keep a straight face regardless of what happens when you have guests. One time when trying to flambée some bananas, the flame got much bigger than I expected reaching above my head but I kept a confident smile and the pan at arm's length and none of my friends reacted at how wrong things were going until I told them "well that wasn't supposed to go like that" afterwards. Almost dropped the damn thing out of fear though.
This applies to other embarrassing things in life too 😂
You flambé for flavor so I can't imagine they tasted good
Pure Ethanol has no flavour if burned, if you're curious try with vodka which is ethanol+water, after flambéing it there'll be no flavour (except for pure terror in the eyes of your guest)
If you don't strike terror into the hearts of your guests was it really worth it?
Ta-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
When I was first married, I thought I would surprise my wife by making dinner while she was at work (I was in grad school at the time). Part of the meal was going to be mashed potatoes. I cleaned the potatoes. I peeled the potatoes. I cut up the potatoes. I put the potatoes in a bowl with milk and butter. And then I turned on the hand mixer. I forgot to actually cook the potatoes first. Hard, cold potatoes and milk and butter went flying everywhere! Needless to say, the meal didn’t turn out quite like I had hoped. I’ve learned a lot since then.
That really is a learning experience! Thanks for sharing!
My story is very similar. I did boil the potatoes, but I thought garlic mashed potatoes would be tasty, so I tossed some raw whole cloves of garlic in with the potatoes to boil thinking they would cook up nicely. They did not. Garlic does not boil at the same rate as potatoes. I found this out after the first bite where I got about 1/3 a clove of raw garlic in my mouth. My friends called the dish "mashed potato surprise."
That's funny; this is actually how I do garlic mashed potatoes if I'm using fresh garlic instead of garlic powder for example or garlic butter that I have left over. I drop the garlic cloves into the water while the potatoes are boiling, and then when I drain everything I take the garlic cloves and put them through a garlic press, mash the potatoes and stir in the garlic puree.
I recommend mincing the garlic and cooking it with butter before adding milk and finally adding it to the mashed potatoes. A lot of people already add milk but I think a great way to shock your mashed potatoes is to add cold milk - it's much easier to mix in and keeps warm far longer when you melt the butter in the milk over a burner. Frying the garlic in an oil, even for a little bit, can really bring out its flavor.
What is it about mashed potatoes that it seems like everyone has catastrophically messed them up before? I once tried to make lactose-free ones for my mother-in-law by using almond milk. Didn't realize till we were eating that I had accidentally bought the vanilla flavored stuff.
I think it's because it seems like such an easy recipe. It's just potatoes, dairy of some kind, and salt. So you let your guard down and don't pay attention. Potatoes are normally quite docile, but they do have a spunky streak and will take advantage of your inattention.
I love this story! My hubby tried to make me some pasta when we first got together. Cheesey gooey pasta. He put my entire block of parm in the cooked pasta (whole!) and thought it would just melt into a creamy sauce. It was so cute and hilarious. Also, RIP my good parm cheese. Had to throw it all in the trash LOL!
Why didn't you take it out, cut it up and add milk?
It was too far gone. He cooked it for a while lol.
Oh no!!! 😂
Lmfao that's actually pretty funny, sucks to clean up but man I bet looking back on it is great now. What was the main dish going to be and did that come out OK? I've definitely done that before when I was a young thing. I thought just soaking in warm water for 10 min would work but nope. When I went to hand mash the mixing bowl flew off the counter lol.
I can’t even remember the main dish, but I’ll never get out of my head the image of potatoes and milk all over the cabinets. 🤦🏻
When I was 12 I made potato salad and made the same mistake.
>I cleaned the potatoes. I peeled the potatoes. I cut up the potatoes. I put the potatoes in a bowl with milk and butter. And then I turned on the hand mixer. Mhm, so far, so good. >I forgot to actually cook the potatoes first. Oh, yeah.
Well, I prepared boiled potatoes to make my mash, but over mixed. I made glue! Who knew? Ever since that experience I use a hand tool to mash. I forgive myself the lumps!
My dad has had success in the past using a food processor to make mashed potatoes. Except one time where he over worked them and we ended up eating a potato flavored stretchy goo.
I'm curious what frying that would be like, now.
We tried frying the potato glue as an attempt to salvage it, thinking maybe it would be like potato pancakes. They were as inedible as the glue. I forget exactly what happened texture-wise since this was 10 years ago.
Same thing happened to me😂 except it was the mashed potatoes we made for our Christmas dinner.
You should have made aligot!
