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Making a chili from scratch and using dried beans which I never used before (always canned) and I soaked them over night as directions said, but they were still crunchy in the morning. I was going to have people over and I slaved over the sauce for days, it was great. Well i put the beans in with the sauce and hours laster they were still hard, so I turned the heat up and went on to other things. Burned the sauce, it had that charred taste to it and the beans were still crunchy by the time people came over. Never again will I use dried beans. People still ate it but I was so upset.

Tried to make popcorn one night with corn syrup instead of corn oil.

Caught my deck on fire from embers from my water smoker. I wasn't home when it ignited. Luckily my neighbor saw it and put the fire out with a hose. To make matters worse, at the time I was a volunteer fireman.

Calculated the weight and time wrong on my neighbors turkey which I had agreed to fry. It turned out perfectly golden and beautiful on the outside, very rare on the inside.

And then, like an idiot put some chicken breast in to fry - calculated that if it took 1 hour to do a 10 lb turkey, it would take 10 minutes to do a one lb breast. Wrong - that one wasn't even rare - it was raw, but golden on the outside.

I've since remediated my math skills. Ten years later finally got it right.

My very worst cooking experience ever was my very first dinner party. Now please understand that I grew up vegetarian, and while I started eating meat in my teens, it wasn't something I actually cooked. So, anyhow, my friend who swore she made the best meat sauce on the planet, gave me her family recipe. It called for sausage. I was completely unaware that there were different kinds of sausage. So I used Jimmy Dean sausage. I guess I don't need to tell you the results.

I am lucky that I had been blessed with really great friends. They were both honest and kind. We ended up ordering pizza and had a great night, though 30 years later, I still haven't lived it down with some of them.

Which in a way is kind of awesome. I mean, really, having some friends that I've had for over 30 years is pretty freaking spectacular.

I had a problem similar to the OP, only the container of rosemary was already open. I just didn't notice that it had a big open hole instead of a shakey top, which is just plain stupid for something as easily overpowering as rosemary. Tried to salvage what would have been an otherwise delicious risotto but it was far too bitter. Remade it the next night and it was perfect, though.

@unpocojmoney - wow that has to be the most memorable date ever.... i hope you two had a few laughs over that.
@ribster - nice if you can laugh about it all now.... nothing beats a cornsyrup fire or raw fried turkey (i had one once myself....)

hey, look how much amusement these mishaps provide now...

i was once having a huge labor day party, it was when i worked 80 hours a week and must have been out of my mind.... i had so much stuff to do that day and my day began with my espresso pot blowing coffee grinds all over the kitchen. i actually wept. but it was a good party, don't know how i ever pulled that one off.

@producestories- Every single time that I have made beans then (chili in the 80's I was really young) and now I can not for the life of me get any beans to get soft. About a year ago the BF wanted me to make a home made pot of Boston baked beans using dried beans, same thing but this time I was smart and didn't turn the heat up to full blast as with the chili I cooked it slow this time so not to burn the beans but it took 2 days of coking before the beans were soft enough to eat. Lets face it beans hate me sniff sniff.

I hate admitting it but it was the first time a cooked a Thanksgiving turkey. I know, such a cliche. I had gotten a 16 lb. bird from the office I worked at and brought it home and thought one night was enough time to thaw it. When it came time to cook it I went to remove the guts and neck and it was still frozen on the inside! Instead of calmly trying to figure out what to do, such as putting it in the tub to finish thawing, I totally freaked out and started tearing the thing apart. I wound up cutting it into smaller pieces and figured I would cook it that way. OMG, even that didn't turn out. Needless to say, my husband was afraid to eat it after I'd butchered it and we just ate the side dishes I made. It was just the two of us so it really wasn't a big deal. Plus, I didn't pay for the damn thing but even today my husband STILL razzes me about that turkey.

I (more often than not) hit the on button when I mean to hit the release on the hand mixer...whipped cream (or whatever) flies everywhere....what a bonehead!

Having a dinner party.... drinking too much... and putting the home-made ice cream mixture into the ice cream maker without the frozen bowl in place. Ruined the machine.

anything involving meatloaf. For the LIFE of me I can't cook it. I know, I know, should be easy, but it never turns out. Too greasy, never cooks through, always a disposer meal!

jar I mean, not far :) last note!

During my HS vegetarian stint, I decided that I really wanted some tacos. I was home alone, and trying to come up with a recipe. I figured if I drained the broth from a can of lentil soup and mashed up the lentils, that would be a good substitute.

Happily preparing my meal in the kitchen. Preheating oven to warm up the taco shells. Figuring out that for the very first time EVER, my mom had decided to store some bagged baked goods in the oven.

