Kitchen Blunders

[cjsmith]

OK, what's your worst, your funniest, your most obvious, your cleverest recovered, etc... kitchen blunder?

I have three to offer. You all know the brisket story already.

1) Carrot cake without the flour. OOPS. I remembered shortly after putting it in the oven, and fixed it. Took a while to live it down though.

2) I can't take credit for this: Bouillabaisse without shelling the shrimp. That was Amit, a guy known in our living group for... creative... cooking explorations. (Favorite quote: "Does it need more oregano?")

3) Fig bars from a mix, when I was something like seven. I added two cups of water to the light brown stuff and three tablespoons of water to the dark brown stuff. OOPS. I tried a couple of creative (for a seven-year-old) solutions to the gloppy crust mix. I set it on the warm spot on the counter above the dishwasher. Nope, it didn't get any drier. I put it in the oven. The bottom of the (plastic!) bowl started to mold itself to the rack and I got it out of there. Then I mixed the light brown stuff and the dark brown stuff together and made drop cookies.

OK, what are yours?

Comments

[shaktiqueen.livejournal.com]

Ok here is my worst one. Spiders in my from scratch chicken and dumplings.

I had made it at my mothers house (she's the one who taught me how to make it)
And as I set the pot on the table for people to begin ladling out...my mom and I looked in the pot and were startled to see three large daddy long leg spiders...swimming around. Her house was known for have lots of spiders...but damn...did they have to get in my stew?
I think we ended up having pizza that night.

[catrinaz.livejournal.com]

Was making a chocolate cake for a potluck a few months back...baking it at the house, during dinner, you see. Doubling the recipe in my head as I went along. I do remember thinking, when I put it into the oven, that the batter seemed much thinner than usual. Hmmm...weird. Oh, well. <shrug>

Opened the oven at the appointed time, and it was like very thin pudding in the center, a bit thicker toward the edges, and sorta, somewhat cake-like on the very edges.

Oops. I re-doubled the water in my head, so used four times as much water with only twice as much of everything else.

*facepalm*

My wonderful, beautiful, amazing friends ate it anyway and swore it tasted great!

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

I made chocolate chip cookies. But I used powdered sugar instead of flour (I was tired).

It did Not Work At All. :(

did you have a kitchen blunder today?

[just-cyd.livejournal.com]

kitchen blunders? where to begin??

--failure to read the directions for melting the white-chocolate coating stuff in the microwave resulted in it *burnt* to a dark brown with lots of smoke. (roughly age 13)

--spent much time preparing a contains-lots-of-costly-ingredients german chocolate cake thing for mom's card club. i was super-careful in following the directions, because this was for company. when i pulled it out of the oven, about 1/2" around the edge was done and the center was still batter-y. didn't occur to me until later that the oven wasn't hot -- the (*%^$(%& oven had shut itself off (as it sometimes did - something with the timer feature was wonky). several tearful phone calls later, i dumped it all down the drain, and mom picked up something on the way home from work. (age 11-12)

--tried to make a cake from scratch, beating it by hand with a spoon. it had the texture of cornbread. (again, age 12-ish)

--making mom's vegetable soup, i added 1/2 the box, not 1/2 cup, barley. when i described it to mom over the phone, she called it "slice and eat" soup. (age 22)

i know there's more. LOTS more.

[takhisis.livejournal.com]

I was making tuna noodle casserole, and when it was almost done, turned the over to broil and set the microwave to 3 minutes to just brown the top. Except I was running on almost no sleep for about a week straight, accidentally set the timer for 30 minutes, and dove back into my work project on the computer. 10 minutes later I smell smoke, dash into the kitchen and look into the oven to see the casserole smoldering. I forget 6th grade science (fire is fed by oxygen) and throw the door open, which makes the dish merrily WHOOMPH into flames.

I grab the hot pads, haul it out and throw it on the stove, still flaming. All my training on dealing with kitchen fires goes out the window and I proceed to beat the casserole to death with an oven mitt while screeching like a cavewoman. Once the actual flames are splattered out, I'm still left with a casserole dish full of glowing coals. In total exhaustion and disgust, I kick the back door open and drop the whole thing out on the concrete balcony. As I'm heading back in I smell the stench of scorching plastic and realize I've just melted the doormat onto the dish. I stomp back out, grab a flowerpot filled with rainwater, and dump it unceremoniously over the remaining coals.

Stomp back inside.

Stomp back to the door and lock it, just in case.

Call J. on his cell phone and tell him to pick up Burger King on his way home, or someone will die.

Lie facedown on the couch for a while.

