Anybody have any good kitchen disaster stories. Assuming that's not a contradiction in terms. Here's mine.

At one time, I wanted to try dehydrating food to help store it for longer periods of time. I had dehydrated bags of carrots, potatoes, celery, etc. Of course, never having cooked with dehydrated food, I wasn't sure exactly what I was doing. Fortunately, the dehydrator came with a cookbook. I decided to try the vegetable soup recipe since I already had all the vegetables.

Things started going wrong right after I added the vegetables. It didn't look like enough considering how big the pot was. I like a lot of vegetables in my soup. So, I added more and more and more. Eventually, I added about 4 times what the recipe had called for. I'm sure you've figured out what happened. As the vegetables sat in the pot, they began to soak up the water and swell. Before I knew what was going on, I had a solid mass of what was once soup.

Never being one to waste food, I tried it. It tasted like soup, but the consistancy was wrong. I had to scoop some out of the pot and add a lot more water to it so that it would turn back into soup. Considering the size of the soup mass, it was going to take me months to go through it.

A few days later, I was invited to a pot luck dinner. I took some of the soup mass, pressed it into a casserole dish and sprinkled it with cheese. Oddly enough, it went over very well. The world's first soup casserole was a big hit.

MY grandmother in law gave me some wonderful homegrown tart cherries.  I decided to make a pie for Thanksgiving.  My family and my husbands family were there.  My mother in law is famous for her pies.  My sister LOVES cherry pie.  I was so proud of my beautiful pie.  My sis takes a bite and loses her smile.  I ask what is wrong and she says oh nothing and continues to eat the pie.  I notice she is spitting in her napkin.  I didn't pit the cherries.  It was like eating lovely tasting rocks!  I am just glad noone broke a tooth.  To this day if I make a pie everyone sticks their forks in to make sure I haven't booby trapped it.

This is a story from my childhood.  My Aunt Dorothy came to visit our family from Washington State.  she really never cooked or did anything in the kitchen.  With 6 thristy kids outside she decided to make us some kool aid.  i was the oldest and told her I could do it but she said she wanted to.  We were so glad to have it as it was pretty hot, we all started drinking it and my brother Carl just spitted it out and kept on saying yuck.  My aunt had put two cups of Salt instead of sugar.  Needless to say I made kool aid from then on.

The wonders of Kool Aid.  When I was 10 I read that you could dye your hair with kool aid.  My friend and I decided to do this (w/o knowledge of our parents).  We made the kool aid and put it on our hair.  Oh but all we did was become bee magnets.  We made the kool-aid exactly like the package said sugar and all.  We had really stiff hair but it wasn't red.

 I thought I would do a goose for Christmas.  I found a frozen bird, and a good recipe, so I thought I was set, and invited friends to eat--eight of us in all.

  Ever try to get enough meat for 8 people off a regular -size grocery goose? Not gonna happen! There was nowhere near enough meat.

  Fortunately, we had lots more other food, and my guests were good friends---and even better sports. Everybody had a taste, but that was about it.  (at least it tasted good !!)  

I've had a few cooking disasters, combine adhd and dyslexia, and a being an independent and adventurous child with access to a kitchen and i'm suprised I never started a fire.  I've substituted baking powder for baking soda, done tablespoons instead of teaspoons or various ingredients.  Forgotten I was cooking many times.  I learned the hard way cooking avacado isn't smart, that ngel food cakes are really hard to make, and always read a recipe completely before attempting to make it.

I think my favorite cooking adventure was my attempt at homemade ravoli in my early teens.  I found a recipe and made the dough and found some cheeses for the filling.  Anyways I didn't have anything to seal the dough packets with so attempted with a fork and failed misearbly.  So naturally I choose despited fulling knowing that the ravoli wasn't sealed attempted to cook it.  I had plenty of water and ended up with a noddley cheesey watery mess.  So naturally I drained off as much water as I dared without loosing the water, added tomato paste, tomato sauce and italian spices until I ended up with a sort of chessey noodley italian style tomato soup.  Overall I had enough to serve 20 people, and 1 person to eat it.  It was a long afternoon, and I think in the end I even hid it from my parents, who either never found out or were too amused to question my crazy cooking adventure.

Have two - one mine - one my mother's

My mother decided to make a blueberry pie (I was about 12) and after dinner she served it, and dad took a bite and made the funniest face.  Mom asked him what was wrong, and he said nothing, just take a bite.  She took a big bite (the pie looked wonderful), and made a face.  - Seems she'd used salt instead of sugar in the pie.  Needless to say, we didn't have dessert that night.