Doorbell rings. Run to answer it. A group of neighborhood friends stop by. By the time I get back to the kitchen, there are flames from paper and plastic bags.

HS BF and I grab big plastic cups and fill with water. Continue throwing water at the fire until it's out.

Look around kitchen. 2 inches of gross water on the floor. A houseful of people. Inedible tacos. Sobbing commences.

This just happened about a month ago. I had bought concert tickets for my boyfriend for christmas and I wanted to make a nice meal for us before said concert. My boyfriend loves Pasta with Vodka Sauce. I had never made this particular pasta sauce, but thought, I'm very compentent in the kitchen so no problem. So I'm cooking down the onions in oil. I go to pour in the 1 cup of vodka. I have a gas stove. When I pour the vodka I am assuming that, because I am cooking in a shallow pan that some of the vodka hit the pan and splashed out because the next thing I know foot high flames explode up. I am still holding the remaining vodka over the pan and I immediately freak out and let go of the vodka to get my hands out of the flames. Letting go of the vodka was STUPID. It hit the stove top, spilled and spread the fire. So I am literally standing there as 2 foot flames are engulfing my stove, and my brain simply cannot comprehend what just happened and I am literally standing there mouth agape. Luckily boyfriend, swung into action, pushed me out of the way and successfully doused the flames. After that debacle, I am still convinced I can make this dish. So I continue on with the recipe. I can't get the sauce to cook down into a sauce like consistency so I decide, I'm going to send it through the blender and then continue heating. I transfer the sauce to the blender but apparantly did not put the cover on tight enough and the wheels of fate were set in motion. The moment my finger hits the "puree" button an explosion of Vodka sauce coated me, my boyfriend, the stove, the wall, the refridgerator and the floor. By that time I was so mad, that I looked at him covered in sauce and said, "Clean yourself up, we're going to Cousin's for dinner". I can look back and laugh now, but man, I was ready to kill that night.

Worst ever? Cooking dinner for a new girlfriend and several other couples many years ago I seeded some dried, extra hot, red peppers for a Chinese dish and did not wear gloves or wash hands after. Went to the bathroom shortly soon after and learned that while the oil from the peppers may not burn your fingers it will certainly burn other parts of the male anatomy.

@kathy it really only takes a pinch, ive learned my lesson from that as well...

Kersona, that sounds kind of like what happened to us Saturday night. We pre-heated the broiler to roast a poblano pepper without checking to see if there was anything in it. We never use the oven for storage, so really this shouldn't have been an issue.

Some plastic, metal, and magnetic concoction WAS in the oven, though. We only discovered it when the fire alarm went off, the apartment started to reek, and the object consisted of scorched tinfoil and melted plastic drippings. We still don't know what it was or how it got there.

Dinner, oddly enough, was delicious, once we got past the mingling odors of chili, homebrew, and noxious plastic fumes.

I thought I would save a lot of time by making lasagna in a disposable aluminum pan, and although I doubled the pan for safety because I had a lot of stuff in the lasagna, it folded as I was removing it from the oven, spilling the entire contents all over the sides and floor. The lasagna then proceeded to drip down to the broiler, etc., and I proceeded to shriek out every bad word I ever heard.

Of course, the future in-laws, who have never been members of my fan club and probably have never uttered a bad word in their lives, heard and saw everything. And did any of them offer to help with the clean up????? Nooooooooooo.

Two weeks into culinary school, I entered a mystery basket competition requiring me to put a dish together in an hour and a half. The ingredients ended up being 2 ducks (whole), a savoy cabbage, pine-nuts, salsify, shallots, and a spaghetti squash. Managed to debone the duck and sear the breast off pretty well, but everything else was a mess: soupy "slaw" of cabbage & squash, undercooked salsify finagled into some sort of "carpaccio" interpretation, pine-nuts scattered askew and burnt duck fat fries. It was a mess.

But I had a blast.

Two plus years ago, I had a housewarming party and one of my best friends fell in love with the blue cheese pop-overs I made -- Enough so that the next time she was over, she begged me to make some with her. So it started off well enough: We mixed the batter, greased the muffin tins we were using, and so on -- only to discover that one of my oven racks had mysteriously gone MIA. Not a problem, I thought -- I just jerry-rigged a rack at the bottom of the oven, using a wire rack with feet that raised it off the sides. Two pans of pop-overs go into the oven, and we start the cleanup while we wait until we can open the oven without risking the pop-overs falling.
Of course, I turn my back for about two minutes, and when I glance back, there is smoke POURING out of the oven. I no longer care if the pop-overs fall, throw open the door, and find flames leaping out from under the makeshift rack, something black and melted and decidedly flammable across the bottom of the oven. I manage to smother the (thankfully small) flames with salt since the baking soda vanished, opened the windows to let the smoke out, and called out for pizza instead.

