Today’s Kitchen Disaster Story is brought to you because I’ve been invited to be a part of Pampered Chef’s Spill It! Contest.
By sharing MY story with y’all, I’m entered to win a $3500.00 shopping spree to Pampered Chef to stock my kitchen and a $125 Spa Gift Certificate. {swoon}
UPDATED: 4/11/11 2:10 PM CST
I’m really excited to announce that I was just given permission to do this and I’m SOOO excited!
If I win, I’m going to share this awesomeness of this with y’all!!!!
IF I win, everyone who commented on this post and helped me win — gets entered to win MY $125 Spa Gift Certificate!!!!! Thank you TPC for being SO Generous!!!
How do I win?
With YOUR help! The blogger with the most comments on their post by NOON Friday, April 15th — wins.
Have I mentioned how much I love y’all? How beautiful you look today?
I’m about to share my biggest/most memorable kitchen disaster with y’all — I’d love for you to share yours with me here and Pampered Chef wants you to share it on their facebook page, too!
** Check below the post for a way to ENTER to WIN THE EXACT SAME PRIZE that I’m in the running for!!!!!!
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Do you remember when you were learning to cook?
The thrill of mastering a recipe?
The nervous butterflies in your tummy when you pulled something out of the oven for the first time, hoping, praying that it turns out correctly?
The double and triple checking of ingredients and measurements?
OH! You didn’t double and triple check the recipe ingredients when you first started cooking?
I did — except this ONE time — this time that 20 years later I STILL hear about.
Okay y’all — truthfully, I measured everything I just um……
Well, I was making my Dad’s Raisin Bran muffins which were my favorite favorite thing ever for breakfast and snacks. I was SO confident that I could do it just like he did. I just knew that my muffins would be light and moist and filled with plump raisins and delicious — just as good, if not better than my Dad’s.
{sigh} to be young and cocky confident 😉
Everything was going perfectly until young teenage me added 3 Tbsp of baking powder instead of 3 tsp of baking soda.
Let that sink in for a moment
This was literally, a recipe for disaster.
The resulting (I hesitate to call them muffins) muffin shaped imposters were horribly bitter and completely inedible and I was devastated.
I’ve had multiple other kitchen disasters in my day but this one — this one stands out to me as my BIGGEST kitchen disaster of all time. Maybe because it was my first, or because it taught me the lesson that I should always read a recipe completely and measure out my ingredients carefully beforehand but mostly because those were hands down the nastiest muffins EVER.
Now, even when I’m distracted — you can bet I triple check my ingredients AND my measurements!!!
What’s YOUR biggest/funniest/most memorable kitchen disaster?
I’d love it if you’d share that here in your comments and help me to win this amazing contest!
Want to know how YOU could win big??
Go to the Pampered Chef Facebook Page and share your own disaster story on www.facebook.com/ThePamperedChef (under the “contests” tab) before Friday at noon!. If you do this.. then YOU can be entered to win your own $3500 Pampered Chef Shopping Spree and the $125 Spa Gift Card.
Pampered Chef is sponsoring TWO giveaways! One for bloggers (I’m participating with MY post here) and one for Facebook Fans on their Facebook page.
Here’s today’s linky! Please leave a comment (to help me win!) after you link up your recipe! Thanks y’all! Happy Monday!
great post. good luck. living vicariously imagining how you will use the spa gift!
Yikes! Who hasn’t done that?
So when my sister & I were little, we decided to make pudding for my mother’s birthday. I think I was 8. My sister was 4. So I could read. (Clearly, it was my fault but still, I blame her. Read on.)
So we put the pudding mix in the plastic measuring bowl. Added the milk. Stirred it really well. (It said to stir for 2 minutes and we actually timed it!)
Then, the directions said to continue stirring over heat until it thickened. So, we put the bowl on the burner, turned it on and continued stirring. We stirred and stirred and it never thickened.
However, the plastic bowl melted all over the burner(doh) and it smelled horrendously bad & yes, when we realized what we’d done, there was no getting it off the burner. We had the wherewithal to turn off the burner. Finally.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Good luck, ma’am! I hope you win!