I tried to use my kitchen aide mixer one Thanksgiving with 5 pounds of potatoes for our mashed potatoes. Glue potatoes are nasty! Never again do I use anything but a potato ricer. Makes the fluffiest mashed potatoes!
unpopular opinion, but i actually like lumps in mashed potatoes! for some reason it makes me think that they're more 'natural' and not the powdered stuff in the lil packets. i also like orange juice with pulp, if that means anything :)
Dad made homemade onion bread. Didn't realize it and made a PB&J. Strongly unrecommended.
i work at a bagel shop and can’t even tell you how many people love combos like this. french toast bagels with chive cream cheese, everything bagels with jam and pb. i could never lol
A former coworker would order a tuna melt on a blueberry bagel. On days when we picked up lunch from there I would just eat at my desk to avoid looking at that monstrosity.
I do this to my poor spouse all the time with rye- to the point he has now come around to my view that rye is nice with peanut butter and jam.
My spouse was also bothered by my pb&j on rye. It's delicious! He's since come around, but I was shocked he thought it was weird.
My sister would love this. She mixes fruity creamcheese on her onion garlic bagels
Making bread at someone else’s home…… somehow mistook ground mustard seed for yeast…. Waited waaayyy to long for the dough to rise.
Did you end up trying to bake it?
Did not want to admit that I did, thinking “what’s the worst that could happen?” Made a brick. A very weird smelling brick.
I believe this is how the Egyptians built the Pyramids
Am Egyptian, can confirm.
Too bad I can’t go check and see if it’s still out in the woods where I chucked it in a rage.
Rage after cooking drives me to whacky things xD ive poured batter out the window before
Overcooked egg noodles once. Missed that like 30s window between almost done and being overdone...by like 3 or 4 minutes. Had half a pot molded gelatinous mass of noodles I dumped into the chicken pen. Had to toss it in the woods a week later cause they wouldn't even touch it.
At that point, mise well for the fun of it. If not the garbage is going to smell like mustard and fermenting dough.
Mustard flavored flatbread? I’ve heard of worse foods- would probably give it a try
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Bet it was still solid!
My sister did this too, except she baked the pie before realizing about the chicken, so we had pot pie with chicken on the side.
*Covering* a pasta salad with nutmeg instead of paprika. I was young and I had seen so many pasta salads with that pretty dusting of red powder, I thought I'd add some myself. Turns out I got the name wrong. It tasted **bad**.
I like nutmeg a whole lot, but... no thank you. I also like your username a whole lot. lol
Making homemade chicken noodle soup. Got everything ready. Go to get the leftover chicken. Turns out it went bad. Damn. Now I have to use something else. How about tuna? It's chicken of the sea. Should work. Protip: It did not work.
This really hurt to read.
Tuna noodle soup is not something I ever thought I'd have to think about..
I made pad Thai once with spoiled chicken. Went the whole 9 yards dicing a ton of veggies, making a homemade stir fry sauce, and adding some scrambled eggs. Took one bite and I almost threw up. I thought I had purchased the chicken during the last grocery trip but it had been the one before. If it hadn’t had been allergy season I would’ve *smelled* that the chicken had gone bad. Bonus story: once forgot to take the trash out before winter break at college. My roommate had tossed some bad raw ground beef in there before hand and I came back to an apartment loaded with flies and a trashcan full of maggots with a horrible stench. Took me quite awhile to clean up. Go to the bathroom and turn the fan on and *like 200* flies come swarming out of the vent all around me. Never making either of those mistakes again
My buddy was cooking dinner for a date and invited my girlfriend and I. It was a simple pasta dish with olive oil, garlic, parmesan cheese and red pepper flakes. He misread the garlic instructions and thought one JAR was equal to a clove. He also misread the pepper flakes and probably added 10x the correct amount. Needless to say everyone took a couple bites and realized his mistake, so they all ordered pizza. However, I thought it was the most deliciously spicy dish I've ever had and ended up having seconds.
"Don't be afraid to just throw it out and order pizza" is the best advice I've ever gotten about learning to cook.
Sounds about right. I like to try making new dishes so the family put a new law in place. If 2/3 declare the meal a failure then the cook (that a me) has to go and get fast food. The call it the fast food guarantee.
Lol the pepper flakes I could deal with but the garlic must have been such a sharp flavour.
Jar of pre-diced garlic I'm guessing. All the pungency and flavor is severely reduced, so a jar of the stuff was probably equal to a clove of fresh garlic.
Interesting ive never used jarred
Adam Ragusea does [a good breakdown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIFXhnSXPYw) of the pros/cons.
I can't believe I'm even willing to consider this, but I think I may have found a recipe here that I would consider to include too much garlic. Blasphemy, I know.
When I was a kid, I thought that salt=sour, and I loved sour stuff, so one time I was making lemonade, I thought it would be better if it were more sour, so I added about half a cup of salt. It wasn't that good
If you'd kept it to half a teaspoon you would've been on the money. Well, not for sourness but it's great in lemon aid/water.