When I was about 20, we were having a party at the office (don't remember what for) and I was to bring a cake.  At the time, I was a lowly government employee and didn't make much money, but got enough together to get a cake mix and made frosting.  Baked the cake and when I took it out of the oven, the two pieces for the double layer weren't even high enough to make a one layer cake.  I didn't know what to do and didn't have any more money to get another mix, so just frosted it as high as I could and took it.  I was very embarassed, but no one seemed to mind.  Apparently the oven wasn't set right or something and the cake never rose. 

My worst disaster was the first turkey I cooked after we were married.  It was a fresh, organic turkey and cost a fortune.  I undercooked it.  I tried cutting the breast and it was bloody; it was awful.  I had to stick it back in the oven for over an HOUR to get it done, and then, of course, the texture was off.  I was so disappointed.

I have always liked to cook and started at a pretty young age.  Once when I was in high school, my friend and I decided to make a chocolate pie.  Since no one had ever shown me how to make a pie, I had not idea about over working the dough, cooking the pudding slowly, etc.  My mom cooked, but not pies.  Well, by the time we finished the pie, not only my family wouldn't eat it but when I gave it to the big Irish Setter we had, she wouldn't even eat it!  So we still refer to the pie that "Duffy" wouldn't even eat.  I'm 59 now and can make a pretty good pie.

Nancy

I've had a lot of disasters :-( I was making a soup with kale once and I'd never eaten kale..I piled it in the pot and left the kitchen and came back and it was gone..looked atmy food scarfing german s hepherd and she looked too innocent..well didn't realize the stuff s hrinks down..

also had  a really good whte bean soup with s pinach and thought after making it once that it had enough broth to add another 1/4 cup barley and extra  pkg of spinach..turned into a solid..didnt' realize it'd use that much of the broth..

a thai lemon c hicken pasta dish that even my german shepherd refused to touch

Okay, I've been to culinary school and everything.  We are usually in a hurry, and love 'bake-n-rise' pizzas.  One day I had the oven all set, unwrapped the pizza, in it went.  After about 20 minutes, took it out, got the scissors and started cutting.  I was thinking, 'Wow!  I must have had the oven set too, high, the crust is really tough on the bottom!'   You guessed it, I had left the frozen dough on the cardboard, and it had thawed and glued itself down tight. :)  We had pizza delivered that night.

I swear on a stack of bibles this is true...

I was working two jobs.  My boyfriend (now husband) decided to come over to my apartment and impress me with his cooking skills.  He knew I liked fresh bread so he decided to raid my kitchen and make my favorite bread recipe.  Sounds sweet, right?

He tried to make the dough, It was too wet so he poured it (with the yeast) down the drain and ran warm water down to clean it out...

Then he tried again.  As he used up the flour on the first try he grabbed the container next to it and used that, thinking it was flour.  It was powered sugar. He used six cups.

10 years later he has mastered the microwave and grill, but that is as far as he will go....

My dad still reminds me of this one....

My first attempt at a real stir fry.  Unfortunately, I hadn't realized that gingerroot is different from ginger powder...I had never heard of it, so I just assumed it was the stuff in the can.  We ate it...but wow was it gingery!

Off the top of my head...

One night, I decided to try a new, interesting-sounding recipe for dinner.  Some Lebanese orange chicken or something.  It turned out so awful that I refused to eat it and made myself a sandwich, but my poor husband forced it down while telling me politely that it tasted like an air freshener.  After he was done, he begged me to never again try to cook any 'ethnic' foods except for tacos and enchiladas.  That was fine by me!

Last year my mom was making us a turkey and was attempting to season the gravy.  We told her it tasted fine, but no, she thought it needed more garlic salt.  So she goes to shake the garlic salt into the gravy and I guess she shook too hard because the top came off and the entire contents of the jar went into the gravy.  My mom and I just stood there with shocked looks on our faces...lol

When I was in highschool my friend and I took a cooking class.  We made some kind of peanut butter chocolate cookie bar.  We liked them so much that we took the recipe home and we were going to make it for my family.  We didn't have any chocolate chips, like the recipe called for, so we used chocolate syrup instead.  That didn't work out at all and we were left with a pan of wet chocolate peanut buttery goo.  Yuck!  lol

Oh and another turkey story...my mom didn't have time to look for the roasting pan she normally uses, so she asked my sister to get a disposable roasting pan.  Well she wasn't paying attention when she took it out of the oven and she thought she could handle it by herself.  She picked it up and the pan bent inward at the middle, spilling most of the juices into the oven.  The juices caught on fire and when I walked into the kitchen all I saw were flames shooting out of the oven!  My mom was fine but shaken up about it.  She didn't drop the turkey though!  lol

It isn't a single kitchen disaster, in my case, but in  53 years of marriage, my nuclear physicist husband has never gotten over how the floor, all four walls, and the ceiling get dirty whenever I cook.  He says it is just a good thing I didn't work with radioactivity, as he did.