I don’t do kitchen disasters. I do kitchen learning experiences. Big difference. 😉
I was melting some chocolate for brownie drops as a kid. Got distracted, came back in, saucepan was on fire! Put the lid on to put the fire out, pulled it off the burner — and inexplicably put it ON THE FLOOR. It melted a hole in the 1970s linoleum and had to be chipped off. We had a rug in the kitchen for the next 10 years.
every day is a kitchen disaster for me. probably the worst one was when the lasagna slipped out of the aluminum pan into the bottom of the oven. that was phun..
How about the time I made oatmeal bread and forgot to add the flour???
My first time cooking chicken, I added the raw chicken to straight hot oil.
It was also my first small fire in the kitchen.
Oh I would have so many stories to add to this list! I hope you win!! xoxo
My worst kitchen disaster was when the bottom fell out of my blender – right after I finished making margaritas (but NOT after I’d put them in the pitcher). Tequila and lime goodness ALL OVER the floor!
I’m perfection in the kitchen:)
I kid.
But, once my cousin messed up Rice Krispie Treats…I don’t even know how.
Oh that’s good. I have done numerous measurement mistakes. But I also did a milk mistake. I made a beautiful bundt cake and used light vanilla soy milk. Needless to say, the cake never set, and the inside was one big runny mess. I learned to never do that again!
Ohhh I hope you win!! My biggest disaster was cooking boxed mac and cheese as a teenager. I thought what could be easier? Boy was I wrong. It turned out to be a hard, gloopy, disgusting mess of noodles. I don’t know how I did it but thank heavens I have improved greatly since then but my brothers and sisters still remind me about it!
You so need to win. So you can cook me a feast. I don’t get fed feast-like often enough.
kitchen disaster? I’ve been known to leave out stuff like sugar, when baking. (you can’t do that).
Dishwashing soap in the dishwasher after a Thanksgiving Dinner. ‘Nuff said!
Good luck, Rach!
Well, there was this one time where I added WAY TOO MUCH vodka to our jello shots. So, they didn’t fully congeal & were strong as hell. Which made for even bigger drunken disasters later on in the night. One dude fell asleep in my yard… in the rain.
truly a disaster:
preteen me, attempting to make peanut butter rice krispie treats. i had the butter melted before i melted the cup of jif creamy peanut butter. couldn’t figure out why the damn things weren’t sticking together, though. turns out one must melt the stupid marshmallows, too!
(good luck in your contest!)
My most recent disaster was the time I made a 7-up pound cake and used self rising flour instead of all purpose like the recipe said. I was cleaning up burnt on cake forever.
Good luck!
I stuffed a meatloaf pan to the brim with my meatloaf mixture……turns out, those little holes on the bottom are for draining into a bigger pan.
I had grease all over my oven and my “meatloaf” was little gray meat pellets floating in three inches of grease.
I wish my disasters were when I was a kid…
It was 2003. It was time for the Thanksgiving celebration at my office. We were making the mashed potatos (easy, yummy, cheap!) We had about 45 people in our office, so we were making *a lot* of potatos. Anyway, we had just moved into an apartment that had a garbage disposal, and boy was that thing handy! I had forgotten some ingredient at the store, so while I ran back to get it, my husband started peeling. He was almost done when I got back…that’s when I saw it. He was peeling the potatos directly into the drain. “The garbage disposal with get rid of them, right?” he asked. I said, “Well, I guess? Have you tried?” He had not. He thought I was being overly worried. I was not. He turned on the water (none of which went down the drain) flipped the switch (which whirred for 2.5 seconds then stopped) and I groaned. As I put the potatos on to boil, my husband took the drain apart to scrape a couple of pounds worth of potato skins out of the drain. The entire thing was packed with skins from the drain all the way through the U-shaped pipe. The potatos were good, but they took 4 hours to cook (including plumbing time). One of the more memorable moments in the kitchen with my late husband 🙂
My college roommate and I were making a birthday cake for our neighbor and (without knowing it) we both added a stick of butter and we both added oil. (Obviously we were paying *very*close*attention* to the task at hand.) And we baked and baked and baked that thing and the center just would *not* get done. Finally we gave up, scooped out the goopy center and had a big birthday doughnut! 🙂
Oh no! I’ve had my share of disasters, from hard as rock rolls (they didn’t rise) to ruining my mom’s burner because a pan of rock candy boiled over!