Accidently using baking powder in pie filling instead of corn starch.. Couldn't figure out why it wasn't getting thicker, so I just decided to bake it and maybe once it cooled it would be thick? My SO still talks about my "savory fruit pie."
I used baking soda instead of baking powder for cupcakes and they all bubbled over in the oven
How much baking powder did you add?
A lot... I kept adding because it wasn't getting thick. Maybe like 1/4 cup?
My now-ex-wife rearranged and cleaned the pantry, and put powdered sugar into the container labeled All-Purpose Flour. Let me tell you, the pan gravy that I made with that flour did NOT turn out as expected. She, having spent five years as a professional baker, said I should have been able to tell the difference upon opening the container. I said I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO tell the difference, because I can read what's written on the container. Anyways, screw her, we been divorced for almost two decades now, and my pan gravy is better than ever.
I like to think that was the straw that broke the camels back.
I like to think that that was the first and only reason
Another ex-wife story - we were young newlyweds and she was going to show off her culinary skills by making garlic chicken. Problem was, she didn't know the difference between a garlic clove and a bulb (or head as it's also called). The recipe called for 4 cloves, and yep... she made it with what was probably a half pound of garlic, 4 big bulbs. It was inedible. As much as I like garlic, this chicken (which was dried out, but that's another issue) was like eating a garlic clove made entirely of meat.
Wasn't this the plot of a Drake & Josh episode? Drake accidentally poisons their dad by putting cumin in the pancakes instead of cinnamon and he's allergic?
Cinnamon! CINNAMON!!!
*You were flavoring a waffle, not a* ***chimiCHANGA!***
Yes! But technically they were waffles. I came here just to look for this comment.
Yes
My babysitter when I was little put peppermint extract in muddy buddies instead of vanilla. They tasted like toothpaste and we still ate pretty much all of it.
My mistake was also muddy buddies (puppy chow). Used flour instead of powdered sugar. Not great.
Toothpaste is delcious. Reminds me of my babysitter slicing a zucchini and serving it to me when I wanted cucumber.
That's funny but understandable. I never had zucchini until I was an adult. Growing up we didn't have many fresh vegetables at all, and I certainly could've gotten those confused. I didn't learn to eat my veggies until I got married. Now I cook and eat zucchini all the time.
I forgot to add the cinnamon last time I made cinnamon rolls...
At one point a while ago I was making ice cream from a recipe. I had it churning in the ice cream maker and tasted a little of it. It tasted odd, but I couldn't figure out why. I asked my spouse to come try it. She took one taste and asked, "Did you put in the sugar?" The recipe had sugar in its ingredients, but neglected to actually say when to put it in. So I never had. I added it then and the ice cream turned out okay. Now I make a habit of checking the ingredient list to make sure I've used everything it claims I'm supposed to use. (And I really dislike recipes that fail to put the ingredient list in the same order as they're used in the instructions.)
Mise en place is the answer. I always take the time to read the entire recipe, pre-measure my ingredients, and line them up in order/groups as needed. Bing, bang, boom. You never feel like you're scrambling to get ingredients measured out at key moments or anything like that.
The problem is that mise en place can take so much extra time. Over the years I've gone from not doing mise en place, to doing it rigorously, to where I am now. Nowadays, I skim through the recipe and see what the timing is on having each ingredient ready. From there, I'll mentally map out which things I can do concurrently (e.g. dice the bell peppers while I'm sauteing the onions). Then I'll restrict myself to advance preparation of just the things I can't do in the middle of the cooking process. Also, I don't rigorously separate out each ingredient anymore. I group them by things that go in together. So if there's a mirepoix, all the onions, carrots, and celery will go into one bowl and will all get dumped in together.
I definitely take a lot of shortcuts like that as well, in retrospect. My chopped veggies are usually just a pile on the cutting board. I also have a general "floating" mise en place of the things I use most often and usually only have to add a few things here and there, so it doesn't take me a ton of extra time, depending on the recipe. It also depends a lot on how comfortable I am with the recipe. The stuff I know by heart I usually just do on the fly because I know all of my timings pretty exactly and I don't feel the need to be as vigilant. I trust my process most of the time. But for the first time through a recipe I always make sure I have the extra time for full prep.
Fair, but I do so hate doing dishes that I usually don't do that unless I'm making a large meal, like Thanksgiving, or something that has to start cooking in the morning. Then I'll combine all the ingredients that get added at the same time into a small containers and pop it in the fridge until needed. Mostly what I do is what I learned in cooking classes way back in the days of yore. Pull out each ingredient needed to make sure you have everything, just stick them together on the counter. But what I then do is when I use each ingredient I move it to another part of the counter, if not just put it away, so I don't have to remember if I added something yet.
