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The first time I used sea salt I didn't realize how much saltier it was. That dinner was inedible.

In an attempt to gain family support for our new catering (ad)venture, the husband and I invited them to a dinner at home to present our ideas. All went well until the Diavolo roast chicken...it needed just a little more time in the oven, but the drippings were burning so I poured in cold water...to the pyrex dish. Explosion and glass shards everywhere...we took them out to dinner. Not my best sales presentation....ahem.

I don't know if this counts, but it really was the worst. It was my first experience "cooking" with our brand-new Amana microwave in the eighties (I think I was 8, and the microwave was the size of a refrigerator). I put my chicken nuggets in to warm them up, and set the timer for something like 6 minutes... That smell was unforgettable, and the results were a great argument against the "parts is parts" mentality!

Easy. Years ago, back when I was just starting out in my cooking career, on my day off I went to Chinatown, where I bought a big bag of live blue crabs, somehow under the impression that they were soft-shells. I was also somehow under the impression that the proper way to cook these not-soft shell crabs was to deep fry them in a vat of boiling oil without any kind of prep whatsoever.

Dropping the live, writhing crabs into the oil produced a torrential boil over, which ignited into a tower of flame that scorched the ceiling. We managed somehow to put out the fire, but that was the end of the meal, and the last time I attempted soft shells, at least until I saw the real thing made in my restaurant kitchen, by someone with a clue.

Late one night, I was really hungry and I decided to fry some chicken. I found some frozen chicken wings, and then I went to go look for oil. After digging through the cabinet, I found sesame oil and thought, oh this would be really interesting. I heated up the oil, threw in the frozen chicken wings, and the whole thing went up in flames. Up to the ceiling. Everyone panicked, and my sister tried throwing water on it, which just made the flames stronger. I finally found a metal bowl and threw it over the pan, putting out the fire. There are scorch marks on my ceiling now, but my mother has never noticed.

Age 5, breakfast in bed for my parent's wedding anniversary.

Toast: black and burning at the edges

Scrambeled eggs: a hard blob of yellow and white

orange juice: spilled all over the toast and eggs.

Nevertheless, we went to the diner for breakfast that morning.

Substituting peppermint for spearmint when making a goat cheese dip. It tasted so strongly of toothpaste I couldn't eat it.

My worst culinary disaster has to be in the last 2 years, for tha is when I started really cooking. I was playing around with recipes from the food network and decided on roasted chicken.

I forgo to urn the oven on and left a chicken in a non-heated oven for 1 1/2 hrs.

When we were kids, we took turns making dinner on the weekends. I was a(n inexperienced) food freak already, and thought I would make a simple pesto to show off my culinary skills. Having not so many cooking turns under my belt, I took "3 garlic cloves" to mean 3 heads of garlic...

Out of compassion?, charity?, sheer lunacy?, everyone ate it and never said a word that night.

When I was twelve, my best friend and I were making chocolate chip cookies without any adults at home - just her older brother. We didn't notice that the oven was set to broil, and we put the cookies on the top shelf. By the time we noticed something was wrong, the cookies were each little balls of fire.

All of my culinary disasters include: Stove lighting on fire: Very burnt food. I am partially blind and not a very good or well trained cook, so I tend to burn things or set things ablaze. Maybe it would help to follow instructions? LOL ;)

One of my aunts is famous for her chocolate cream pies. Every Christmas, she's expected to provide several for the family gathering, wherever it may be held.

One year when my mother was expecting a particularly large group to assemble at her house, my aunt decided to bring the prepared pie ingredents and assemble them on-site, to avoid the hazards of transporting five -- yes, five -- pies with fragile cream topping. In Mom's kitchen she lined up five baked pie shells and began work on the cream toppings. Enlisting me to help, she pointed to a gargantuan ceramic bowl of chocolate pie filling and said "You can start distributing that among the pie shells -- and make sure they're filled equally!"

As I hefted the bowl off the counter (it required both arms to lift it) and headed toward the row of pie shells on the table, I knew instantly that I had failed to notice the moisture condensation that had formed on the outside of the bowl. And before I could even scream for help the bowl was slipping down, down, down toward the tile floor.