[takhisis.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I was around 28 when I did this. ;)

[catrinaz.livejournal.com]

I did this (the open-the-oven-feed-the-flames thing) almost exactly 7 years ago while hugely pregnant with my second child. It was a "Big New Yorker" pizza in the box, and the box touched the side of the oven and was smouldering. Until I opened the oven door. I too screeched like a cavewoman, grabbed the box and dropped it outside my front door. On the carpeted landing in my apartment building. It burned/melted the carpet both inside (where a small piece dropped) and outside the door.

I cried.

[nanocub.livejournal.com]

Wow, I don't have anything that compares to takhisis's story.

One of my first culinary experiments didn't go so well... i tried to approximate pizza by putting ketchup and cheddar cheese on white bread and baking in the oven for a few minutes. I think I was about 9 at the time.

[catrinaz.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. At 17, making dinner for the family, and my boyfriend was coming over. It was my first time cooking for him.

I was making a dish my mom calls "Spanish Rice" which in fact doesn't much resemble any food from Spain at all. She always bought certain spices in big 1-pound plastic jars. I picked up the chili powder from the cabinet and dumped it in (no measurements in this recipe, you know...I'd made it many many many times). Only it was cinnamon. I scooped out as much as I could, but it was Definitely. Not. Right.

[jtidwell.livejournal.com]

We got a spiffy new bread machine a few years ago, at the height of the craze. We wanted to bake a nice loaf of plain old white bread, so we got out the canister with the *bread* flour (not the regular flour), followed the recipe, and set it a-baking.

When it came out, it looked fine, but it tasted... wrong. Like baking soda. And too much salt, and it was a little on the sweet side. What on earth had we done wrong with the recipe?

Turns out we'd used the canister of Bisquick, not bread flour.

[sharya.livejournal.com]

When Jason first started to learn to cook, he decided to make some sweet and sour ribs for me. He was using his roomate's recipe which called for a cup and a half of b.s. He decided b.s. was no bbq sauce, but instead was baking soda, and he added this to a mixture that already had vinegar. There was a small explosion, and we had to scrape it from the walls and ceiling :P

[http://users.livejournal.com/_opus_/]

We had a party at our house one winter, and planned to do roasted garlic in the microwave (the ovens were already full with other stuff). So, I put them in their pottery bakers, tossed them in the microwave, and yelled to Rocky to tell me what time to set. He said ten minutes.

Four minutes later, the most foul stench started, with copious amounts of black smoke, billowing out of the microwave. We grabbed all the bakers, and pitched the contents into a snowbank, where they sizzled and glowed for a bit.

After turning off the smoke alarm, and completely soaking the bakers (which continued to smell), I turned to Rocky and said "ten minutes, huh?" He responded, "oh, I thought you were asking about the stuff we just tossed in the oven..."

By the way, the smell permeates the entire house, and doesn't go away for about three weeks. And it takes even longer to get it out of the pottery.

[curmudgn]

Ah, yes. That would be the cornmeal whiskey cake.

[lkeele.livejournal.com]

My worst was the taffy volcano.

See, I was making taffy for the first time ever. And I was watching the temperature rise oh-so-slowly, and got bored, and went to check my e-mail (that doesn't sound like me, does it?). Five minutes later, the taffy in the pan was black, bubbly, and rising quickly. The temperature was hotter than my candy thermometer could measure. I had to put it in the freezer just so the pot would cool down enough that I could throw it away without burning the house down...

[ken_r]

Burnt spaghetti... distracted by I don't remember what, I forgot to break it so that it would all fit in the water instead of sticking out over the edge of the pot.

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

I was going to tell the story about how I almost set the house on fire trying to make cookies when I was 10, but that story isn't nearly as dramatic as some of the stories here. If my mother were here to tell the story of how she was sleeping peacefully when her 10-year-old woke her up yelling "Mommy! Mommy! It's on fire!" I'm sure it would be, though!

I also have an old-enough-to-know better story. A little less than 20 years ago -- I moved into this house 20 years ago and I know I hadn't been living here very long -- I somehow managed to let the oil in a frying pan catch fire. The range in this house is a double-oven one with the upper oven overhanging most of the cooking surface, so the entire space above the 12" pan was engulfed in flames. What's worse, the range is stupidly designed with the controls next to the upper oven, directly above the front large burner -- which of course is where the frying pan was. I couldn't turn off the burner till I got the flames down, but I couldn't get near the fire to throw anything on it because the upper oven was in the way! (At least I had the presence of mind to remember to throw flour, not water, on a grease fire.) Meanwhile the flames were licking out from underneath the upper oven and heading for the cabinets on either side.

