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Cooking Confessions
After all the recent blasting of Paula Deen's peas recipe, I am willing to bet we have all had our stupor moments in the kitchen and have had to ask for help or face a failure of a dish for not knowing what we are doing. Why not admit it here and give us all a chuckle?
I will fully admit to calling my best friend's mom about 5 years ago (so, in my mid-20's, no less) to ask how to properly make a baked potato. I wasn't sure how long in the oven it went and for what temp, and I felt like a moron asking her how to do it over the phone but I didn't have internet at the time and up to that point I had mostly done either scallopped, mashed, boiled, or hashed/sauteed potatoes. I am quite sure she laughed at me after hanging up the phone for such basic instructions. 
Re: Cooking Confessions
I've boiled steak.
I've made the worlds saltest/soggiest rice.
I've ruined Mac N Cheese (in the blue box)
I've also caught fire heating up oatmeal in the microwave.
I try and stick to meals I can make with out appliances, or have constant supervision.
I can bake like a mother, though.
I will never hide the fact that I am a lousy cook.
My mom didn't cook, my dad only made Persian foods and for the greater majority of my adulthood I lived in places that didn't have working appliances.
One time, before I moved in with D - I had him over and I was going to make him my favorite Percian recipe. A weeks worth of planning involved in this, including asking my dad how to do it, and him showing me how. He even made it improperly so that I knew exactly how to do it when the day came (I had to use a stove instead of a grill).
The day comes - the salad ::kisses finger tips:: Perfect! The meat (kabob) the best it could have been for being made on the stove.
The rice.. oh, the rice. The rice failed miserably. It was nasty and watery.
During the entire time I was dealing with the rice I called my dad about 10x. Finally he said "come over and I'll show you again" By the time I had gotten there, he had the rice done and packed up ready for me to take back home.
Luckily there had been a pool party (I left early) and D went to the neighbor across the hallway until I was done.
He has no idea to this day that I ever left and that my dad made the rice.
::nods head approvingly::
I almost caught a kitchen (not mine) on fire while trying to make Jello Shots. It's not a good idea to do that on a gas-lit stove with strong alcohol like Everclear after you have just finished smoking a blunt. Lesson learned, but several dishrags and a fire extinguisher were the cost that day.
There were two major cooking debacles that I had.
The first one, I was doing a whole beer chicken on the grill with baked potato. (Something I had done probably 20 times.) My husband turned on the grill, and I stuck the beer, bird, and potatoes on. I walked away to do something else, 15 minutes later, I go back to flip over the potatoes, to find my bird completely burnt to a crisp. Apparently I forgot to turn it down from the ignition setting. (This night ended with us getting pizza for dinner.)
Another one was from like six years ago, so my husband and I had been together for a year or so and I had cooked from him before, but I wanted to try something new. I got a recipe from my 70 year old coworker for steak. It involved cherry preserves, basalmic vinegar, red wine, thousan island dressing, and tomato paste. The combination alone should have scared me off...It was horrible. Words cannot even describe how awful this meal was. I don't even think we ended up eating anything that night, we were so disgusted. To this day, my husband still doesn't want any kind of cherry preserve in our house, for fear of it finding it's way onto a steak...
Thankfully these are the only real cooking horror stories I have. They just happen to be really, really memorable.
-- Thoughts become things, choose the good ones! --
I have burnt canned tomato soup almost to a crisp.
I made some kind of canned tuna/dijon mustard/olive oil concoction a few years ago that almost made H vom (and he still brings it up to this day).
For Thanksgiving about 2 years ago, I attempted to make sweet potato and gruyere turnovers. First, I put them in the oven on wax paper and the wax started melting all over the bottoms of them. So, I had to take them out and scrape out the filling. I didn't have any more dough so I used a frozen pie crust I had and stuffed it all in there, and made a sweet potato and gruyere pie instead. It tasted so good, but looked atrocious.
Last week I was making a cake to take to a party, and somehow (I'm still not 100% sure what happened) it ended up on the kitchen floor in about 20 pieces.
I like to think I'm a good cook, but my impatience/attention span don't always work out in the kitchen.
Ugh, wax paper! Yes, I have had a charred/melted wax paper in the oven before and have never used that stuff in there since! I can't even remember what I was trying to cook on it, but it was for sure ruined. Must have been something I was making for myself since I can't even remember what it was.
When my best friend and I were growing up, we'd always want to cook when I stayed the night over at her house. We really liked spaghetti. Well, the only way we knew to check if it was done was to throw it against the wall...if it stuck, it was done.
It was only about 3 years ago I found out there is a better way to check if it was done.
Hmm.. I was not aware of this method.
I must try it in the future.
Dude, my dad STILL does this.
Your dad is full of awesome!
My dad us pretty much an older version of me.
It's not really an error in cooking, but it's a funny story about something I made.
Years ago I worked at this awful place (most of the people were just nasty individuals), but I was sucking it up while I went to school. Every Friday was breakfast day and we all took turns being the person responsible for bringing in goodies for the morning.
When it was my turn I bought some bagels and cream cheese, but the night before I had also made a yellow cake in a 13x9" pan which I planned to bring in as well. It was late when I made the cake so I left it cool on the counter overnight and planned to put the icing on in the morning. When I went into the kitchen the next morning I found that a large chunk of the center of the cake was eaten by my cat. Instead of just tossing the cake, I iced it anyway and let my coworkers eat it.
For me, I absolutely LOVE to cook, I was raised in a hard core Italian family... So it was ingrained. You COOK! But I remember It was the first time I made my own noodles! For Pasta basil Mari. OMG! I was so nervous I cracked shell into the dough, and I rolled the noodles so thin that they kept breaking....then when I was making the Tomato Basil sauce I didnt it mash properly and it was so chunky.... Gosh! It was just crazy! It tooke me doing it at least 3 times to get it right!
Edited to add actual words. I hate the nest ha!
You don't cook with wax paper. You use parchment paper. Wax paper isn't made for heat. Feel free to disregard if you already knew this.
Yeah, that was the problem! I thought I was using parchment paper, but when I checked on it I realized there was melting wax everywhere. Oops!