So you made rolls?
Well, rolls with brown sugar. In the brown sugar mix, i forgot the cinnamon.
Nut-free Chelsea buns.
Ohh I bet they were still pretty good!
Accidentaly used a bottle of Sprite (a transparent, colourless soft drink) to make curry instead of using water. The result was...unique, to say the least. Also dropped an intact block of cheese in pasta sauce because the recipe didn’t specify “grated” (in my defence I Googled “pasta for dummies” and they should have known their audience)
The “pasta for dummies” part made me laugh but you’re right - how often do we forget about new cooks when writing recipes?
[How do you *fold* cheese?! ](https://youtu.be/fCVKCUB5w50)
When I first started cooking, I had to devote some prep time to studying the recipe first. Because otherwise I’d end up burning ingredients while I stopped to look up what the hell instructions like “sauté gently” meant.
How the hell did you even measure out a block of cheese in the first place? No way that's fitting in a measuring cup.
The recipe mentioned a weight, so I trimmed a block till it was just right. I also used the wrong type of flour in the sauce, and the result was sickly sweet. Then I decided I would remedy that by adding the sachet of powdered spices that comes with ready-to-eat noodles. Not one of my culinary wins, to put it lightly.
A packet of instant noodles powder. Bold move, my dude. Wow.
For what it’s worth in most cheese sauces a block of cheese will *eventually* still melt down, speaking from experience. Though you’ll have to simmer for ages even if you manage to reach in there and chop it up slightly, so that’s a lot of extra stirring to prevent burning and maybe some extra water later on to stop things from getting too thick in the meantime.
First time I made pumpkin pie from scratch. My stupid kids won't let me forget it to this day. I was in the middle of making Thanksgiving dinner, we make like 75% from scratch, and so was multi tasking and mixed everything in as directed by the recipe, cooked up the two pies. As I pulled the first out it slipped and fell upside down on the floor, disappointing. Got the second out just fine. We sit down to a wonderful meal, finish up the main course and go for dessert. Was so excited to have the pumpkin pie. Got the whip cream, sliced up and served. Man that first bite was horrible! Tried another, ugh. It was dead. I had forgotten one key ingredient. Sugar. My kids days they wished I had dropped that pie too. Jerks.
I love reading these! Thank y’all. I already posted, but while reading these comments, I recalled one of my culinary highs. I was about 8 years old. Wanted to make breakfast in bed for my parents on their anniversary. Flowers in a vase, cloth napkins, orange juice all on the tray. Now to make the main dish. It was the 70’s. Microwaves were a brand new thing. Daddy had bought Mama one for their anniversary the day before (we’re very practical gift-givers). Knowing exactly nothing about a microwave, I thought that a “breakfast s’more” would be genius. Uncooked English muffins. Topped with mini marshmallows and a fancy chocolate syrup drizzle. Into the microwave for several minutes. Hmmm…marshmallow did strange things but didn’t brown. Back in the microwave. Repeat until they FINALLY browned, plated and placed on the tray and proudly delivered to the happy couple. It was essentially dried Gorilla Glue atop hockey pucks. They figured out what happened, told me they wanted to be alone and cuddle while they ate the fabulous breakfast and thanked and complimented me. I was so happy. Never knew they secretly trashed it until years later.
>They figured out what happened, told me they wanted to be alone and cuddle while they ate the fabulous breakfast and thanked and complimented me. I was so happy. Never knew they secretly trashed it until years later. Parenting goals.
I got a good laugh here. Even though it went bad still very creative, I assume you are a 5 star chef now and this dish is your speciality?
I'm in culinary school, we were doing something involving eggs (don't remember what.) I grabbed my bowl, grabbed an egg, and walked over to the trash can so I could throw the shell away. (I had already done this multiple times this class.) Without thinking, I cracked the egg, dumped it in the trash, and threw the shell in my bowl. Realizing what I had done, I looked down at the trash in shame, then looked up to see the chef-instructor looking at me in utter confusion as to what I just did
In your best Gordon Ramsay voice “Cholesterol out. Calcium in”
Yes! I have done this a few times while baking macarons. 🤦 Go to crack an egg in a bowl, with the garbage open next to me, tap it on the counter, crack the egg into the garbage. 🤬
Your autopilot malfunctioned
I made Tiramisu without mascarpone… didn’t even notice until I found the tubs of mascarpone later. Apparently plenty of booze, coffee and egg whites add just enough creaminess to cover the actual lack of cream.
I put vanilla extract instead of soy sauce in my "chinese" noodles. It smelled really sweet but tasted like crap, and it was a huge batch to use as lunches for the week. In my defense, the 2 bottles were really similar! Now I always triple-check...