Later, we could only speculate on the physics of just what happened. My cousin Ned, an engineer, had an explanation: the round bottom rim of the bowl must have hit the floor perfectly flat, every millimeter landing at exactly the same millisecond, to create the pressure that caused the entire bowlful of semi-liquid chocolate to explode straight up out of the bowl with enough velocity to fly in a mass SPLAT against the ceiling.

But that was later. At the time, we could only stand there, mouths agape, looking up and down, up and down -- from the bowl on the floor, unbroken and as clean as if it had been licked by a hungry dog, to the ceiling, where six quarts of thick chocolate cream pie filling was dripping back to down to earth a cupful at a time, like an upside-down bubbling tar pit.

My dad has been on a low-fat diet since I was a kid, so I've grown up around some pretty inventive low-fat cooking techniques. By the time I was in college, I thought I had mastered the art of such "substitution cooking," which is why I was so confident that when we realized we had no eggs for a birthday cake, we could just add some extra oil instead. The cake turned into more of a thick chocolate pudding than anything else - not completely inedible - but that was probably because it was from a BOX MIX. I screwed up Betty Crocker, aka "Cooking For Dummies."

When I was in high school, I needed to make lunch for my much younger sister and cousins. I decided to make my own spaghetti sauce despite a very shaky handle on what went into spaghetti sauce. I poured a can of tomato sauce in a pan and added some oregano. It was really bland, so I added some salt and pepper. Still really bland. Added more oregano, didn't help. Finally I dumped in a tablespoon of cayenne pepper. Not bland anymore! My one little cousin actually started to cry in pain after the first bite. The worst part was my teenage pride would allow me nothing less than to eat my whole serving and proclaim the whole time "It's not that hot", as my taste buds burned out.

I nearly set the kitchen on fire at work one day. I had some leftovers of a chicken panini that I didn't want to eat cold, so I thought there was no harm in quickly popping it in the microwave - even though it was partially wrapped in foil. Well, after a few seconds I turned around and saw that the entire interior of the microwave was going up in flames. Luckily (?) I noticed it in time to stop the timer and put it out.

And this doesn't exactly qualify as a "culinary disaster", but I also managed to spill a jumbo size box of cornflakes on the kitchen floor shortly thereafter.

Well, my very worst disaster was when I was going to bake a chocolate cake from Nigella Lawson's Feast. The book was brand new, and this was the first thing I tried from it. Well, I love Nigella, and I definitely trust her, so even though I thought it was a bit strange to line the cake tin with plastic wrap.. I did it. I really SHOULD have known better, because even though she assured me that no, it would not melt, it sure did. It ruined the tin, and needless to say, the cake. To make matters worse, Nigella specified to poke holes in the finished cake (in order to pour over a chocolate syrup) with a potato tester, or lacking that, uncooked spaghetti. I didn't have a potato tester at the time, and used spaghetti. In my warm cake. Well, guess what? Spaghetti breaks! Real! Easily! So, my unedible plastic cake was also studded with tiny pieces of broken spaghetti. Delicious, huh?

Anyway. I hear that the instructions have been changed in later editions and on the show as well - happy to hear it! And I will *never* make the same mistake again!

I had a lovely homemade beef pot pie with a biscuit crust in the oven in a stoneware baking pan my Father & Mother-in-law bought us at Cosco. I should've known something was up. All of a sudden we heard this tremendously loud crack & a violent sizzling. The pan had broke because I had the oven up a little too high to bake the biscuit crust properly. The pie filling was all over the oven & we had a huge mess to clean up. Never again! Now I use my trusty Pyrex baking dishes!

I keep my salt and sugar in green topped parmesan cheese jars, clearly labeled mind you, but I grabbed the wrong one while making spaghetti and ended up with a half cup of salt instead of sugar in my sauce. I realized it shortly after when I taste tasted, and ended up throwing out the batch.