I love your link party. What great recipes to chose from today.
Hmmmn, I think my biggest mess would be pushing the wrong button on the hand mixer… I was making angel food cake, which is the world’s stickiest substance, and I meant to eject the beaters. Instead, I turned them on high, flinging that marshmallow cream-like stuff all over my cabinets.
Now? I ALWAYS unplug the mixer before trying to eject the beaters. 🙂
When I was living on my own for the first time I decided to make my Mom’s famous chicken soup…without her recipe. Big…BIG mistake. I knew that my Mom put in rice and noodles in her chicken soup, I just didn’t know how much. So, being totally unworldly in the realm of food expansion, I put in a cup and a half of both together with all the other ingredients and let is simmer. By the time the *soup* was done, it was so thick that my wooden spoon stood up straight right in the middle of it. Even though it was chock full of chicken chunks, my cat wouldn’t even eat it. Good thing I’d say that today I bake more than I cook. LOL
Best wishes with the contest Rachel, hope you *shop until you drop* 🙂
I was making chocolate chip cookies for the first time by myself. And I misread the 1/2 tsp of salt as 1/2 cup of salt. I finally called to my mom that I couldn’t get the lumps of salt out which made her curious enough to come see what was up. Whoops!
(Hope you win – how fun would that shopping spree be?)
When I was trying to help my Mom cook dinner and I added baking soda instead of baking powder to the biscuits. They were awful.
Raised by a single mother, I tried to help out as much as I could. One night around the age of 8 I decided to make hamburgers to suprise her when she came home from work. I had watched her do it so many times, I felt confident I could master it on my own. When I took the chopmeat out of the package it was (obviously) bloody. So I washed it. I had seen my mother rinse chicken numerous times, same with pork chops…so why not? Yeah, couldn’t have been more wrong. I was so excited that I made dinner – even set the table – that I was too nervous to eat. My mom took that first bite and tried to smile through her gagging. Thankfully, 25 years later I am a MUCH better cook and have even schooled my own 8 year old NEVER to rinse / wash chopmeat!
I am SO no chef…and I’ve had my share of wonky outcomes…but when I get it right…boy howdy! (I made cake pops this weekend, so I’m feeling a bit fab)
Ouch! It’s always horrible when you feel like everything is going to be just perfect and when you open the oven door, BLAM! Horror City. I’ve had that happen a couple of times baking bread, and I still can’t figure out what went wrong. I checked and rechecked the recipe versus my measurements and checked comments on the recipe online and NOTHING. Maybe 3rd times the charm. Good luck!
Thanks for hosting! I just linked up my Cinnamon Swirl Pancakes! Good luck with the contest!!!
Christina @ It’s a Keeper
I have an Emeril cookbook that says to fry chicken for 12 minutes. So that’s what I did, I fried it for 12 minutes. Because I was following the recipe’s directions.
We sat down to dinner with our mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, and RAW fried chicken.
I was so embarrassed.
Oh no! I once made banana muffins only the baking soda didn’t mix in properly, I must have been rushing through. So when I bite into one specific muffin I hit a pocket of baking soda. Gag! It took me a long time to brave that recipe again.
Good luck on winning the shopping spree!
My biggest cooking disaster involved a mango/chicken/cilantro/rice invention in which the garlic burned, I had too little food and had to present it to my extended NYC family (one of whom is a REAL CHEF.
Shame. Total shame.
