Comments on: And then the brownies exploded

By: Melissa the Librarian

Melissa the Librarian — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:16:57 +0000

My worst cooking disaster (among many) occurred early in my marriage. I cooked a pot of noodles for spaghetti, but when I went to drain them, I sent them down the drain on accident. So, I turned on the food grinder and made another pot. Unfortunately, pasta doesn’t go down easily and the drain was clogged. So clogged that we had to have the apartment maintenance guy come fix it. While we were at work, he came and dumped something along the lines of sulfuric acid down the drain, but didn’t leave us a note! When I came home from work, the whole complex smelled like rotten eggs and our carbon monoxide detector was blaring. We called the fire department. All to take care of a pot of spaghetti noodles. Awesome.

By: Zina

Zina — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:02:24 +0000

This thread got me thinking. Someone said that Pyrex used to use a better type of glass. I also just learned about etching your name onto a Pyrex dish (apparently this is a common thing for Super Saturdays but my first time to hear of it was a few weeks ago) and learned that occasionally for some reason the glass just won’t etch. So now I am thinking that maybe it is the older, better Pyrex that won’t etch. And I’m thinking I need to haunt thrift stores for old Pyrex, since the exploding Pyrex seems to be a common mishap (and I use my 9×13 Pyrex dishes all the time.)

These stories have all been so fun to read that maybe the moral can be that if we all share our disasters they can be a great source of entertainment. Sorry I can’t think of any of my own to share at this moment — probably because I don’t cook often enough. I do remember my sister telling of a time she made a beautiful, deluxe, from-scratch cake for some event and accidentally dropped it in the road. I think she also said her kids heard some swear words from her at that moment that they hadn’t ever heard her say before.

By: Bev

Bev — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:42:59 +0000

When ever we break something witch is quite often, we consider it a blessing if the broken dish was dirty-one less dish to wash!

By: christine

christine — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:59:22 +0000

I was trying so hard to impress my very new in-laws. I love to cook and my mother-in-law not so much so they were expecting great things. It was a special dinner for their 25th anniversary. I made a fancy cordon bleu type of chicken and made a lot-the first one baked just fine and was delicious. When I took it out I put another pan in so we would have “seconds” ready whenever we wanted. During a nice dinner (at which the new bride was already very nervous) we heard exploding and crashing coming from the oven. My delicious chicken was all over the oven (apparently the glass couldn’t handle going from fridge to oven) I was so embarassed. Looking back it was no big deal but at the time I was sure I was a huge disappointment to my new family!

Another time we had my father-in-law for dinner when MIL was out of town. For some reason the gravy wouldn’t thicken no matter how much cornstarch I added. It didn’t look very good to me so I just passed. FIL was relishing the dinner, DH took one bite and asked me what was wrong with the gravy! I had been adding POWDERED SUGAR trying to thicken it up! Gross. The funny thing is that FIL didn’t care and ate it all-
Hard to believe I cook professionally now. and still make lots of mistakes!

By: Adriane in TX

Adriane in TX — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:08:42 +0000

I guess that you could always switch to a metal pan!
When I was a teenager my parents had gone to the food bank for some help in the pantry department. Flour was one of the items that they received. I decided to make a cake on day. A beautiful yellow cake from scratch named “Bonnie Butter Cake” or something like that. When the time came to eat the cake it tasted like soap. All we could figure was that there was something wrong with the flour from the food bank. It has forever since been reffered to as “the cake of soap”!

By: Tiffany W.

Tiffany W. — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:31:25 +0000

My funniest cooking disaster happened when I was a teenager. We were making lemon meringue pie for my dad’s birthday. I hadn’t separated the egg whites cleanly so there was a tiny bit of yolk in the whites. I didn’t know it at the time, but egg whites will not set up when there is yolk in the whites. We had a stand mixer and I started experimenting with different attachments, finally settling on dough hooks to try and whip the eggs. I didn’t know they were dough hooks at the time. I had to leave to do something and asked my 10 year old sister to watch the eggs while I did another chore. She agreed, hopped up on the counter to sit beside the stand mixer and started reading a book. A few minutes later, we heard frantic screaming coming from the kitchen. We rushed into the kitchen to find her head stuck to the mixer. She had waist-long hair and somehow it had got caught in the mixer curled it right up. The amazing thing is that once we got the mixer turned off, her hair unrolled easily from the dough hooks. The mixer was ruined. And the pie was scrapped.
I did learn to carefully separate eggs, use the correct beaters for whipping egg whites, and never to read while making lemon meringue pie.

By: Amanda

Amanda — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:41:16 +0000

We had company over for dinner. It was shortly after we were married and it was the first dinner party we had ever hosted. I had made a nice meatloaf. However, there was some extra oil that needed to be drained. So I very carefully started to tip it a little over the sink to drain the oil. And lo and behold, the meatloaf fell into the sink. Into sink water and dirty dishes. And the other couple watched me do it. We were in this tiny apartment that the kitchen was a part of the living room. I didn’t know what to do. But my husband and the other husband took over from there. Luckily, half of the meatloaf fell into a dish that was mostly clean. They scraped it out and ate it. At the time it seemed okay to do so. Now that I think back to it…we should have just gone out to eat.

By: Allypally

Allypally — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:01:50 +0000

Back in the days when microwaves were new, it struck me as being eminently sensible that I could cook a boiled egg in it. Turns out, if you try, that the microwave will explode. We were scraping egg off the ceilings of two rooms for weeks.

By: Tara

Tara — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:08:32 +0000

Last year I was making milkshakes for my son’s first sleepover with a friend- being the good mom, you know? And then I tried to use the ice cream scoop to push the milkshake down towards the blades, and the handle slipped and I dropped the ice cream scoop into the whirring blender. I wound up with chocolate milkshake all over my walls, floor and ceiling (gotta admit, there is still some drops left on the ceiling) and shredded metal in our shakes.

And two six year olds who thought I was an idiot.

By: m&m

m&m — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 06:47:32 +0000

Story from my dad — he made mac-n-cheese on his mission…the recipe that is simply adding evaporated milk and cheese to cooked pasta (one of my fave quick meals, actually). The problem is that where he was serving, the only canned milk was sweetened condensed…. Need I say more? His comps wouldn’t touch it, but he ate it all. Ugh.