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.

The first Thanksgiving dinner I ever made, I invited my mother, sister, and nephew to my apartment. I worked so hard on all the little details and basted and basted and basted the turkey. I did such a good job of working to make the turkey moist that when I moved it from the baking pan to the platter, it literally fell apart in a heap and the meat practically slid off the bones. My family laughed like crazy.

I was making a special wedding dinner for friends. I decided to make potato filling instead of plain mashed potatos. I found a recipe and went over the ingredients to make sure that I had everything. The day of there marriage I was preparing everything and carefully measured out the ingredients to make my potato filling. Then my potato filling suddenly turned green. I was upset but my husband laughed as he put them down the disposal. I reread the recipe. There in black and white it said one and a half cups of celery. For some reason every time I checked the recipe my brain inserted the word parsley where the word celery was. I have never tried to make potato filling again.

One night I decided to make salmon croquettes. I asked my mother and sister how to make them how they said sounded really easy. One thing they failed to tell me was to take the bones out of the salmon. Imagine my husband and my surprise when we bit down on the salmon croquettes/bone in them. Ladies, I swear I thought i had broken a tooth. When I told my mother and sister what happened they both had a good laugh.

First of all, what is the definition of "catastrophe" to a person who thinks a black bottom pie is easy. I have an old recipe from way back when and it looks pretty complicated to me.
I have two stories that are pretty typical of young brides. My husband (first one) and I got married in November about two weeks before Thanksgiving. One of his college friends came to stay with us over the holiday because the dorms were closed. Our oven had two temperatures - off and 500 degrees! Plus, I made the classic mistake of leaving the giblets inside the bird. The turkey was very well done and tasted a lot like paper - but both men were very forgiving. Fast forward to when my husband was working on a construction crew and coming home for lunch every day. I was going to make a tuna casserole but I was out of tuna and noodles. I'm telling you that a casserole made of Vienna sausage, rice and mushroom soup is not a man pleaser.

You mean besides the puppy eating half the raw turkey on Thanksgiving Eve? Or serving blue cheese and walnut stuffed pork chops to guests who hate blue cheese AND were allergic to walnuts? I've burnt more meals than I can count while chatting away with guests, and set more pot holders on fire than I care to admit... fortunately I love to entertain and cook, so most of my guests remember the positive experiences, but there was that one time when I exploded a can of condensed milk when trying to recreate my step-mother's quick version of Dulce de Leche for a midnight snack!! I'm surpised no one called the fire department!

My sister and I were very much younger (and clueless)and just learning about baking. She being older than I got total control of what we should try to bake first. She chose chocolate chip cookies. What kid, or adult for that matter can resist chocolate chip cookies? She started to put together all ingredients. Everything went well until we came to adding the vanilla flavor. Well, she was stumped thinking out loud "why would they want us to add vanilla ice cream?" She went straight to our freezer and took out the vanilla ice cream nevertheless. She carefully measured out a teaspoon of 'vanilla flavor' and mixed up the cookie dough. We scooped out dough on cookie sheets and baked. Being that that was our first foray into baking,the cookies turned out very delicious despite adding the wrong vanilla ingredient. I have since learned what vanilla flavor is and become a great baker since that first time many years ago. My sister on the other hand does not enjoy baking so much.

The year I tried to make pinwheel cookies. I made the recipe four times and only on the first try did they turn out - sort of. Actually, they just fell apart when touched. I tried freezing the dough. I tried using better butter. But in the end I decided it was wonderful as raw cookie dough (no eggs) and left it at that.

I was fifteen when I learned valuable lesson...water and 350 degree oil doesn't mix. The Knot & Loop Club kitchen, where I gained my first experiences in culinary cuisine, was hot that summer, so I always kept a pitcher of ice water at hand. During a long rush, I reach for the water and knock it into the deep vat frylator. Man! It was like an atomic bomb exploded. The hot oil went up into the air with a loud rumble in the shape of a mushroom cloud. It took me three hours and 20 pounds of salt to get that mess on the line floor cleaned up. Needless to say, I kept my ice water from then on, far, far away from the fryers.

I am reminded now and then when a recipe says to use a large bowl, use one. I've splattered batter all over the place using too small of a bowl with the mixer, cooked something in the microwave that wasn't in a big enough bowl to have it boil all over and make a mess, and pouring something into a not quite big enough bowl to have it spill over. Now, I just pull out my biggest bowl and use it and if I need a smaller bowl, transfer my batter or whatever I'm making into the smaller bowl if I need to. It's less complicated that way. I've been known to have a pie or cobbler spill over now in the oven and create a burnt mess and then set off the fire alarm. Don't feel bad Monique, you aren't alone.

My first attempt at making cookies. I think I was about 11. I messed up the salt content. I put 1/2 cup instead of 1/2 teaspoon. They were horrible, and I think that is why I don't like making cookies to this day.

I made a root vegetable gratin once, when i was a more of a novice in the kitchen. I used half and half instead of the cream the recipe called for, and it was all clotted and curdled in the pan....it was just really, really unappealing to many senses to eat, and I ended up just tossing it.

I can't cook rice without setting off the fire alarm. Really. I keep extra towels handy to fan the alarm, since I can't always jump up to take the batteries out. Once this happened during my dorm days at 4am, and the entire dorm had to evacuate because of me. Not so good. I've also been known to burn a few pies.

There have been so many... I picked up butterfly and flower cookie cutters at a yard sale, the nice, copper Martha Stewart ones. I bought all the various goodies to make them all decorated cute for a baby shower. I labored over them for hours, but when I stood back, they looked horrible, like a second-grader had decorated them. The colors were so bright and fake, they did not look appetizing, though they were pretty good. I ended up eating them myself, and I picked up something for the shower from a bakery.

My biggest cooking catastrophe happens EVERY time I attempt to cook toast. I'm impatient, so put it in the oven on "high broil" instead of waiting for it to cook at 350 degrees. EVERY single time I burn it to a crisp, wasting the bread and filling the house with smoke.
Maybe I need to invest in a toaster?

I wasn't the perpetrator of this crime, but arguably culpable. I was having a huge Thanksgiving dinner for, like, 20 people. My best friend was on board to bring the pies for dessert, and some port for after-dinner drinks. When she arrived, she showed me the pathetic remains of the bottle of port (about 1/3 left), which she had been drinking as she cooked. She was already toasted, but the pies were not. She had brought the pies ready to bake, so they would be hot when we ate them. We stuck them in the oven and carried on with communal gluttony and debauchery. Unfortunately, I had just moved into a new apartment and had never tested the oven. When I turned it on and set it for 350, it went straight to, like, 500 and stayed there. When my (extremely) drunk friend opened the oven door to pull out the grand finale for the meal, she screamed. The pies were totally black. We all ate them anyway. They tasted good.

Making a buttload of chocolate chip cookies with some new recipe. They came out like hockey pucks. I found one of the decorative tins that I had given to one of my friends in her trunk two years later. She should have used them in her next pick-up hockey game.