Thankfully, once cleaned, the oven's fine -- but I don't use that rack for anything anymore!

@ProfessorChaos... i never even made it to the assembly part, the custard failed the cake was too dry and I gave up before the ganache.

dinner for one. i was home alone, and at the time the only thing i knew how to cook was potatoes and rice, really, in the microwave.

so i dug out a small potato. punctured it a few times with a fork. and stuck it in the microwave. a very small potato. on high heat. for twenty minutes.

the smell never went away. luckily we eventually got a new microwave. i still haven't lived it down.

Edit: Actually, forget that fiery cheesecake I mentioned before, worst cooking experience ever was thirty minutes ago. Made a spinach salad, with eggs and walnuts and bacon. Overcooked the spinach, and didn't realize the bacon was bad: I ate the first bite, couldn't believe how bad it was. Ventured a second bite, just to make sure, and promptly ejected the previously-eaten first bite. Overcooked spinach is *bad.*

I was pretty serious about cooking when I was a kid. In high school I entered my marinade phase. After successfully trying several marinade recipes and tinkering around, I realized that marinades contain acidic ingredients to tenderize the meat. So why bother with the oil, or wine at all? Thinking myself rather clever, I marinated a roast in... unadulterated vinegar... for hours.

I went ahead and cooked the roast as usual, then served it to my family. It tasted like pure evil, lie the meat of Satan.

My aunt makes this yucky Jello cool whip concoction at every holiday and only she and my grandmother like it. I decided to spruce up the usual Thanksgiving spread by making one of those pretzel crusted Jello cool whip deals because it sounded like something I might actually enjoy for once. Well lets just say I learned my lesson on making my family eat a new dish I've never made before. I didn't get to tinker with the recipe I'd gotten from a friend and it turned out even grosser than the way my aunt usually makes it! Same thing happened with the other two dishes I brought that year pretty much. She didn't ask me to bring anything for Easter....hhmmmm

There are two things I've learned but unfortunately I have not really LEARNED them because I persist in doing them.

#1. I cannot make bread or rolls. Period. But I am obsessed with making them. I am college-educated and have a keen intellect--how hard could it be??? They are hard, tough little flavorless bricks. I try all kinds of recipes, following instructions to the letter. Compassionate family members have come to my home to demonstrate their "fail-proof" recipes and they are delicious. Until they leave and I try it on my own. It's been suggested that I overmix or over-knead things so I am hyper-alert and don't do it. But maybe I do?? I have been failing at this since high school Home Ec. class ...twenty-seven years ago. My husband begs me to stop. Begs. But someday I know the stars and my chakras will be in alignment and I will turn out the most fluffy, flavorful dinner rolls ever:)

#2 Never. Try a new recipe out on guests. I have even made dinner rolls for guests--my delusions know no end.

Well I suppose I could try and give beans one last try, but I am NOT going to invite anyone over for dinner till their done so they won't think I am trying to poison them.

Oh another thing that screwed up was the first time I was in Austria visiting the relatives (I was about 9) my mother took a day trip with her sisters and I choose to stay where I was, with other relatives. We got around to talking food, American food and none of them ever tried a good old fashioned American apple pie. So I said I would make one for them. I watched my mother make them but i never ever made one. We went shopping for the crap I needed, and everything was going good, made the dough, spiced up the apples, yadda yadda, got it into the oven, no problem, smelled wonderful, came out golden brown, perfecto.....Until we tried it, the crust was hard as a rock, I forgot to put butter in the pie crust.

I can't believe no one has mentioned my "worst" as their own yet: fried chicken. I was fresh out of college and just starting to get away from processed foods and really wanted some good fried chicken (there is none to be found where I live) like my Mom used to make. I knew what my mom used for spices as I had made that up before for her, so I bought the chicken, floured/spiced it and set about to cooking it.

I don't know about you guys, but in my 20s I was not big on investing in any kind of decent pans, and I didn't even think about the fact that my Mom used to fry her chick in a big, heavy cast iron skillet, so I threw it into my cheap Teflon, on high. Result? Very, very burned chicken on the outside, extremely raw on the inside. I just had no clue. Honest to God, to this day I haven't attempted homemade fried chicken since then and it's been over 20 years (though at least now we have a Popeye's, better than nothing).

man, these are so bad. I can deal with a failed experiment much better than I can with messes. when I was working in food service, I was carrying a gallon of applesauce with wet hands, turned around too fast to put it in the fridge, and literally threw it across the kitchen. I actually cried, it was so much of a mess.

my husband will never let me live down my failed scone experience. I don't use butter much, so I had a couple sticks that had been in my fridge for....awhile. They smelled a little funny, but they had been in the cheese drawer next to a hunk of bleu cheese, so I figured they had just picked up a little bit of the smell. Bottom line - if your butter smells like cheese, DO NOT EAT IT. I spent the next 24 hrs throwing up everything i had ever eaten.

