Dumb food mistakes

[beachlvr]

So I just made two loaves of zucchini bread and couldn't figure out why they looked so weird.

I forgot to put the sugar in!!! Ick Blech Gross!!!!!!!!

What stupid cooking things have you done lately?

[Stephanie]

I've actually done this a couple of times. I used to sometimes use the Crisco sticks with butter flavor in cookies, but then being an idiot, would forget to add the six tablespoons of water! I stopped using the Crisco because I had a tendency to do that and ruin a perfectly good batch of cookies. My husband commented that "they didn't taste the same" and sure enough, they were gross. Hard, flat, and just seemed to be missing something! :)

[ktsb]

how much time do you have?

I could go on and on and on. But just to mention a couple.

I used the wrong end of cilantro for years. Yep I was using the stems :eek:
The first time I made chocolate chip cookes (I was young) I decided it must be o.k. to use Crisco oil instead of butter. :eek:

[MsRo]

I recently made seafood crepes (part of the recipe was for 2 cups mozzarella cheese) and TOTALLY forgot the cheese. Ick, the sauce was all grainy and nasty.

[curlyjr]

I spent 40 bucks on a lobster and a bunch more on other ingredients (we are not exactly well off) to make a special dinner. Instead of altering a recipe to suit our tastes like I usually do, I followed a recipe to a T even though it included stuff we had never tried before. We hated the new ingredients and ended up throwing the whole thing out and having sandwhiches instead.

I also have several injuries and interesting stories because of my bad habit of CWI(cooking while intoxicated)

[karlatta]

I made a green chile chicken casserole once with Sweetened Condensed Milk instead of Evaporated Milk. It was terrible!

[Holls]

not recently, but when i moved down to college, about 4years ago, and was living in the dorms I burnt EZ MAC... i didn't put in enough water!!! Now you know why I'm lurking in the cooking thread!:eek:

[bunnybeth]

I recently made crab cakes with the pouch of crab (instead of the can) and thought it didn't need to be drained. Wrong. Very mushy crab cakes, more the consistancy of pancakes than hamburgers. :p

[mierin]

I have a great one.

After college, I lived with two friends in an apartment and we didn't have much money for food. One of my friends liked to make a vegetarian lasagna that included cottage cheese. Well, without realizing it, she had accidentlly purchased PINEAPPLE cottage cheese instead of the regular. You want a taste adventure? Try pineapple flavored lasagna. The worst part was that we had to eat it because we didn't have any other food.

Oh, the thought of it brings back unpleasant memories.

[Katyanne]

This wasn't recent but when I was in middle school I had to make cornbread for my whole class for some pioneers day or something like that. I couldn't figure out why it tasted so awful.. Turns out I mixed up baking powder and baking soda.. So even to this day I still double and tripple check the baking powder and soda's in my recipes.. I never want to make that mistake again! BLECH!

Mierin: Pineapple lasagna definately sounds like a taste adventure LOL
Katie

[paiger]

Twice (in the same week) when making Derby Pie I melted the butter, but forgot to put it into the mixing bowl!! I ended up throwing one of them away, but the other, I actually ate some of b/c I was craving DP so bad :o!! It was SO dense, it was weird.

I was making a trifle for a couples dinner that we were having. I got all the ingredients and starting layering the stuff only to actually read in the directions that the recipe was for a 6-qt punch bowl :eek:!! I had put half a 9x13" cake in the bottom (when half a 9" round is plenty) so half the trifle bowl was full. I ended up trying to pull pieces from underneath the fruit, frosting and whip cream, then smashing it down to make it somewhat fit. It turned out okay, but the outside was SO ugly.

[Call_Me_Scarlett]

When I was young, maybe 10 or 11, my mom let my sisters and me make dinner once a week (with supervision, of course). I wanted to make spaghetti and asked my older sister what spices she put in the sauce when she made it. She told me she just put a little of everything in there; whatever looked good to her. Following her advice, I added a little basil, a little oregeno, a little salt, and a little cinnamon! It was terrible and 9 years later I still don't hear the end of it.

[villanelle75]

When I was about 16, my mom gave me a list of ingredients and told me it was adip a recipe and I just needed toss it all in the blender. It was for a party she was havign and I had no idea what I was making, so I just measured everything out and tossed it in the blender. I told her I was done and ashe came over to taste it, looked around, and asked where the Firtos were. I told her I had added them. Yeah, um, those were supposed to be what you dipped, not actually part of the dip. opps!