Sadly, mine was making a frozen lasagnia. Idiot proof, right? Wrong. I knew how long to bake it, so just glanced at the directions, saw the picture of the tray going in PLASTIC ON, and threw it in the oven. By the time the smell died down enough to think about eating (something else), it would have honestly been faster and more convenient to have gone to the store, bought everything to make a real lasagnia, and made one.

It would have to be the year we decided to have "non-traditional" Thanksgiving dinner and picked goose as the poultry, rather than turkey. The night before the big dinner, we set about one of the first preparatory steps -- dunking the bird into a pot of boiling water -- this is supposed to make the goose skin more snug around the body. Well, the pot overflowed, extinguishing the gas stove flame, and water poured into the interior of the stovetop. The sparking devices for all the burners were sparking away! My husband spent the rest of the night taking the stove apart, in hopes of having it repaired for Thanksgiving. After all that, the nicely roasted goose got a lukewarm reception from the family! :)

Just yesterday I tried a recipe for pumpkin biscotti. I should have known it would be a dud when I saw that the recipe calls for NO fat at all -no butter, no oil, nothing. I tried it anyway and ended up with the most tasteless, dry chunks of yuck I've ever had.

One time my husband put some water on the stove and then WENT TO WALMART ("I've got plenty of time! This is taking forever to boil!") when I was at work. I don't know HOW our house didn't burn down. When he got home the pan was completely dry and red hot.

I was 13 or 14 and home alone when I decided to make taffy from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I put the corn syrup in a sauce pan, turned the heat on high, and walked away. I cleaned my bedroom for like the next half hour and completely forgot about the pot on the stove. When I finally went back into the kitchen, the entire room was filled with black smoke and the corn syrup was black and burnt to the pan. Middle of winter (in Wisconsin) with the windows open trying to air out the house before my parents came home. Bad bad bad night.

The first non-dessert food that I cooked was bok choy. A microwave cookbook said that you should cook it in there. It seemed convenient enough, putting in bok choy with salt and pepper. Mine came up all brown, shriveled and dry. It took me a couple years before I convinced myself that I really can cook.

The boyfriend and I had just moved into our first apartment together. I was about to begin culinary school and was eager to prove my food cred to him, as well as breaking in the kitchen in the new apartment. I decided on eggplant parmesan, one of his favorites. I bought lovely wine and ingredients, found the perfect recipe, and told him dinner would be ready at 7ish. Oh I was such a novice! The eggplant soaked up all the oil, and not knowing any better, I kept adding more and more to keep it from scorching. I cooked the hell out of it, basically turning it into oily mush. My from scratch tomato sauce had promise until I added the minced garlic. The recipe read "8 cloves", but being utterly ignorant, I thought a clove was the same as a head. 8 heads of garlic is alot. Things weren't progressing as I'd hoped and when dinner wasn't ready at 8pm, the poor boyfriend wandered into the kitchen to offer his help and I testily told him to "get out!" He said the garlic was burning his throat and opened all the windows. I started drinking wine to calm my frayed nerves. Now it was time to put the oily eggplant pucks and tomato sauce into the oven, at least according to my interpretation of the recipe. I just assumed the eggplant was supposed to suck up the woupy sauce, so I baked it until, oh, 10:45pm or so. Poor dutiful boyfriend. When I took it out of the oven, I could see what a disaster I'd cooked up, so I drunkenly sobbed while he ate 2 huge portions of the mess. He said he loved it and promised to eat the leftovers the next day. I miss that boyfriend. The eggplant was happily gone from the fridge the next day and I didn't dare ask if he actually ate it. The apartment smelled of garlic for an entire week. He never teased me about it and when my birthday rolled around he bought me "The Joy of Cooking" and a Kitchenaid mixer. Best birthday ever! Jimmy, if you're reading this, I want you to know I can now make an excellent eggplant parmigiana. Sorry I broke your heart.

I was trying to impress a new boyfriend at the time and tried to doctor a bottled marinara pasta sauce by whizzing it in the food processor with a block of tofu (vegan) (I somehow thought it would turn into ricotta) and thawed frozen spinach. In desperation I just kept adding salt and then some old wine my roommate had out-- essentially, it was inedible goo and I definitely learned my lesson.

