Recipe Failures

[Debi]

In this cold weather, many are cooking and trying out new recipes!
Even the best of cooks has a failure at some point...
What was yours?
(I confess to a few too many. Details to follow...lol)

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[Lynne]

My whole first year of marriage was full of them lol. I must admit it was user error.

 

[Debi]

My hubs is a country boy who believes there must be three things on a plate: meat, potatoes, and a veggie. Otherwise, it is not a meal. I grew up learning how to make casseroles, pasta, pizza, etc. Croatian food that could be stretched. Learning how to tackle just meat products brought me one big true failure he will never let me live down. He called them "boiled pork chops". I called them pork chops in gravy. He strongly disagrees with that description. If they weren't fried, he considered them boiled. So I learned to fry stuff. (Which is why I don't eat much meat!)

 

[Lone Wolf]

I went WAY overboard with a pot of chili I had made and added just a little too much Cayenne pepper. Breaking out in a sweat, I pushed the bowl away and threw the batch out. That was the first and last time I ever made that mistake. Heat to me is good, but that was over the top.

 

[Stevedog]

My hubs is a country boy who believes there must be three things on a plate: meat, potatoes, and a veggie. Otherwise, it is not a meal. I grew up learning how to make casseroles, pasta, pizza, etc. Croatian food that could be stretched. Learning how to tackle just meat products brought me one big true failure he will never let me live down. He called them "boiled pork chops". I called them pork chops in gravy. He strongly disagrees with that description. If they weren't fried, he considered them boiled. So I learned to fry stuff. (Which is why I don't eat much meat!)

Cooking techniques such as stewing, braising, basting and steaming are all fundamentally the same concept as boiling. If you want to get technical you could classify frying as "boiling in oil". So I say boil away!

 

[Stevedog]

Not sure this is much of a "failure" but the kids and I made Ninjabread Men a few weeks ago for Christmas. They turned out okay but a few of them broke. I told the kids that a good icing job can fix many baking mistakes.

 

[Duke]

Back in the 70s-80s, a series of Korean exchange engineers came to WPAFB. A number of them were "assigned" to a test facility ran by my Dad. For 15-20 years, our family "mother henned" these guys, most of them young (late 20s), single guys, but a few brought their wives.

Although we had invited one of the young couples to Thanksgiving dinner, the wife decided she was going to do their own dinner, complete with a seemingly too large turkey for two people. About 2pm on Thanksgiving day, we got a panicked phone call from the Korean wife screaming a mile a minute in Korea, with the occasional "fire" in English.

Long story short, no one told them the various turkey innards are crammed back into the bird in a butcher paper sack. The paper eventually caught fire in the oven, smoke set off their apartment alarm, and the fire department was notified automatically. I still wonder which was more embarrassing for the young wife, the fire department showing up or being told she was supposed to have stuck her hand/arm up the bird's wazoo to pull out the bagged innards.

 

[Debi]

Cooking techniques such as stewing, braising, basting and steaming are all fundamentally the same concept as boiling. If you want to get technical you could classify frying as "boiling in oil". So I say boil away!

This is why I like you, Stevedog! lol

 

[Debi]

I went WAY overboard with a pot of chili I had made and added just a little too much Cayenne pepper. Breaking out in a sweat, I pushed the bowl away and threw the batch out. That was the first and last time I ever made that mistake. Heat to me is good, but that was over the top.

Oh man, my husband did that once when he made chili! Mr. "I can handle any heat" even had to admit it was too much to handle and, like you, had to throw out the batch! I ended up making grilled cheese...lol

 

[Selectric]

I generally can eat almost everything i cook. There were a few times i couldn't even coax myself to eat what i created lol.