[ZoeGirl]

My mom is a fantastic cook, so I never miss an opportunity to give her grief about the time she made a pumpkin pie, but forgot to add sugar.

Pie problems must run in the family, because a couple years ago I tried to make a pecan pie for hubby, but didn't pay close enough attention to the list of ingredients - I used corn oil instead of corn syrup.

[R_mageddon]

When I make double layered cakes I use pudding between the layers instead of icing or custard
The first time I did it, I didn't think I had enough on so I added more...then added the second layer which promptly started to slide off.
Then the icing wouldn't stick to the sides because the pudding was oozing out.

It looked aweful but tasted great!! lol

[ObscureDame]

villanelle75~omg... i could not stop laughing. I can just almost picture the reactions of both you and your mother. And not only did i think that was a hilarious story but i thought it was completely adorable!!!

[ObscureDame]

Ktsb~ That is too funny on the cilantro.

[paiger]

Just so y'all know...

1. You shouldn't add Baking Soda when it says Baking Powder.

2. Cookies made w/ Baking Soda taste really bad.

3. I can't believe I made such a stupid mistake!!

[mrstim]

Hmm....biscuits made with all purpose flour instead of self rising end up flat and gross.

Yech!

Can't think of any other right now....My sister wanted to prepare lunch for a bunch of the family and had all the sandwich makings out on the table us. She used cabbage leaves instead of lettuce - but she was only 6 at the time, so I thought that was pretty good!

[catch]

these are so funny!

I'm not much of a cook but one time I tried to surprise FH and make tacos for dinner. I bought a pound of ground beef and I was just going to use some of that taco seasoning stuff and brown it, no big deal. So I opened up the packet of ground beef, already thawed, and turn on the faucet to wash the meat. I see the meat melting and falling into the sink. I grab a strainer thing and see the meat falling through the holes of the strainer! Just then, FH walks in and sees what I'm doing. I get a laugh attack and just turn off the faucet. All my ground beef down the drain. I called my mom and she later told me that you're not supposed to really wash ground beef, lol. I've avoided it all together ever since.

[Sare79]

This one isn't me, although I have made some dumb mistakes...

When my mom was making pancakes for the first time she had my dad's parents over for brunch, my grandma had suggested using this recipe she copied out of a magazine. My mom misread the instructions and instead of 1 tablespoon of sugar she added one pound. 1tb - 1lb. Apparently they were pretty grainy. :)

[Rosebud]

This isn't recent, but it's still my most famous kitchen mishap. When I was about twelve I decided to make pancakes for my family one Saturday morning. I thought I'd grabbed the pancake mix, but actually grabbed the flour. Needless to say, my flour & water pancake bricks were not a big hit. :o

[juliemag]

I've combined all ingredients for cookies/cakes in a bowl an mixed them up without reading the prep instructions - SEVERAL TIMES. Wondered why my cookies were all whacked. :confused: hehe.

I've put 2 cups instead of 2 tbps... also more than once.

[lil_geek]

My sister and I were making muffins.....

Our stove had the temperature in celcius and Ferenhieght..... The instructions said 350F or 175 C...we attempted to bake them at 175F... which is like 80C...

We had VERY runny muffins after the 20 mintues! My mom got this call at work that the stove was broken.... nope, we just couldn't read!

Must have started my baking abilities of great...last weekend I burt slice and bake cookies.... I always think "one more minute!"

[MaineBelle]

I was melting chocolate once and it was very thick, so logically I decided to add water to thin it out - has anybody ever done this before? Bad mistake - the chocolate all clumped together and it was a total mess.

Also once I was baking an apple cake, while it was cooking I baked some garlic bread in the same oven. There were big chunks of apples in the cake and they absorbed all the garlic flavor - the cake was terrible. Next time I will be more patient or time my cooking better.

[KarenS]

About 2 weeks ago I was making a loaf of bread in the breadmachine and I left out an entire cup of flour. Bleah.