I was giving a cocktail party for my co-workers and I was making about 20 different things. I have a very old oven where I have to light the stove every time I use it. The broiler and oven pretty much attached. I had been broiling negamaki and decided to heat up my goat cheese leak tartlets and completely forgot that since the broiler was on the oven was at about 500 degrees...so needless to say I ended up buring the tartlets. I was so up set I blamed my boyfriend on the mistakes since he was helping...poor guy.

I made a potentially delicious homemade macaroni and cheese which horrifically blew up in my oven. Now every time I use a glass dish in the oven I say a little prayer that it wont explode.

I was making some cream cheese frosting, working on auto-pilot from a friend's recipe. It was only after adding the 4th cup of sugar (to 1/2 a packet of cream cheese and some ridiculous amount of butter) that I figured out that the recipe HAD to be off. Needless to say, the frosting was inedible. I later found out that the recipe had been transcribed from an old, totally stained piece of paper that rendered the quantities illegible. Ever since then, I try to pay more attention when following a recipe to make sure it actually makes sense!

Besides burnt foods and overdone meats...

The saddest food "disaster" was a baking incident. I'm a scientist, so I'm normally detail-oriented and follow protocols wells. My boyfriend was craving pumpkin pie, so we bought all the ingredients and proceeded to make the pie together. Since I had more baking experience, I was charged with most of the pie-making responsibilities. The pie looked great when it came out of the oven. Unfortunately, when we bit into it we immediately realized that something was wrong. I had forgotten to add the sugar! Oh, the disappointment that ensued... I classified this as one of my worst food "disasters" because superficially the pie looked perfect!

I'm a fairly new cook. Not too experienced. A friend taught me how to make a tomato quiche that includes nutmeg. One night, while my sister-in-law was in town, I decided to make the quiche since it's quick and easy and oh-so-good. As I was trying to reach for the nutmeg to sprinkle in the mixture, I accidentally reached for the cinnamon and sprinkled that in the mixture instead. I tried to scrap out as much as I could, but in the end we had a sweet tomato quiche for dinner.

At a weekend cabin in northern Michigan, our uncle neglected to tell us that the old restaurant stove he had installed was hooked up with propane and not natural gas. My older brother, a short order cook at the time was going to make breakfast, he lit a match and tried to get the stove going. He and my younger brother and I were peering into the hole and waiting, and waiting and waiting. The stove didn't light. Another match, then another one and when it finally lit, kaboom! I lost a good part of my hair, my eyebrows and eyelashes; my older brother was left with only half of his mustache and baby brother (11 years old at the time) was screaming at me to stop hitting him on the head (he didn't realize he was on fire). I guess propane doesn't rise as quickly as natural gas.

Years ago for Christmas, my partner gave me a gift of doing the cookng for dinner that day. He decided that AppleJack, basically a strong apple flavored liquor,would add some flavor. When the chicken wasn't done when expected, he turned the oven up to 500!
Not too long after that I was jolted off the couch by a huge explosion that blew open the oven door and shot liquid everywhere. He had poured the entire bottle in the pan and the high heat had finally caused the alcohol to flame up.
Once I realized what had happened, I couldn't stop laughing. To be nice I forced down a couple of bites of chicken, but it was awful.
We had Chinese take out later that night!!!

Yes, I did it too. I was so proud of my first rustic plum crostata coming out of the oven. I cut myself a generous piece topping it with a nice blob of fresh mascarpone... only to discover at the first bite that I had used salt instead of sugar for the crust....

Almost a year ago one of my little cousin, 5 years old Yann came for lunch after beach time at my place. So I cooked pasta and ham and for dessert I decided to make a chocolate brownie. I did not have regular sugar so I put powered sugar, oh God such a BIG mistake! My brownie was burned on the top, hard as a rock all around and not cooked (still liquid) at the center. My little cousin is still not believing I can cook good cakes.