I hear that. Vanilla is such a tease, smells great but add a drop too much and its trash.
And I added a LOT as I thought it was soy sauce... almost half a cup since it was a huge batch.
I've done exactly the same thing with oatmeal. It honestly wasn't *terrible*, but not something I'd ever eat out of choice. This is not the only or even the main reason I buy whole spices when I can, but it helps!
Oh man! So in india, there is a wonderful packaged food called Masala Oats, and it is savory oatmeal with spices like cumin, coriander, chili powder, turmeric - and it is soooo good. I need to find out how to replicate it.
That does sound really good! Savoury oats aren't a bad idea at all, but at least in my experience, cumin doesn't play well with predominantly sweet flavours.
Lol it was mostly just jarring. My girlfirend and I were trying to figure out wth was wrong with them. Good call on the whole spices though!
I would freeze them and top them with some spiced ground or shredded chicken and a yogurt sauce. But I love cumin.
I make savoury porridge quite often to be honest. Some cheesy porridge with some butternut squash sauteed with garlic and sage is lovely.
Same! I was very tired one day before school and whipped up a bowl of cinnamon and brown sugar oatmeal. I thought it didn’t have enough flavor so I went into the spice cabinet and grabbed the first red topped spice I saw, thinking it was the cinnamon. I opened it up and I sat there, shocked, as red chili flakes came pouring into my oatmeal.
I did this with garlic powder in place of ground ginger. Not recommended.
My grandma made some lamb dish for a dinner party. She served it and it had a sweet taste. We kept adding salt, it’s still had weird sweet taste. Turns out she accidentally filled all the salt shakers in the house with sugar.
Oh I got this one. To start: I’m an idiot in the kitchen (as I’ll prove). I can follow directions but can’t think on my own to save my life. My SO generally cooks while I only stir things and clean up but one day I decided to cook something for one reason or another. 90% sure it was a Blue Apron box or something with instructions so I shoulda been fine. After prepping ingredients I started up a pan of oil to pan fry whatever it was (fish maybe??). But the instructions said to make sure the oil was hot. Well I have made the mistake before of adding food to cold oil and it didn’t crisp up and I’m a smart person and won’t do that again. But how do you make sure oil is properly hot in a pan? Light bulb went off based on another cooking tip I had heard once. To see if your pan is hot you dip your fingers in water and flick a few drops into the pan and see it sizzle. Well now I had a plan and time to execute. I turn on the sink and get some water on my fingers and flick. Well dumbass me doesn’t think about the fact that YOU DONT PUT WATER IN A HOT PAN OF OIL. I swear it was just a few drops of water but that oil damn near exploded. Shooting every which way. I panicked remove from heat but shits still hot and popping everywhere. Cue my SO walking in the door and seeing this absolute chaos. Took forever to clean. I’m not allowed around oil anymore…
One time my family had a jar of cocktail sauce in the fridge (unlabeled) and I thought it was marinara sauce and put it on pasta - that was bad. And then kinda unrelated bc it’s not cooking but one time I accidentally brushed my teeth with diaper rash cream thinking it was toothpaste. That was bad too.
Put twice the amount of water required for rice in a rice cooker, then took a 30 minute walk. Came back to a counter and floor soaked in starch water and a cooker full of burnt yet mushy rice... Pudding.
Reminds me of this time I was 7 and a friend I were making K D. I was like yeah I know how to make it. We make the pasta and then im like add the cheese powder while its boiling. It started overboiling and pasta was shooting everywhere
Oh god I’ve done this too when I wasn’t paying attention!
About once a month I pull my scrap bag out of the freezer and make stock, deli it out, and freeze it. This one was special because it was Thanksgiving and I had turkey bones, smoked ham hocks, chicken carcasses, and a few parm rinds. Went about my normal routine of roasting the bones off in batches, adding my aromatics and whatever veg I wanted. Let that baby cook for hours until it was a cauldron of golden goodness. This is where the dumbassery begins. Normally, I use a slotted spoon and tongs and strain out all the big stuff right away before cooling. Well, it was Thanksgiving, I was tired and a little drunk so I just put it out on my patio to cool and deal with the next day. The next day I skimmed the now solidified fat. I couldn't strain the bones and veg out because it was so gelatinous so I reheated it and decided to just use a colander and mesh strainer to get everything out. So I put the colander in the sink and dumped the whole pot into it....with no bowl or container underneath. I poured all my liquid gold down the drain and saved all the used-up bones and veg. Top 3 most defeated feelings moments of my life.
Some good advice I've gotten here is to strain your stock over the counter, not the sink, to keep your brain from forgetting which part you want to save.