OTOH, I managed to salvage it by drying it out in the oven and making breadcrumbs in the blender! :)

Karen

[lbs27]

This wasn't me, but DH and I still laugh about it! A guy he used to work with (early 20's, total clueless bachelor at the time) invited us and a few other couples over for dinner. He made pasta. And garlic bread. So, DH and I start eating the garlic bread and totally gag--he had used garlic SALT instead of POWDER!! Completely inedible. We couldn't say anything, and stood by as one of our other good friends went to eat it. It was really funny, he kept talking and almost taking a bite like 5 times. Finally he did and you could see it register on his face almost immediately! I never knew if the guy who made it ever realized he did something wrong. ;)

[twinnyme]

Not lately but this is a story I won't ever live down: One New Year's Eve we had a couple over to our place, and I made lasagna - well, I tried to make it. I didn't boil the lasagna pasta, but it was NOT the no-boil type. I had never made lasagna before and didn't even know there was a choice between no-boil or not. At the VERY END of the directions it said to boil the pasta - now, why not put that at the beginning, I ask? And I had been SO proud of my layers - when I realized what I'd done I tried to undo the layers so I could boil the pasta, but it didn't work so well, so I decided to go for it and bake it anyway. Needless to say it didn't come out well. Our friends were very sweet and tried to eat it but it wasn't easy; they suggested maybe microwaving it as leftovers during the week might help.... It didn't. :D Luckily, we had tons of munchies and appetizers to satisfy us!

[SingleWhiteFemale]

I was about 14, and since I was home during the day (school break I think) I was to put dinner in the oven. My first turkey. No problem! I pulled out it's innerds, rinsed him off, put him in his tray/rack, and seasoned him. I put the thermometer in, set the oven to 350, and set the turkey thermometer at 170. I walked away in the early afternoon, came back down at 5:30 when he should have been done. The oven was off, and the turkey was still raw.

What happened? The thermometer was set to have the oven turn off when the turkey was fully cooked--at 170 degrees. Found out later that the thermometer end was not in the meat, but had gone straight through the breast cavity. So, it was hanging out... and every time the oven started to heat up to 350, the thermometer registered the oven temperature and then turned off.

Whoops. But, McDonalds is better than a turkey any day of the week :D

[mrsdrummer]

Once when i was in probably middle school I made some deviled eggs, all by myself Imight add. when they were done i thought i'd sprinkle some of that stuff on top. That stuff I put on it was cinnamon not paprika or whatever goes on it. My dad ate everyone.

then I made biscuits and gravy one time and it was the consistancy of peanut butter than gravy. Once again pop ate it all. It was nasty.

[gayle]

My best cooking goof up was when I made chile rellenos from the (what I thought were) the Anaheim Chiles from my garden. The chiles were actually jalapeno's, LOL.

My folks were over for dinner, and my Dad took one bite, and looked at me and instantly said, "I am sorry honey, but I can't eat these".

We wound up ordering a pizza :)

[Nigellas]

the first year we were together I made my DH (then BF) a birthday cake - Since I was out of vegtable oil, I used the only oil I had on hand- Olive Oil.
BLECH!

[AHammer]

this is the funniest thread, lol!

I'm also a chronic cookie-burner, "just one more minute."

I was making icing one time this summer, and had it going in the mixer. It was too thick so I decided to put in a tad more milk, but silly me, I tried pouring it straight from the almost-full gallon jug. I poured in like half a cup instead of 20 drops like I was going for. I didn't have any more powdered sugar to balance it out, so my icing was super runny. It was for a cake in a 9*13 pan, and teh cake was rounded at the top, so all the icing pooled along the side or seeped into the cake making it a goo factory.

[lawyerlee]

When I was a kid, I made a pumpkin pie using only the pumpkin from the can - no seasonings at all. It was *so* disgusting! :eek: :( I ruined a damned good homemade pie crust, too. :(

[Marilyn]

This is something my cousin did (who was totally clueless about cooking) - She added oil to the pan to fry bacon.

The worst I have done is when trying to puree soup in the food processor, I added the soup in over the fill line. When I turned the food processer on, soup went flying everywere. It made a mess but it wasn't a total loss.

[jimmysgirl424]

This one wasn't me, but it's funny!