When I was in my early 20's, my mom came to visit. I wanted to impress her with my new cooking skills by making one of her favorites -- French Onion Soup. Soup is done, she sits down for a bowl, has a sip. "Oooh, this is .... interesting, honey. Where did you get the recipie? Can I have some water?" Instead of paprika, I had used a healthy dose of chili powder.

I remember when I was a kid my Dad (who's culinary skills amount to cooking boxed mac and cheese and canned beans)  made cookies.  We thought they were the best cookies ever.  Looking back though, I'm not sure how he managed to bake them when he forgot to add the flour. : )

L. G. sez:

<<My worst disaster was the first turkey I cooked after we were married.>>

My husband's too.  He had never done turkey before, but had done chicken breasts, and read the instructions on the turkey's tag to "remove the skin" (from around the neck, it meant, but he didn't read that far), so I arrived in the kitchen to find him carefully finishing the job of removing all the skin from the turkey.  In a panic, he called the Butterball Turkey Hotline, in the hopes that they'd have a good suggestion, since we'd heard that they get all kinds of crazy calls about defrosting turkeys with blowtorches and things.  The folks at the Hotline were silent, then the guy said, "You did what?!?" and then spoke to his colleagues, "Hey, Fred, you gotta hear what this guy did!".  They were nice about it, and he took it with good grace, but it was a bad sign that the Hotline folks hadn't heard that one yet.

Well, we cooked it, and it was horribly dry, as you might expect.  We ate mostly mashed potatoes that night.

It has been 14 years now, and hubby still hears about the "naked turkey". :-)

Cheers,

Catt

This one is my mothers.

  When I was a kid, we'd rent a cabin on a lake in Northern MN for a week every summer.  One year, my mom decided to roast a turkey for us, with all the trimmings.  She loves turkey, and then we'd have leftovers for sandwiches all week.  Since there were quite a few other cabins nearby, my mom decided that it would work to put the turkey in the ancient oven in the morning, all of us go out on the boat fishing all day, and come back to a just-about done turkey.

  We came back to a charred to the bone carcass.  The entire thing was BLACK, and the bones were just about all that was left, and they were black, too.

I think we had pizza for dinner that night.  We took a picture of the turkey and everything.   My mom can laugh about it now, but she was not happy when it happened.

My DH actually did drop the Thanksgiving turkey. One of those foil pans...lost his grip...turkey in it's juices sliding across the floor. He was cussin like you wouldn't believe-it was the pan's fault dontcha know! The rest of us were laughing hilariously, and yes-we ate the turkey.

My dear sister, on roasting her first Thanksgiving turkey (the whole family's there), left the giblets & neck inside it. She said she wondered why she couldn't get much stuffing in it!

I started my  almost brand new gas oven to preheat for a very large quantity of mac & cheese (2 pans, each 2lb.) and 2 very large meatloafs.  Didn't open the oven first--someone had stored a tupperware of brownies or something in there. Couldn't identify the contents of it after THE FIRE!!  It was a brand new kitchen, too. And I had my paralized son in the house. Anyway, no serious damage, son got out, fire extinguisher stuff EVERYWHERE, my embarassment when Volunteer Fire Dept. arrived??? PRICELESS!!!!!!!!!

I decided to make one of my Mother's favorite recipes.  The recipe had you place the chicken in a paper bag then place in overn.  My Mother had done it many times.  It always came out just great.  I did everything the receipe said to do.  Next thing I know I have a fire in the oven.  I was so upset and not thinking straight.  I knew you were suppose to throw somthing white onto the fire.  I grabbed the first container that had something white in it.  It took a while for the fire to go out.  When it was fiinally out, I noticed a poured powdered sugar all over my oven .  Talk about a baked on mess.  It too forever to get my oven cleaned.

Afterwards, my Mother tells me "the receipe is only for electric ovens not gas ovens".  Needless to say, I never made that receipe again.

*sigh. I burned boiled eggs once.

The naked turkey is one of the funniest things I've ever read!