Keep in mind that this was after cooking for 15 years! I was trying out a new meatloaf recipe (which, BTW, once I mastered is my family's favorite!). I decided that for the number of people I was serving I needed to double the recipe. Not only did I double the ingredients, but I also DOUBLED the time. Needless to say, the meatloaf was more a 'meatbrick'! LOL

I'm sure this doesn't really compare to some of the ones out there, but I tried this recipe online for broiled tilapia, smothered with butter, mayo, parmesan, and some different herbs and spices. The recipe called for the fish to be just a few inches under the broiler, so here I have it in the oven, and I hear it sizzling and I'm all excited. So I go to open the oven and realize that my fish is on fire! I finally mustered up the courage to grab the fish and run it under water. Surprisingly, the fish under the charred surface was still good!

while experimenting with unfamilar spiced from the local ethnic grocery store I did a rub for the steak I was preparing. after grilling the steak to mouth - watering perfection, I serving it to my guest and anxiously awaited their praises before they could speak a word,I could tell by their facial expressions my (experiment) had gone terribly awry the unexpecited flavor they got was MINT and a lot of it.

I came home after a night out and decided to make a cheese omelette. What I didn't realize until I actually tasted it was that I had accidentally poured way way waaaayy too much salt in the egg mixture. To remedy this, using all of my skewed logic, I decided to make two more plain omelettes to put on top of the super salty one. Obviously, this didn't actually help at all.

Well, I was finally given the chance to cook Thanksgiving dinner for our entire family.
Me, being the nervous twit I am, was chatting on the tele while mixing together the pumpkin pies that were to be scrumptious!...and forgot the sugar!!

My mother's face told me instantly that I had just had my last family dinner!! *sigh*......oh, well.......the tele call was important!!

We'd been married for about two weeks. We decided to try to make two small fillets of fish in our newly gifted Pyrex glass baking dish. A few minutes after I put it in the oven, I heard a strange BAM, like a gun went off. The dish had shattered -- spiderwebbed cracks lined the glass and sprinkled chunks onto the bottom of the oven.

Best part? We didn't have any money to replace the fish, so we gingerly picked the big chunks of glass out and tried to salvage what we could. Neither of us died, but probably not the best risk to take!

i've made the same double layer chocolate cake for years, and one late night with a bunch of friends, i decided to make it again on a whim. after the cakes were put into the oven to bake, we were playing cards, but we started to smell chocolatey smoke. huh. i got up and went to check in, and the cake batter had brimmed over the top and had spilled over the two grates and onto the bottom of the oven. i had to spend the next half hour cleaning off bits of burnt chocolate drips while my friends kept playing cards. to this day, i still have no idea what went wrong.

When I was twelve, I made my step-sister the most disgusting meal. I microwaved dog food from a can, then I placed it in a flour tortilla with sauteed onions and American cheese. It wasn't a total disaster, because I knew what I was doing. I was devious and cruel, but she ate every bit of it without knowing what it was. How gross!

Someone gave my family a boneless whole turkey for Thanksgiving several years ago (somehow the bones had been extracted). We cooked it and it deflated like a balloon.

Several years ago I was trying to impress my new boyfriend (now husband) by recreating my mother's incredible baked ziti. We were visiting my parents and therefore cooking in their kitchen. I baked the ziti, grated mozzarella, and mixed the innards up. Usually, I top my ziti (before baking) with some Parmesan cheese. Not being my kitchen, I looked in the usual place for Parmesan - the fridge and the freezer. Here's where things went awry. My mother is famous for her blueberry betty and sometimes she makes extra topping (1 part flour to 1 part butter to 1 part sugar) and puts it in a ziploc in the freezer, she also does this with extra Parmesan cheese. The bag was not labeled, and thinking it was Parmesan cheese, I poured a generous amount of this deliciousness atop the ziti, baked it for 45 minutes and removed it from the oven. Dying of hunger, we dug into the ziti - only to be thoroughly repulsed by the most unlikely tastes to be combined - sweetly-topped ziti with cheese and pasta sauce. Thinking that maybe we could solve things, we tried to scrape off the top layer. As the flour-butter-sugar combination permeated the ziti, we were disgusted, unable to take another bite, had to discard a huge dish of baked ziti, and ruined my attempt at delighting my boyfriend with my kitchen prowess.