DH was dating a girl who decided to make homemade crab cakes for dinner. Instead of using breadcrumbs, she used flour !! The crab cakes turned out looking like flat, round stones. DH told me he took one bite and almost broke a tooth because they were so hard, not to mention they tasted like paste. He managed to choke one down so as not to hurt her feelings, but declined a second helping. ;)

[nixer]

Delurking :)

My very first completely solo cooking experience was making scrambled eggs for my dad, when I was about eight years old. I was so proud of myself for being able to carefully break the eggs into the bowl without spilling them, mixed them up nice with salt and pepper, scrambled away and turned out a rather nice looking plate. My dad was so proud and he seemed to enjoy eating the eggs, but had a rather small appetite, considering he asked for the meal. No wonder, as I found out later when I tasted my fine creation -- uhm, apparently putting a whole teaspoon of salt in with two eggs to be scrambled can result in a rather nasty meal! :eek:

Lessons learned there:
1. Always check and measure spices properly (although you'd think I'd forgotten this lesson from the uber fiery chili I made the other day, yikes!).
2. Always taste before subjecting victims to results of my experiments.
3. Dad was a brave man who must have loved me to choke that mess down without any verbal complaints....I can only imagine the laughs he had with mom later though!

:D

[Katy]

I bumped this up while doing a search for something - thought is sounded fun.

My most recent blunder (though to be honest, it wasn't much my fault) was making meatloaf. I made it just fine, put it in the oven and an hour later, it still wasn't done. Nearly two hours later, well, it was done, but it looked weird and was rock hard. Turned out our oven wasn't working, so I basically "cooked" it with a lot of gas, and very, very, VERY low heat. Needless to say, we tossed it.

[megc1]

A few months after we were married DH asked me to make his mom's recipe for tuna noodle casserole. I assembled it all and it looked great. I put it in the oven and then realized I had forgot to put in the tuna! Woops. :rolleyes:

[Shapsgrl]

I screw up dishes on my own regularly, but one time in a restaurant we ordered Chocolate Mousse - when it came out it was disgusting!

The chefs had substituted salt for sugar. yuck!

[ignutzz]

I was a cook/baker for a few summers at a camp that had a large contingent of vegan & vegetarian staff and campers.

I was asked to make a vegan "mayonnaise" using tofu and oil. No problem. Except I used Olive Oil. GROSS! The whole kitchen got a good laugh out of that one. :o

[petdoc08]

My father made a legendary food mistake when I was younger. He was making Hamburger Gravy and Toast and grabbed what he thought was flour. He couldn't get the gravy to thicken so he kept adding more and more flour. When we all sat down to eat, one bite and we knew why it wasn't thickening. He used SUGAR instead of flour. He insisted it was fine and we had to eat it or wouldn't get dinner. My mom finally took us to McDonald's while he pouted and ate his hamburger flavored syrup.

[coquelicot]

This wasn't too recent, but once I made muffins without any flour. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why they weren't rising while they were baking. Needless to say, they got thrown out. I knew they needed them, guess I just skipped over that ingredient accidentally.

[jarm]

I made muffins without eggs, but we ate them anyway. They were really good.

[meggers]

I was making a cake but halved the recipe. I forgot to cut the amount of oil in half so the cake had twice the amount of oil it should have had. I was told it tasted fine but when I was delivering it (I made it for a friend's mom) the top layer started to slide and the icing started to slide off. I fixed it up as much as I could when I got there but I felt so bad that I messed it up.

[eponymous]

Last Christmas, I made a batch of spice cookies... and forgot to put in the spices!

[NicoleWisconsin]

A few years ago, I was hard boiling eggs. I forgot about them until the smoke detector started going off. All the water boiled out of the pan and the eggs had exploded everywhere.

[Pine Tree]

I made a pumpkin pie without the eggs - pumpkin soup in a crust!

[TracieB]

Not a cooking snafu by me, but in college, my roommate was having her brand-spankin' new boyfriend (now her husband!) over for a homemade meal. She decided to make an angel food cake for dessert, even though we didn't have an angel food cake pan. She put it in a bundt pan instead and it overflowed all over the oven, which in turn set off the smoke detector, causing our entire apartment to be evacuated. It was hilarious!!

