Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

While cooking a beautiful pork roast for some friends, we heard a squeaking sound. Lo and behold, a mouse had gotten stuck on a sticky trap under the oven and my guest had to fish it out, take it outside for me and finish it off! Kind of takes away the appetite... I know it's not the nicest way to dispose of mice, but that's what happened.

I tried Mastercook in the past, but there is something about the magazine clippings with handwritten notes on them that I just love. I, too, subscribe to several food magazines and one of my great pleasures is reading them and clipping recipes. I decided not to try to automate them, but rather I bought some beautiful file folders that I leave on a bookshelf with my cookbooks in my kitchen and organize them in my own way. If I automated them, I'd want to print them out to use them while cooking anyway. So, why waste the paper? Every year or so I go through them and get rid of the stuff that I haven't and probably won't make.

Hooray for Homemade Baby Food! Wholesomebabyfood.com was my bible and their toddler site is pretty great too! Good going Mammas!

@JSchwo7 - LMAO! Something similar happened to me. My husband and I hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner ever for my side of the family. I had never made a stuffed turkey, but remembered the importance of not stuffing a cold bird with warm stuffing. Sooooo, I made the stuffing the night before and prepped the turkey. I got up at 8am, stuffed the bird to capacity, and shoved it in the oven at 11am for an anticipated 5:00 serving time. 5:00 came and went. The little "popper" still hadn't popped. My parents are the type who sit and eat at 5 on the button, bar nothing! So I broke open a bottle of wine, then another, hoping to quell their appetite. I'm afraid I got more than my fair share. By 8pm, the turkey was done and so was I. I made it through the meal and clean-up, then passed out on the sofa in a drunken stupor that everyone found hilarious (they were a little nailed as well). Someone came up with the bright idea to take the crucifix off the wall and place it in my hands folded across my chest. My head was dangling off the back of the sofa and I was drooling. What a photo op! They took at least a dozen pictures of me in various poses, all with the cross. Some had lillies with the cross. In another, they draped me in a shroud-like blanket and added a pair of rosary beads for good measure.

25 years later, I know how to properly prepare a turkey and I always host the family Thanksgiving dinner with a lovely, ample wine selection. No one has more than one glass because my camera is the featured centerpiece of my table. They all fear retribution for the dreaded Thanksgiving funeral when I was "dead" before the turkey.

I was having a gourmet pizza party for my first ever book clup and was expecting about 10-15 women that evening. I woke up early to prep and get the house ready. By about 4PM I had been working for 7 hours and wanted to take a little break before my guests showed up at 6PM. So what do I do? Open a bottle of white wine an plop down by the pool which I promptly finished since I was so thirsty. Needless to say the combination of the heat, the wine, and the lack of sleep all combine to make the evening a little fuzzy. Luckily some pizzas did get made since a few friends showed up early to see if I needed help and there I sit with a fully prepped kitchen passed out by the pool. To this day when ever it's my turn to host the request is that I hold off on the wine until everyone is there and we have at least talked about the book.

The first time I made paella, I went to a local "fancy" store to buy all the ingredients, just to make sure nothing went wrong. I bought all the expensive seafood, the saffron, and the rice. I asked one of the eager and seemingly-knowledgable staff there for paella rice. She promptly led me down an aisle, only to be thrown off by a big empty space on the shelf. Then she found another bag, and, delighted by her substitution, handed it to me with a smile.

There were six of us, and we enjoyed cocktails and light hors d'oeuvres while I cooked. When it came time to add the seafood, I checked the rice. Crunchy. I let it simmer a little more, and poured another round of drinks. Still crunchy. I continued with the recipe anyway, thinking the rice surely would become tender any minute. No deal. Crunch crunch crunch. I added more liquid, poured more drinks, cooked it a little more and it was STILL CRUNCHY. The hors d'oeuvres were long gone.

Finally, someone asked (slurred?) "uh, what kind of rice did you get?" I looked at the package: Short Grain...Brown Rice. "Takes twice as long to cook"...under NORMAL circumstances!

After fishing out the now-overcooked seafood and cooking and checking the rice (and moving on to wine), we finally ate it. It was still a little crunchy, but no one seemed to mind. I guess the combination of starving your guests and plowing them with booze can make anything palatable!

The absolute worst thing that happened at a dinner I hosted didn't have as much to do with cooking, but reheating!

I was hosting an Asian Dinner anchored by a Mongolian Hot Pot. Some friends spent a good part of the afternoon frying exotic chips like taro root, beet, etc. as a contribution to this meal. They insisted I reheat the chips in the oven. The kitchen was small and as many times as I tried to shoo everyone out, the "kitchen magnet" rule held true and guests kept meandering back in. Long story short, the acrid smoke that poured out of my oven was a constant reminder of my reheating flub. Efforts to de-smoke the house included opening up all doors and windows and actually fanning the smoke out of the apartment.

Now when I want an empty kitchen, I'm adamant about it.