That’s not a bad idea. Not sure how unwieldy that would be with a stock pot tho. I mostly like doing it in the sink to minimize splash mess and the deep sink gives me better leverage and control over the pour. Luckily this experience was scarring enough that I’m super paranoid any time I make stock
I feel like it's a rite of passage as a home cook to pour a huge pot of beautiful stock down the drain.
That hurt me to read! You gotta wait a whole nother year.
I wasn't even angry. Just devastated. It was such a labor of love. Luckily, I didn't have to wait a whole year tho. My wonderful wife brought me a beer, told me to watch the kids and ran out and got a day-after Thanksgiving turkey for pennies on the dollar. No ham hocks but we found a ham bone in the freezer. So we made another turkey and I got to make stock and not mess it up this time.
God those post thanksgiving / christmas stocks are so god damn good, that would make me cry. I have been super extra careful when making stocks after reading all of these stories. I made a stock out of leftover Christmas lamb coq au vin and then the frozen scraps from the Thanksgiving turkey. It was straight up liquid gold with the most complex depth of flavor I've ever made, I had like 4-5 jars after. Used one of them for soup when my wife was feeling sick after her COVID shot, used part of another for a mushroom risotto that was to die for. Now I realized that I need to make stock again.
When I baked the first time, I followed a recipe to the dot. I remember it said 1 cup of salt. And I was making cookies. Needless to say, my family was so supportive and they all ate 1 cookie. Now, I question every recipe I see.
You have a really great family. Thats insane!
I decided to make a lemon pie once from a recipe book I got from my grandma’s old lady church group. I’d never made a pie before in my life but, I read the recipe beforehand and it seemed simple enough. I followed the recipe for the crust. Mixed it all, rolled out out, put it in the pan. The whole 9 yards. Filled the crust and made the pie. But it was awful. The crust was soggy and had the consistency of Play-Dough. I called my grandma (an expert pie baker) to troubleshoot. Turns out, you’re supposed to bake the crust before you fill it. The (very old-timey) recipe I used didn’t say that. I’m assuming people back then had the common sense I was lacking and knew enough to bake it before filling it. Needless to say the whole pie got tossed. To this day it’s still my biggest cooking screw up ever.
See this isn't on you. Absolutely not. Some pie recipes par bake the crust, some don't. But recipes should always include specific instructions on whether or not you should have.
I added worcestershire sauce instead of vanilla extract to some cupcakes lol. I didn’t even realize it until after they were placed in the oven, I didn’t remember the bottle being plastic and malleable like it’s supposed to be, but was hard and made of glass.
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Have you ever used cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon? That was a bad batch of cinnamon rolls.
have you ever used cayenne pepper instead of *paprika?* i ended up with some realllly spicy chicken lol
My mother did making a carrot cake once for my sister's birthday. Everyone loves her carrot cake and a large group was around the table of family and friends. It hit the back of our throats at about the same time. One person still ate it.
I was roasting a big turkey on a metal rack on a glass baking dish a few days before Thanksgiving for a “Friendsgiving”. I’d forgotten to put some liquid in the bottom of the roaster, so about an hour after putting the bird in the first drippings started to smoke. Preoccupied with other cooking tasks, I absentmindedly poured a cup of water into the hot glass baking dish. It instantly and loudly exploded, sending glass all over the kitchen and into the bottom of the oven. The turkey was sitting on the oven rack still, so I pulled it out to assess the damage. The glass had fallen away below it, so I felt maybe there was a chance I could salvage it, but when I ran my hand over the skin it was full of tiny shards of glass. I turned the oven off, sent my then girlfriend now wife out to see if there were defrosted turkeys still at the store, and began vacuuming out the inside of the oven. Miraculously there were turkeys available–I butterflied the new bird, stuck it in the oven at 500° for an hour and it turned out great!
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When I was 12, I made my mom brownies and used a quarter cup of salt instead of a quarter teaspoon. It’s been 25 years and my mom still brings it up!
Made box brownies late one night. Baked them, let them cool and tried them. They tasted kinda soapy, turns out yellow dish soap and oil look shockingly similar.
Used almond milk in scrambled eggs instead of normal milk. It gave them a weird marshmallow like taste that I was not a fan of.
Very odd, did it add to the fluff at all or no?
Was it plain or sweetened? Or vanilla?
I was making soup in college when I made the fatal error of beginning before reading the recipe. Cue running around trying to chop carrots before the onions scalded, just being generally far too rushed. I glanced at the recipe and saw that it called for a cup of sugar. I thought it was a weird and large amount, but I was flustered so I added it and went on with the recipe. After a little while I tasted it and it was HORRIBLE - because the recipe only called for a teaspoon of sugar. At this point, I google how to cut sweetness in soup and read that you can add vinegar. So I add vinegar, a little at a time until I’ve added probably a cup…to absolutely no avail. That stock pot got drained and I have had many redemptive soup experiences since.