Oh my, that is hilarious! I am FAMOUS for missing an ingredient. For the MOST part, it hasn’t been anything devistating. Certainly changes the result though. I totally have to double and triple check a recipe. Glad you lived and learned! The muffins sound awesome! Do you have the recipe here for the raisin bran muffins or am I just missing it? I’d love to try them. With the correct amound of baking soda of course. 🙂
my most recent is a couple nites ago….after melting some chocolate candy melts in the microwave — i decided it was too thick for dipping marshmallow peeps….thought…well, how about a little corn syrup to thin it….as I was pouring a small amount i realized “hmmm i think i read about thinning with crisco for some reason….wonder if this is not a good idea”….definitely not a good idea….adding about 1 teaspoon to a pound of candy melts made it more like modeling chocolate…and overnite it turned into a brick! oh well you bake and you learn….! GL!
Good luck. That sounds like something I did when I was younger, too, only it was salt not leavening….the results weren’t worth swallowing even one bite!
I’ve had many and that all started with “It seemed like a good idea at the time…” or “But I was trying to go healthier, and it said substitutions would work!” The best advice I ever got was from (of all people) Heloise. We were in a meeting and she did a “test kitchen” with two recipes she was trying out. The cakes were ok, but umm, not very good. And she’s an amazing baker! She said every kitchen is and should be a test kitchen and you just have to keep trying! It doesn’t need to be perfect the first time! You just need to keep trying until you DO figure out how to perfect it. That sure freed me to feel comfortable trying!
Oh! How I was going to IMPRESS my new in-laws at Thanksgiving with MY grandmother’s famous pecan pies! My s-i-l said, ‘are you sure?… I mean, do yall even have an oven at the ranch?’ Well, yes! We did have an oven. We spent all day getting it connected to the propane tank. It was ready to roll! So, I got the pies made, turned the oven on and waited for it to warm up. This is kinda gross… if you’re squeamish and don’t know how things go on a ranch, stop reading here. Next thing I know there is a terrible odor. Undescribable, really. Smoke is boiling out of the oven… I’m thinking ‘fire’!!! Open the oven, there’s nothing in there but smoke… open the broiler under the oven… a toasty fried mouse! Apparently this unfortunate fellow had found a home in our oven while it was parked in the barn waiting for it’s place in the kitchen. Moral of this disaster… always check your equipment! PS… the pies got baked in town. Turns out you can freeze a pecan pie and pop it right into an oven to bake. who knew?!
Oh GOOD LUCK! What an awesome prize! 🙂
Disasters — definitely been there. I sometimes get carried away with having a toddler around so I end up skipping some crucial ingredient like sugar in my zucchini bread. Not the lovely bread you’d expect normally.
I recently also left a loaf of bread baking for about 3 hours instead of 1. Surprisingly enough, it was dry but totally still edible. I give full credit to my Römertopf Pane terracotta bread pan for that still turning out ok! 🙂
Oh, I’ve had MANY disasters. My most recent one was making S’mores Brownies, which I’ve done before (successfully, thankyouverymuch). I was using a different box mix than usual (yes, a box mix), though, and I didn’t realize they needed to cook longer. I was in a hurry or cocky or both, and I didn’t even check to make sure they were cooked through. Just imagine – completely NOT cooked through brownies with marshmallows, graham crackers and chocolate chips thrown on top. It was a disgusting mess…that we ate with spoons. 😉
Thanks for hosting! My most recent kitchen mishap was the flop that occurred just this weekend in trying a new sourdough bread recipe. My husband asked if it was even worth the electricity it would take to bake these disastrous loaves — our flock on laying hens enjoyed it nonetheless. 🙂
I cook a lot of experimental dishes because of my food allergies so I have more than my share of failures!
Most are edible- just not the result that I am looking for, but some get dumped in the trash! I have a lot more wins than losses, thank goodness and I always learn from my mistakes!
I am sharing my recipe for Chicken Dijon Stew- it tastes great and it’s really healthy too!
Thanks for hosting!
