What was your worst cooking disaster?

I made turkey, mashed potatoes , and corn and carrots. No one came. I then decided to put BBQ sauce on the turkey and eat a quarter of it and a whole pot of mashed potatoes with creamed corn. I also burnt a permanent scar on my left wrist from the oven. I was 18 and the first thanksgiving on my own. My dad lived with me and even he didn’t show up. I think the rest of the family had a secret dinner elsewhere. The My food was good. I was expected to fail. I learned early not to cook on high unless you are boiling water.

@RedDeerGuy1 I like that TG story.

I had long fingernails. I was hosting a dinner club supper and baked a ham and made potato salad and some veggies. After I mixed the salad, put it into the serving dish along with garnishings I realized one of my nails was gone. I mixed the salad with my hand. I didn’t know what to do. I decided to live in Faith like I had always. No one reported finding my nail…thank God. When cleaning up I found the nail in the very small amount of salad left. I could not believe it. I have never again mixed anything with my hand without a vinyl glove on it. That was more than 30 years ago.

I think my worst fail involved one of the simplest things anyone can make.

I was fresh out of the navy. I should have been able to handle those ten hour days decorating cakes. It was the commute. One hour to work, an hour and a half home. Sitting on the subway gave me the opportunity to sit long enough to have fatigue set in. I would get home, throw something on the stove, and eat it after I got out of the tub. One evening I was too sore to rush through a bath. I decided to boil an egg, eat that, then get in the tub and think about what else would I eat.
I leaned my head back on the back of the couch for a second. When I woke up, the smoke was thick, my throat sore, and the steeeeenk ugh! I grabbed a towel and threw the saucepan in the sink, cold water gushed over the ruined pot. Only a portion of melted shell stuck to the bottom of the now warped pot.
Of course, I had to throw open the windows.
That awful, tiny apartment still smelled like charred butt when I moved out.
I’ve had other cooking fails, but nothing to compare to that one egg disaster.

made a pizza that tasted like soap.
made some bread that turned into rocks

I was making mashed cauliflower for a health nut, and the garlic cloves didn’t mix well enough. My friend ate an entire garlic clove.

Well, at least now you know he was not a vampire.

It is no secret: I love chocolate. (I also love Brie cheese but that is a different story.)
I worked in an office with about 50 people, mostly engineers and researchers. We always had an annual, end of year party where everyone brings something they like to make.
I decided on chocolate truffles. I used Mark Bittman’s cookbook and mixed up several batches of different flavored ganache: dark chocolate, mint, cherry, raspberry. and had different coatings prepared: cocoa , powdered sugar, crushed cashews, crushed almonds. I also tempered a supply so I could cover a few with hard chocolate and salt. I made enough to give everyone 2 or 3 of different flavor combinations. Do the math and you see this is a lot of chocolate ganache!
With all my planning an fiddling I unknowingly made the ganache too soft. After all that work the truffles would only maintain their shape if they were refrigerated so I opened the kitchen window and worked in a cool kitchen. I did not know that this would be a problem. I made the dozens of truffles and put them in the fridge. In the morning I carried them out to my car in the freezing cold December weather. I brought them into the office and put the trays on the dessert table so everyone could enjoy them during the afternoon.party.
They looked beautiful – until they began to warm up to room temperature. Then they started to soften and wilt and by noon had turned into a pile of elephant diarrhea.
They looked awful – but still tasted good. It was quite a mess.

I made about four pounds of ground meat into chili when we were first married. Instead of chili powder I put in cinnamon my mistake but we were too poor to throw it out so we ate it all winter.

All winter? I guess it lasted because you didn’t take seconds. I made the sugar/salt mistake in home ec in high school. Those girls still remember that too! :)

@MollyMcGuire Most of it was in the freezer; we had other meals in between.

Chef Bob…didn’t see out his first month.

I had cooked something easy quite successfully and spent the next hour or so relaxing in the lounge watching television with a friend. When I opened the lounge door I was startled to see the air appeared thick and dark and full of multitudes of sticky black particles. This cloud from Hell filled the entire flat as every door apart from the lounge had been left open. Fighting my way through to the kitchen I discovered I had left the ring of the cooker on and the plastic handle of the saucepan which lay across it had been burned down to the metal.

I was lucky it hadn’t started a fire but those tiny burnt black bits were everywhere and it took and eternity to clean the flat.

When I was a tween I went home for lunch and I was short on time so I put the electric kettle on the stove top to heat it up faster. It was plastic and burned a hole in the kettle. The water leaked onto the stove top and steamed up the kitchen.

When I was in primary school, I poured a cup of boiling water over my leg and went to school the next day, untreated.

^really? Or you making that up… your parents must have noticed it.

Oh they did. They were the ones that sent me to school with that burn.

@ragingloli, I am confused. Did you pour the water on yourself intentionally, or accidentally?

As for your parents not getting the injury treated, I am terribly sorry. No matter how it happened, it certainly should have been tended.
Belated (HUG)

I would not scald myself intentionally. I am not that much of a masochist.

This isn’t a cooking story but it does involve a stove, a pot of water, and heat so I will include it.
When I was about 10, I got a piece of underwater cannon fuse that had fallen out of an M-80 firework. I wanted to see if I could make an underwater firecracker. I also had a supply of empty Shaffer ink cartridges so… I carefully removed the fuse from a firecracker, and replaced it with the M-80 fuse. Then I cut the top off the cartridge and shoved the firecracker inside. I put cello tape over the top and around the fuse to seal it. Finally it was ready to try.
I filled a pot of water and put it on my Mom’s gas stove and put the device in the water. Unfortunately it floated. So I rooted around in the drawer and found a funnel. I put the device in the open end of the funnel, passed the fuse through to the narrow end and lit it. I put the lit device in the water and held it under so it would not float. The lit fuse bubbled like crazy as it down until…
Blam!!! Water went everywhere! My hand was numb and stinging like it had fallen asleep for a week. The metal pot had 6 ridges pounded into it.where it had been sitting on the burner. It was as if I had picked up the pot an slammed it on the stove, totally ruined. My parents were more than a little upset.
I never did that again.
All future “testing” was done remotely!

Well, I make super good baked beans. But then one time I thought maybe it would be a cool idea to throw the seeds from the green peppers in the mix.
Do not throw the seeds from the green peppers in the mix. OMG! It made the sweet beans horribly bitter so don’t do that.
I think I was able to salvage them by beating down Kardamom’s door on FB! Or maybe it was here.

@ragingloli…. hugs. I am so so sorry.
You too @RedDeerGuy1. I am so sorry.

Loli, I was not making an accusation. At such a young age, children sometimes do dangerous things without understanding what the outcome will be. I was only asking.

When I was very young my little sister and I decided to bake an apple pie together. We replaced all of the flour in the recipe with sugar…

When my sister was about 17 she wanted to make some cookies. They were out of eggs. So she used a hard boiled egg…..

My dumb litte brother tried to cook pasta.
Without water.