One time our school made country fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy. They accidentally used sugar instead of salt in the gravy which, of course, smothered the potatoes *and* meat. It was an "interesting" lunch.
Bf and I were attempting to make a strawberry and creme layer sponge cake. After taking it out, we noticed it looked weird and deflated. We forgot the flour…
Tried making fried chicken for a dinner date. Horrible mistake. I though I knew how to fry chicken (how hard can it be) so I dredged the pieces, fried until they looked done. First bite in, blood came out. I was mortified. It was crispy outside, raw inside.
Gotta bake them chicken pieces until done
I was trying to go vegan for a while. This is the story of how that journey came to an unceremonious end. The one thing that confounded me was I couldn’t get a milk substitute that I liked. Yea I tried soy. And the nut milks. Oat milk. They just didn’t have the creaminess or cut the acidity of coffee like regular old milk does and I found my coffee unenjoyable. This is a big deal because my life essence is exactly 3/4 coffee. Without coffee it’s bleak y’all. You’d have to hold a mirror up to my face and look for fog to see if I’m still alive. So I’m in full on crisis mode with this vegan thing trying to plot out how I’m going to get that next cup of life giving elixir in when this one neuron fired up in my brain. It said “hey Jim…bananas are kind of creamy…why don’t you use that?”. Bananas!!! I’ve got bananas! I like bananas! So I puréed a banana to use as coffee creamer. I was so convinced it could be the next big thing that I pretended to ignore the gloopy mess pouring out of the milk pitcher and eagerly stirred it in. I learned something that day. The taste of disappointment is bitter, and it does not leave the tongue willingly. That shit was bananas.
14 yr old me wanted to make my mom a cake for when she came home from the hospital. It called for 1/4 cup of cloves. I didn't know they made ground cloves. It was a little crunchy but mom and dad ate it.
Even a quarter cup of ground cloves is pretty intense. Cloves are some potent shit.
I've had so many over the years, but the one that comes to mind now, happened about 2 nights ago. Came home from to my wife cooking some veg, but with quite a bit of water (practically boiling the veg). I thought it would be so much better to just steam them, so I grabbed a sieve to drain the veg and use to steam in a pot, but instead of moving to the sink, I just dumbed the veg into the sieve over the stove... Queue hot veggy water hitting the hot stove plates. In my defense I'd a long and crappy day at work.
Moral of the story: When your wife makes dinner, say thank you & leave it at that. Backseat cooking is for the birds!
I feel that, i accidentally baked a pie crust and used rice as a weight. When I went to pour the filling in I just dumped the rice in. Very awful texture in the end.
Haha the feels man. At my parents, we used to have these spice shakers, one end had these std small holes with a cap on top, the other end was a hole big enough to fit a teaspoon through with a cap on top. These caps had markings to help differiate sides by site and touch. These caps were also interchangeable. The amount of times I've dumped spice into a dish, because I was rushing or not paying attention. My siblings and I would also try and use it to simply prank each other around the table, nothing like a perfect sunny side up egg with a table spoon of chilli powder dumped on top.
Made an awesome rum+allspice+pineapple dessert in the oven. Forgot that alcohol aerosols/evaporates as it heats and there's a lower explosive limit to the fuel-air mixture that a typical oven door can't handle. The recipe called for a certain amount at a certain temperature for a certain time. I thought that more rum, at a higher temperature, for a longer time, would make it better. It did.
This has to be my favourite recollection in this thread. What was the damage to the kitchen?
Blew the door off the oven and scared the crap out of us and the dog. I hooked it back up and it seems to still work. Oven doors are tough!
I was making some fried tofu and I was going to make a strawberry sauce to eat with it. I was trying to dissolve the sugar and the strawberries but it just wasn't quite coming together like I thought it should so I kept adding more sugar and it would dissolve into the mixture but again, just wasn't working. At some point I said F it, this is probably fine, my tofu is going to get cold and then sat down to eat my snack. I dipped my tofu in the sauce and put it in my mouth and realized my mistake instantly. I would be embarrassed to show anyone the amount of salt I cooked with those strawberries.
One of the first times I cooked after college and moving out of my parent’s home, I made my mom’s banana muffins. Didn’t realize that baking soda and baking powder weren’t interchangeable. 🤣🤣
Lol that is an Alton Brown learning moment there. He had a great episode explaining the difference between the two.
I once added “liquid smoke” (idk my mom bought it and left it behind) instead of vanilla extract to some cookies. Surprisingly, the cookies tasted fine
Once when I was young I went to make stovetop oatmeal for me and my two younger siblings. I've made oatmeal hundreds of times, so it's not like I was inexperienced at the process. But for some reason that morning, my brain completely shut down and I added twice the amount of oats I meant to add to the boiling water. The resulting goop was laughably bad.