Eggplant. I salted those suckers with probably 1/4 of salt and didn't do a good job of getting it all off. It would have been such a great dish, if salt wasn't the only thing you could taste!

Being a good and true Good Eats fan, several years ago I tried making AB's yellow cake recipe, with a chocolate whipped cream frosting. The cake turned out fabulous - moist and delicious. The frosting was made with whipped cream mixed with AB's hot chocolate mix (cocoa, powdered sugar, powdered milk, etc., with a pinch of cayenne to give it some kick). Not needing a full recipe of the mix to make the frosting, I scaled the measurements. Evidently I miscalculated a bit on the cayenne, though. Said one friend, "The cake is wonderful, but frosting should not have a slow burn!"

One Christmas I decided to try a new cookie for the family. I don't remember exactly what kind, but they were some type of meringue cookie. The recipe called for cream of tartar. I thought to myself, wow, that's odd, why would a cookie recipe call for tartar sauce. Even when people serve it with fish I don't like it. I shrugged my shoulders and said well... what else could it be? So I mixed the ingredients together and did a taste test. Right about then my husband was coming home. He saw the look on my face and asked what was going on. I explained what I did and he laughed and laughed. He too, had never heard of cream of tartar but knew that wasn't right. So I called my mom and explained and she couldn't stop laughing. I think she might have been crying. Lesson learned. Go with my instincts when I think something sounds "funny" in a recipe.

Every Christmas the family gets a good laugh out of that one.

Just after college I lived with three friends of mine. One night I decided to do a shrimp boil in our kitchen. Liking my food fairly spicy, I dumped a lot of cayenne pepper into the boiling water. Well the cayenne mixed with the steam from the pot and the result was about the same as spraying our house with pepper spray. Me and my roomates were coughing and our eyes were waterting for about 30 minutes. My throat was burning for about an hour after it happened.

I would have to say this is a tie....
either the time I tried to bake chocolate chip cookies when I was in high school to impress my boyfriend... I couldn't figure out why the top of the cookie burnt, but the bottom was raw... I left the oven on pre-heat instead of bake. I also once forgot to take the cardboard off the bottom of a frozen pizza and it caught on fire! I'm happy to say that I've improved my cooking skills since then.

Oh, there are so many to choose from.

How about the time I made an oreo cheesecake for my boyfriend's birthday that turned out more like a rubber brick? Or the time that I made a red velvet cake that shrunk AND fell in the pan, also forming a tough, brick-like substance. Or maybe it would be the lemon muffins that ended up as lemon discs. Or setting ramen noodles on fire. Or..............

I'm contemplating taking cooking classes.

I was trying out a vegan recipe (I'm not vegan, but was interested to try some things) for Lunchbox Fondue (http://shmooedfood.blogspot.com/2005/11/lunch-box-fondue.html) from the Vegan Lunchbox blog. The recipe calls for 1/4 tsp dry mustard which I read as 1/4 CUP dry mustard. As I measured it out I thought, "Wow...this one recipe has almost used up my entire bottle of dry mustard!" First taste: felt like a mushroom cloud of HOT swept through my entire head obliterating anything in its path. My husband of almost 2 years, who has never said anything bad about my cooking (bless him), took a bite and could not hold back: "Oh MY GOSH! That's horrible! OH! What IS this!!" I contemplated making the batch bigger to balance out the mistake (I HATE throwing food out) but decided against it when I figured out I'd used 48 times the correct amount of the mustard.

It's hard to determine the worst (or, in retrospect, funniest). There was the time that the cayenne was substitured for the sweet paprika for the Paprikosh. Oof! Then there was the poptart in the toaster oven incident in Somerville MA, in which my sweetie had put the strawberry unfrosted toaster pastries in to toast while a friend called from out of town, the pastries started to burn and flame (!) and she called for me to help -- and my friend Gary refused to get out the damn phone "but-but-I have more to say!". *oy* So I unplugged the toaster oven and ran the whole thing out onto the front porch and shoveled show into it!