1. Made an Alton Brown concoction of clams which required putting hot clams and broth in blender. Didn't hold the lid on. Hot liquefied clams shot all over the kitchen, dining room, and living room.
2. Newly married trying to work and make dinners, I was searching for some easy things to make for my husband. Saw a "lemon chicken" recipe in Kraft magazine that called for lemon jello. It sounded terrible, but I thought it was so weird that it was intriguing and deserved at least a try. Not even our dogs would eat it.
3. Caught a microwave on fire while reheating cashew chicken. When I ran out the back door with it to get the smokey mass out of the house, little cashew fireballs rained down on the lawn.
4. Forgot that I was boiling hard boiled eggs and ended up burning them to the bottom of the pot. Smelled like the worst fart you've ever smelled.

Wow, these are great stories. I have to share a cooking story that is now an official part of our family lore. It's my mother's cooking disaster -- not mine, and it involves the Easter ham -- a CANNED ham (ick). After it had been in the oven for 90 minutes or so, she mused to my father "I wonder how we are supposed to when the ham is done if it's in a can." He went into full-on FBI bomb squad mode, marching the family out to the snowy front lawn, extracting the ham-bomb from the oven and flinging it into the backyard. No one remembers if we ate the ham -- just the day my mother became an accidental terrorist.

I can only come up with two: putrefy and stupefy -- both of which could relate to food and cooking. What is the other one?

First let me just say that I've spent the last 10 minutes reading this thread and laughing SO hard that I've been crying and also come very close to peeing once or twice.

My story has to do with a flaming cheesecake as well...although not due to a 900 degree oven. My oven was perfectly fine...turns out it was operator error.

As the ambitious middle schooler that I was, I thought I would make a cheesecake for an after dinner dessert on one of our days off from school. My little brother (4th grader at the time) and I were home alone for the day. I started out with a recipe from one of my mom's cookbooks and went to town in the kitchen. I mixed everything together, made the cheesecake batter and the graham cracker crust, and put it all together in the spring form pan. I had preheated the oven to the said temperature in the cookbook, and proceeded to place the cheesecake in the oven four about an hour to cook. Let me just preface the next part of the story by saying that my mom's stove was old...and the writing on the oven knobs was starting to fade away. 10 minutes after the cheesecake had been in the oven, my brother makes a comment about the burning smell. I said "it can't be burning, it's only been in the oven for ten minutes". So I proceed to leave it in the oven thinking that the smell must be coming from somewhere else. Another 10 minutes later, I decide that I should probably check on the cake because the smell is only getting worse. I open the oven and low and behold...the cheesecake has three inch flames engulfing the surface of the cake. I pulled the rack out of the oven and stood there screaming for my brother (yes, the 4th grader) as the cake remains flaming. He runs from the bathroom to find the flaming cake and proceeds to start hitting it with the kitchen towel. Apparently I had put the oven to broil instead of bake. Needless to say, the 4th grader put the flames out and I scraped the charred substance from the top of the cake and put it back in the oven to cook for the remaining time (on bake this time) and we ate it that night for dessert. And it was horrible...an absolute charred mess. Like many of you here, I have yet to live this story down.

Defy.

Damn, good call, lillibet. I guess I read that "fact" years ago and just believed it!

I knocked over an open container of cornmeal onto the floor. Our pup got excited and started rolling in it. It got tracked throughout the house. I vacuumed and swept and mopped, over and over, but I swear it was weeks before I could go barefoot and not feel cornmeal grit. I haven't bought any corn meal since then.

@dhorst, I know how hard it is to get cornmeal out of carpet. I once made a plate of cornbread for a friend and left it on the kitchen counter while I ran to the store. I came back and the plate was upside down on the kitchen floor, the plasitc wrap about 4 feet away. I immediately began searching for the dog. I found her, (a 30 pound beagle), lying in the corner of the living room like a beached whale. I also found 3 piles of cornbread barf. It's not easy to get out of carpet.

That dog also ate - on separate occasions - my graduation cap, a 1-lb box of chocolate covered macadamia nuts, and a jar of vaseline. And of course, several pairs of shoes, countless newspapers and magazines, and at least three copies of the book 1984. She was part goat.

@blackwdw - HAMALANCHE?!?!?!?!?!, hahahaha, best story ever!