What’s Your Biggest Cooking Catastrophe?

Every cake baking use butter. As you know the colour of butter is yellow and it's the same color with soap cream which I used for dishwashing. It turned out that when I was baking a cake, my finger got stuff like yellowish cream and since I was lazy to just wash it, I licked it thinking it was butter that I used for baking, but....yuckkk....it's the soap cream and you can imagine what it tasted like.

I am not a baker in the least, but I found this really cool recipe for a home-made brownie, icecream cake (which I thought I could handle.) I made it for my dad's birthday, put it in the car to travel to my parents' (an hour away,) and low and behold, it was a melted mess all over my car by the time I got there. I am sure it would've been delicious...had I used commmon sense (in August!)

after cooking for nearly 40 years i still cant get chocolate chip cookise right!!! i gave up a while back ,i just use pillsbury now,almost foolproof,my kids still make fun of me,the last time i tried they were for some gathering or other,i got everything together and started mixing and baking,it seemed all was going well until it was time to plate them,one fell on my foot and it hurt ! the darn things were like hockey pucks! i followed the recipe ,i dont know what i did wrong .well ,knowing myself well ,i gave myself enough time i stopped at the bakery and bought some,no mess no fuss and no guessing,much eayier that way.then theres the story about the blue cakes...................

My Bigges one was the First Thanksgiving we had at our new home. We just finished building the house in August and I decided to have my famiily and my husband's family over for Thanksgiving. Not knowing that Turkeys make alot of grease - I used a shallow pan, not big enough to handle the grease. Well, the new oven was getting overloaded with Grease on the bottom of the oven. And my in-laws were coming up the lawn, as they live next door to us. Smoke started coming out of the oven and the smoke decators started working very loudly. "Open the windows" "The oven is on fire" were the shouts being heard in my new kitchen. Crying - Oh, no. "Save the bird". We got the fire out before my in-laws came in the house, and I told a lie. "I burned the buns a little". My oven was not hurt. Thank goodness. And the next year - I purchased a new Turkety pan to whole the grease inside the pan. No fire next year after that.

Hi. My biggest cooking disaster is anything I normally cook that is good--but when I am really tired or sick, NEVER comes out right. Example is meatloaf--I will usually use manwich sauce instead of ketchup--one time, being sick, I grabbed a can of premade chili and used it. Needless to say, it tasted terrible and my husband and kids threw it away. They went out to eat and I went to bed.

I invited a friend over for spaghetti, but I had a gas stove at the time. So while I was taking the noodles off the stove top, I burnt myself and I dropped the hot mit into the fire of the stove. I didn't notice it at first, but when I did I quickly threw it in the sink and put it out. But by this time, the damage had been done and the smoke dectector was going off. My friend showed up literally two minutes later... The moral of this story - always turn the stove top off, before you take something off it!

Mine might be a bit painful to read about, but I had a cooking disaster when cooking pork tenderderloin for my best friend. I was following the recipe, which said to add the tenderloin to a pan of SEARING hot olive oil to brown it before cooking it in the oven!! So, I had the tenderloin on the fork and when it was over the pan it fell into the oil, causing it to splash all over my chest, neck, arm and even on my leg some. It was sooooooooooo painful. I couple of minutes later my friend showed up - ahh!!
By the way, if you ever burn yourself, don't put water on your burns (which I did at first), but put Colgate menthol toothpaste on them. Weird, I know, but when I discovered that it was pretty amazing. I ended up with first and second degree burns and I looked like a leopard for a while!!! Luckily it didn't get on my face and my scars have completely disappeared (since I didn't go uncovered in the sun for about a year).

I had to add another one (this one's short). My husband was trying all these new grilling recipes one summer. One was for burgers stuffed with a tarragon butter mixture. As I'm reading the recipe for the butter mixture, I see it calls for "cloves." Hmm, I think. That sounds weird, but in the cloves go. We cook the burgers and they are horrendous. What could be the problem? I look at the recipe and see it was CHIVES not cloves. I was pretty embarrassed!

When I was in college in Arizona, my mom would send me care packages from New York. I could never leave the boxes out because my cat would tear into them and manage to throw everything around my apartment. So, after receiving one care package, I didn't have time to go through everything, and I needed to hide it from my cat. I couldn't put it on top of the fridge, because he could climb up there. The first place I thought of was the oven. In it went. I forgot about it (of course), so when I preheated the oven one day (I didn't cook often), I started smelling something terrible. I thought it was a neighbor, this was a college town after all. The smell got stronger and stronger and then- smoke was coming from the oven. My care package was burning and I grabbed it and ran out of the apartment with smoke billowing behind me. I took it outside and stomped it out. But all my NY goodies were toast. :(

I'm a great cook now. But many years ago this wasn't so. My mother had passed away about 20 years ago in March. By November we had almost finished grieving and I was determined to cook the family Thanksgiving Dinner. I pullued out my mothers handwritten, shorthanded, cookbook. I went shopping and I began.
Needless to say I had no idea of how long it took a frozen turkey to defrost. I also forgot to remove that paper package of neckbone and giblets. Apparently it was frozen in place so I thought it belonged there. Finally not being able to find the right pan, I resorted to placing it on a rather shallow cookie type sheet.
By the time people started showing up I had a half cooked, half frozen, mess running over into the bottom of the oven that I kept using the baister to try and empty the pan with. Everyone laughed at me, and I remember breaking into tears. Luckily everything else came out all right and someone had brought a very large cooked ham.