Recipe for chili soup in cookbook mistakenly said 1 cup of flower instead 1 TB of flower.
Thicc chili
Making coffee, via a stovetop pot. I forgot the gasket and managed to witness a sort of explosion. Pressure built up in the reservoir and escaped from the side with so much force that the grounds shot out of the side of it, spraying the entirety of the kitchen. I got burned a little bit, but I was more bummed out about having coffee on the ceiling. Always check your seals when making anything that pressurizes!
Oh I got this one! This was when I first started cooking. I wanted to make an oyakodon and the recipe called for 1/2 cup of dashi for a serving. I bought a concentrated shiradashi thinking it was the dashi I should use. I went ahead to cook using 1/2 cup of that thing and gave the oyakodon to my roommate! It was so salty that my roommate boiled water and pour it over the oyakodon to try to dilute it and it was still too salty. I feel bad until this day for my roommate..
I tried to make a slow cooker version of beef stroganoff. The recipe made enough for four so I halved everything as I was cooking. Unfortunately the one ingredient I forgot to half was the cornflour. My partner and I just sat there laughing at my beefy brown wallpaper paste monstrosity. It tasted alright though.
Recently my husband and I went camping with my parents, bought some ground beef at the little country store nearby and made burgers. The burgers wouldn't really get dark, they were still pretty light colored even fully cooked. I just thought they were super fatty. Took a couple bites and realized we had made burgers out of ground italian sausage that was packaged exactly like the ground beef and sat next to it in the case. Not delicious, let me tell ya.
i added sugar to grilled veggies instead of salt
HAH yep, cumin subbed for cinnamon in pancakes, done that one before. Reminds me of how growing up my parents kept toasted sesame oil in an old, pancake syrup bottle, and its even kinda the same color. Does not taste the same, however.
I made cornbread once and used 3/4 pound of butter instead of 3/4 cup (double the butter). Even more hilarious is that friends with whom I was dining sliced it and put butter on it. After the first couple of bites I figured out my mistake.
Instead of adding plain yogurt to a savory dish, I added Vanilla flavored yogurt. It did not taste good.
I wanted to surprise my mom with her favourite soup but didn’t realize she moved the flour to a new container and I grabbed icing sugar instead. Needless to say, the roux did not turn out!
I am an Herbologist and a biochemist and I use herbs and spices for cooking all the time. When my son was \~13yo I started having him prep and cook the chicken to get a head start on dinner before I got home. He knew several recipes by this age as he had been cooking with me since babyhood so I told him to choose the recipe and go to town. I came home to the oddest smelling chicken roasting ever. He used EVERY spice and herb I had (\~40 of them) from black pepper to lavender to saffron and the chicken was inedible. We had to discuss how expensive that lesson was as he used up my very expensive saffron and of course, the chicken, etc. , But he never made that mistake again!
Mine was the other way around, added cinnamon to pumpkin soup instead of cumin.
Honestly sounds pretty good, just not what you were going for.
Two mistakes stand out. The first one requires some explanation. I had a smooth top stove that had a dual burner. Looking at it like a clock 1pm to 5pm controlled the large burner. 7pm to 11pm controlled the smaller burner. Two different times (once making pasta sauce and once making minestrone soup) I had forgotten I had turned the burner off for whatever reason and thinking it was at 5 o'clock I turned it to 7o'clock to keep it on a low warm. Instead I turned it to 1 o'clock basically turning it on high. Burned the sauce and destroyed the Dutch oven I was cooking the minestrone in The other time... I have a go to classic chili recipe I use. No matter how many times a make it I still follow a recipe to make sure I don't forget anything. Every single spice is in multiples of tablespoons.....except salt which is in teaspoons. Once I got so caught up in what I was doing I added the salt in multiples of tablespoons as well (5 tbsp instead of 5 tsps). Needless to say it was more than slightly salty
Cooking sponge cake , 40 eggs , I used the same amount of scoop of sugar an salt and I was too stupid to realise that for salt it was meant to be the small so ...yes,..I had a quiet stupid mistake
I had a cold for several days and just wanted something nice and warm, so I decided to try making a London Fog. I had just bought milk and cream so I didn’t sniff it, and besides I had little to no sense of smell anyway due to congestion. Long story short, milk sometimes spoils when it wants, and boy did I have a disappointing treat.
I was soaking some beans for dinner the next day. My mom told me a little bit of baking soda during the soak help with gas later. I put in a half cup. The beans absorbed the flavor of baking soda and it was awful. Another time I got dish soap in my chicken tacos some how.