As soon as you mentioned that you were making muffins, I knew where this story was going. I recently got married and my husband was really excited that we had gotten a waffle maker as a wedding gift. The first Sunday we were in our new home, I wasn’t feeling well so he decided to make me waffles from scratch. He was incredibly proud of himself when he presented them to me in bed. He though I was kidding him when I took a bite and said “This is TERRIBLE! I can’t eat this.” It turns out that he made the same mistake as you, but he knowingly did it! He said the recipe called for baking powder, which he couldn’t find. He found the baking soda, which he noticed was powdered, and he thought it must have been the same thing! I didn’t tease him too much about it, otherwise he might never try to cook again!
I was at my mom’s house, making chili. I was stirring a big pot of it on the stove, and when I pulled my arm away, the sleeve of my sweater had caught on the handle of the pot. That pot crashed to the floor! I jumped back and only got splashed, but her kitchen floor was a FLOOD of chili.
Oh, what a giant mess.
Amazing Story and Great Memories! I have a few of these kinds of stories too! Good Luck in the contest!
Ok I will play….this is a good one.
My husband and I were renting a 2 bedroom apartment, and his best friend was our roommate for a year. My husband was the main cook in the house. When my husband wasn’t around, Eric (roommate) and I were forced to hunt for something to eat ourselves. It was really pathetic to see us trying to figure out dinner most nights. We lived on grilled cheese and quesodillas.
Well one night I got bold and decided to make Regu Pasta Bake. I cooked the noodles and placed them in the 9×13 pyrex. I then poured the meat and sauce on top. With all of the ingredients, the pyrex dish got very heavy. I had the pyrex in one hand and was trying to open the over with the other hand, well of the contents of the dish slid into the walls of the over and into the interior door of the oven.
The red sauce oozed all over the crevices of the door. Eric and I freaked. We had to find a screwdriver to remove the door to the over to clean. We got the over door off and the glass out, but while removing it, we broke off a piece, and then we couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. It was horrible.
To this date, I make my husband put lasagna dishes in the stove, because I have post traumatic stress from that event….
How about my juicy lucy burgers (the kind with cheese in the middle) that were completely not cooked in the middle and everyone was kind enough to eat around the edges.
I’m gonna delurk today because I have a pretty good one 🙂
I had been married all of 5 minutes and I was all ready to make my mother in law’s beef stroganoff recipe. My hubby had all these nostalgic feelings about it and I was determined to recreate this famous childhood meal of his. I made all of these perfect little meatballs, made my beautiful sour cream sauce and I was about to put the finishing touches by adding some pepper. I grabbed the “pepper” and started shaking away. But I immediately saw that I had made a mistake…a HUGE irreversible mistake. It was cinnamon….a lot of cinnamon…all over my beautiful stroganoff. I tried to rinse it… we tried everything to make it even remotely edible. Even ketchup. Alas…we had to order pizza. And I have never heard the end of that now infamous meal. The cinnamon stroganoff. I’d like to think that all these years later I have redeemed myself with many yummy dinners. The more dinners I put in between me and that nasty meal the better.
1st of all, I MUST have the recipe for that bundt cake and the yummy looking glaze!!
My disaster was WAY back before I even cared about cooking. I had my first apartment so of course we had an all out, teenage, liquor-filled birthday party. Someone suggested we have a cake. So we walked across the street to HEB for cake. Of course we were all living on our own for the 1st time (translation: BROKE) so we couldn’t afford a ready made cake. Cake mix was out of the question (No Cake pans..lol). So we came across what we thought was the greatest thing ever! A “just add water” cake!! Complete with it’s own disposable cake pan! It was super cheap so we bought it. Went to the apartment where the party was in full swing. I added the water to my birthday cake and stuck it in the oven. Many beers and shots later someone said “shouldn’t the cake be done?” It had been about an hour and the cake only needed 45 min to cook. Expecting it to be burnt, I took it out and it was still the watery chocolate mess it was when I stuck it in! Oven was working so I figured “oh, the time on the box is wrong! It just needs more time to cook!” An hour later….Still watery but a little thicker. An hour after that (yes, it TOTALLY had been in the oven for 3 hours!)….DONE!! We get out the knife, cut the cake, and it is the most disgusting looking chocolate cake EVER!! Looks like mud inside..LOL! Someone looks at the box (I think it was my now-husband) and says “you added the 3/4 Cups of water like it said to, right? OOPS!! Nope! I added 1 3/4 cups of water!! So moral of the story…YES you can screw up a “just add water” cake..OR maybe teenagers shouldn’t drink…LOL!