Starting the kitchen on fire by putting an oven mitt on a hot burner during Homecoming Weekend at college on "taco night" in our apartment. Subsequently knocking out power for the 3 apartments that made up our house, and highly irritating our many houseguests trying to get ready to go out for the night.

Yet another taco disaster! I came home from my high school job of cooking at a senior center to find all the fixin's for soft tacos left out for me by my parents, who were out attending the local PTA meeting. I fired up the wok with hot oil but spilled salsa all over my work top. I left the kitchen to put my clothes in the washer...a couple of minutes later my dog came running to find me, barking like Lassie. I ran back to the kitchen to find all the wood cabinets up in flames from the grease fire. I ran to the wash room, grabbed as many towels as I could find, threw them on top of the wok and frantically beat the living daylights out of the cabinet fire. I successfully got the fire out, but turned around to see four feet of thick, black, greasy smoke filling up the entire first floor of the house. I opened up all the windows and doors, got the house fans out and blew the smoke out of the house. I called up the fire dept and had them check out the house for any potential problems. Needless to say, I did not have an appetite for soft tacos anymore. Ever.

I consider myself to be a very proficient pastry chef. So imagine my embarrassment when I went to make a meringue buttercream for a friend's birthday cake but kept coming up with egg white and butter soup. My apt was scorching hot and I couldn't cool it down (AC was busted) and my egg whites wouldn't whip up properly. Keep in mind that I'm already 20 minutes late to her birthday party and she lives a half hour away. I made another batch but the same thing happened. I had no choice but to scrap the buttercream and just slap some melted white chocolate all over the cake. It looked horrible, like something a 5 year old would make. Luckily for me, I was able to slice and serve the cake without anyone seeing the entire thing. So I wasn't publicly embarrassed, but I was embarrassed nonetheless.

Let's see, SO many to chose from! How about the time I cooked a spaghetti squash in the microwave WHOLE! I knew that I had to let the steam escape and punctured the squash several times with a knife. But evidently this was not enough. I had walked out of the kitchen and I heard what sounded like a small explosion. The spaghetti squash had burst and blew open the door to the microwave, covering every surface of my small kitchen to include the ceiling with "spaghetti". It is amazing how much surface area on squash can cover! I cleaned up spaghetti squash for WEEKS! Now I know to CUT the squash in have before microwaving.

my mom had an easy peesy recipe for making some ribs with soy sauce, vinegar, rice wine, and sugar. it was something like three parts vinegar and two parts sugar.

when it was cooked and i eagerly dug in to discover that i forgot the sugar and it was as if i just braised something in rice vinegar.

that first bite caused me to make a face like what you saw on those "bitter-beer-face" commercials. good times.

It was two weeks before we were closing on our house - in a market where we were lucky to even have someone to make an offer - I decide to make a bag of popcorn in the microwave. I was glad I smelled the smoke before the flames started licking at the cabinets. It took a fire extinguisher to get out all the flames. Popcorn makes really good fuel - and smells really, really bad for a couple of weeks. I will never, ever, ever cook in a kitchen without a little red canister - I think it saved my house! Luckily, we sold the house and we're much more careful about popping popcorn.

My absolute worst cooking disaster was back almost 30 years ago when I was a new bride just beginning to cook. Up until then, Mom had done all the day-to-day cooking, and there's just so many hotdogs you can eat. I had received a crock pot as a wedding gift, along with it's little recipe booklet. Hmmm. Cauliflour soup. Sounded pretty good, and within my skills range. Put everything in in the morning, and turned the pot on. Came home after work, expecting great things. Oh no. The aroma wafting under the door was not at all pleasant. The entire apartment reeked of rotten onions. I still use the crock pot, but that little recipe book went right into the garbage, along with all that soup.

This weekend, we made a Black Forest Cake for an Octoberfest party. Unfortunately, the humidity got the best of the cake and the layers started to slide around. Not one of our best cakes...