I had to get the frying pan out from under there so I could put out the fire and turn off the burner, so I grabbed the handle and pulled it out, then turned off the burner with the other hand. Whew! The flames were in the middle of the room now, away from contact with anything ... except me! I suddenly realized I was standing there holding a foot-wide circle of flame. I couldn't put it in the sink because I was afraid of setting the cabinets above that on fire. I thought of running outside with it but I couldn't get the locked and charlie-barred sliding glass doors open with one hand, and the front door was too far away past too many flammable objects. So I set the pan down in the middle of the vinyl floor, grabbed the canister of flour and dumped it on the pan.

The fire went out immediately and I was greatly relieved that my fast thinking had let me get away scot free. It wasn't until I lifted up the frying pan and saw the charred, melted vinyl that I realized that, even though there were no flames underneath the frying pan, the bottom of it was still extremely hot and a vinyl floor was not a great place to set it down.

Fortunately the damage was just cosmetic. The vinyl was patterned in brown and beige (the house was built in the late 1970s!) and I tried to tell myself the burned area didn't show too badly. And it was much smaller than the diameter of the pan -- the extreme heat had warped it enough so that only a few inches of it were actually in contact with the floor. I wanted to do something about it for the longest time, but there was always something more important that needed to be replaced, and eventually the burn became part of the normal surroundings and I stopped seeing it.

Which is good, because it's still there, and most first-time visitors are polite enough to pretend they don't see it.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. My mom made an oil-in-the-frying-pan fire once too. She smothered it with a pot lid and wound up dropping the whole thing into a snowbank. (Lucky. Winter.) I think we got McDonald's that day.

Oil-in-the-frying-pan makes for a REALLY IMPRESSIVE fire, doesn't it? :-/

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

She smothered it with a pot lid

I would have given anything for a lid that day! I actually thought of it at the time, but it was a sauté pan and it didn't have one, and I wasn't about to start trying other lids to see what might fit closely enough to smother the flames!

Oil-in-the-frying-pan makes for a REALLY IMPRESSIVE fire, doesn't it? :-/

And how!!! I was really afraid those cabinets (or the pot holders hanging on the side of the upper oven on their magnet hooks) were going to catch and my new house would burn down! After the huge losses I'd had in the past couple of years, I was so relieved that all I lost was a few inches of flooring that I didn't even care that much about it.



OT: I can't get over how cute you look with this haircut!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think my mom's pot lid didn't fit all too closely either, but at least it got the flames from all-the-way-up-to-the-range-hood down to just-up-to-the-lid size. My mom was also lucky that the stove controls were in front, by her hip.

I'm so glad your house wasn't damaged! Ours wasn't either, but the smoke was fierce for a while.

OT: Awwwww, thanks!! :-)

[aelfie.livejournal.com]

Okay, once while making popcorn, I set the oil on fire. (Had to scrub it out, took forever) Two weeks later I did it again. (about age 12)

When I was 20 I was making peanut butter cookies, doubling the recipe (christmas I think, need lots of cookies then) misread markings on butter sticks, ended up quadrupling the butter and just doubling the rest. They were really greasy, thin, cookies. They got eaten anyway. I guess my family isn't that picky. =)

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

Well, let's see. There was the time my ex and I tried to make Persimmon Jam. We made two errors: 1) we used a mixed of the two main types of persimmons, one of which MUST have the skins removed--but we didn't know that, and 2) we got interrupted, and put it in the fridge for a day or two before getting back to it. The result, once we got back to it, was sooooooo incredibly astringent and nasty that we declared it to be a biohazard, and made notes on our recipe card to never ever ever try this again. And we didn't.

Then there was the time that I made shortbread, and forgot the sugar. Coating it with chocolate was NOT helpful.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Sometime sophmore or junior year of college I put some eggs on to boil in the kitchen. I then proceeded to head back to my room, completely forget about them, and leave for an appointment at the med center. A couple of HOURS later I suddenly remembered them and called my boyfriend from campus... he reported that the water had entirely boiled off and the shells were beginning to burn on the bottom of the pan.

When I got home I peeled one of them, just out of curiosity. It was bouncy :)

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

Every Jewish cook has their (several) stories of the time the latkes went wrong...

Mine involved the time that I was cooking in a fairly dark kitchen, meant to grab the flour, and instead got the cornmeal. It actually wasn't bad...

Then there was the time I was making a gingerbread house with my friend Kathy, and didn't know that blackstrap molasses was different from regular...