[salysaturn]

My first Passover (I am not Jewish, DH is), I was making the egg for the Seder Plate. I hard Boiled it, and needed to brown it. DH did not tell me how to brown the egg (basically, when heating the shank bone in the oven, there is some water in it, and you place the egg in there with it, thus browing it), so I hard boiled it, then stuck the hard boiled in an oven at 500 degrees(don't ask). A neighbor came down, at the point where I was making the soup and all, and she complimented me on how well the apartment smelled, well no sooner than 5 minutes later, my egg EXPOLDED in the oven :)

[LilOne]

A few years ago, I was hard boiling eggs. I forgot about them until the smoke detector started going off. All the water boiled out of the pan and the eggs had exploded everywhere.

My DH did the same thing! He put them on the stove, then went to sleep. The smoke detector woke me up. We lived in an apartment at the time, and the building's alarm went off, so the firemen came!! :eek:

[PurpleRose]

I've had my fair share of cooking mistakes. A fairly recent one was when I made a cake and forgot to put in the sugar. It was a really nasty, rubbery texture. I made the icing perfectly, though! ;)

Another time a few years ago, I bought a package of pre-seasoned frozen chicken breasts from Target. The box stated that you could just remove them & cook them straight from the package. The box lied. I cooked the frozen chicken in a skillet & ended up burning the outside of the chicken while leaving the inside raw. DH tried to salvage the chicken, but I refused to eat it. It was so hard he dubbed it my "rock chicken." I have been reluctant to cook chicken ever since!

[betsyboop]

Every Christmas Eve growing up, my Dad, sister, and I would make a big batch of Toll House chocolate chip cookies. One year, my dad accidentally added however many tablespoons of salt instead of teaspoons and we ended up with the saltiest cookies ever! We still giggle about that incident every year. The sad thing is that we ate the cookies anyway:p

[diam124]

I was making a large batch of nutrolls and instead of mixing the yeast in water and letting it rise, I just sprinkled it into the dough. I ended up throwing it out.

[Lucy Van Pelt]

The first time I came to visit DH when we started dating, he made some macaroni and cheese. I thought it tasted funny but I didn't want to be rude so I continued to eat it. He asked if I liked it and I was like "sure". He then told me he put CINNAMON in it! GROSS. Apparently he liked to experiment with different spices when he was in college because money was tight and he didn't have a wide variety of foods to choose from.

Another time when DH and I were dating, he decided to make chicken enchiladas for dinner. When he went to the store, he accidentally picked up teriyaki seasoning instead of fajita seasoning. It was bad enough that we suffered through them the first time, but he had bought TWO packets so the next time he made enchiladas, he used the teriyaki seasoning AGAIN, this time on purpose. I didn't eat any of them...blech.

[spencer's_girl]

I have Two that I can remember.

First was when I was about 12 and my mom was talking me through the steps to make dinner we were having something over rice and she was telling me how to make minute rice. well when she told me to stir the rice into the water she didn't tell me to take the pan off the heat so I left it to soak up the water on a burner on high. The rice was so burned that even after soaking the pan for 2 days we couldn't get the burned rice out and had to through the pan away.

The second was when I was about 16 I was living with my father at the time and I wanted to suprise him with brownies when he got home from work. So I got out the box mix and added the eggs water and after some searching found a bottle of vegetable oil. When dad got home he went right for the plate of brownies and grabbed one after taking a big bite he made a funny face and asked me what I put in them. After showing him the bottle of oil he told me that was the bottle that he poured the oil into after he cooked the shells for our toco salads the week before. That was the worst batch of brownies I'd ever had.

[heather 8^)]

Oh man, I have so many stories it's not even funny!

About 5 years ago, I borrowed my mom's recipe for a fantastic oriental broccoli slaw salad recipe for my very first company picnic. I figured out after the fact I was supposed to mix in sunflower seed KERNELS and not the whole sunflower seed. I was so embarrassed that I pretended not to know who made it. :p

In home ec. back in middle school, my group somehow forgot to add flour to our brownies. Everybody else had yummy brownies and we just had chocolate pudding. Truth is, today I'm a pretty good cook, but my failures are doozies and apparently I really like to share them with lots and lots of people. :D

Speaking of brownies, I had a roommate once that NEVER made a box of brownies correctly. She was still learning English, so she followed the picture directions on the back of the box and used my pyrex liquid measuring cup to add the water: a whole quart of it. :D She was thrilled that brownie mix came in a box, so she kept trying and messed something up every time, leaving us with LOTS of pudding and hockey pucks to hand out to visitors. Aside from the brownie issue, she was hands-down the best and most experienced cook in the house, which made it even funnier.