Still to this day I never see that “just add water” cake ANYWHERE!
Wellllllll, I have a few but the MOST EXPENSIVE ONE I’ll share with a link:
http://www.pensieve.me/2008/11/uh-oh-our-thanksgiving-day-disaster.html
Yes ma’am, the URL tells you the truth……..and it translated to needing a new kitchen appliance!
(p.s. J’adore Pampered Chef but it’s been a while since I’ve checked it out. Thanks for the reminder!!)
Oh wow – I just had a huge one last week! My pan exploded and brownies went everywhere! I blogged about it, because it was crazy and I’d never heard of that happening before!
http://legallymarried.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/public-service-announcement-exploding-brownies/
I was helping make Gingerbread Cookies with my mom one year when I was young…I decided I didn’t really need to mix the dry ingredients together first so I just added them one by one in with the dough…ending up with some really spicy areas!
Good luck! I remember being very young and “helping” my Grandma make a cake. I begged and begged for her to let me mix the ingredients with the hand mixer. Well, finally she did….but I didn’t know I was supposed to hold the bowl (my mom must have always done this when I “helped”) so I was holding the mixer and the bowl flew out from under it….cake batter went EVERYWHERE. Floor to ceiling. But my Grandma didn’t fuss at me, gotta love grannies 🙂
I remember making a big pot of hot chocolate without parental supervision. I forgot to add sugar and my brother in law never let me live it down. I was about 14-15 years old.
Then there was the time I made potato salad for a date — never made it before. Well, my potatoes weren’t cooked enough and it was just too hard to eat. Years later I had my mom come and help me prepare for a party…she came to make potato salad, I watched intently and now I know how to do it!!
Rachel, love your blog…Hope you win the grand prize!!
I think it was the time I tried to teach my then 7 y.o. how to make BOX mac and cheese and I didn’t hoover ENOUGH. Let’s just say, it took 3 boxes. *sigh*
My greatest kitchen disaster happened when I was a newlywed. I put a pizza in the oven (my first mistake!) and promptly fell asleep. When my husband got home from work our apartment was filled with smoke and my pizza was a crumpled black mess. 🙂
Good Luck, I hope you win.
Most recently, last night in fact, I heated some oil in a pan. From a bowl I poured in sliced zucchini, onions and garlic. The last of the veggies plopped into the oil, splattering it on my arm. I now have a decorative splatter of burns on my arm. Yay me. :'(
Good news is, everything tasted great.
Mine isn’t a disaster with measuring/cooking persay, but a disaster nonetheless. It was Valentine’s day, and I thought it would be really romantic to make my boyfriend the dessert that he told me loved on our first date. I specifically remember him saying that his neighbor made great tres leches cake, so whenever he went out and the restaurant made it, he had to try it. I looked up tres leches cake recipes and decided on one. I made it, whipping egg whites and everything…I had never done that before! My cake turned out great, and I was soooo proud and excited to enjoy it with my boyfriend. Then, suddenly, it hit me: it WASN’T tres leches cake he had talked about…it was tiramisu. So much for the romantic gesture! It was yummy anyway. 🙂
I love Pampered Chef! GOOD LUCK!
My first time here! Linking up the Cookies and Cream Cupcakes I made last weekend for my daughter’s 9th birthday party!
Good luck on the contest!
And then there’s the most EMBARRASSING time where I had been talkin’ about how much I loved to bake; a small group I was a part of was having a covered dish dinner & I asked to bring dessert.
I was trying a Kentucky Derby pie CAN YOU SAY YUM????
Except I forgot to add the eggs DON’TASKMEHOWYOUCANFORGETTOADDESSENTIALINGREDIENTS!
Do you know what happens when you forget the eggs in a Derby Pie? You make concrete that sticks to the pie plate & is impossible to clean EVEN WHEN YOU SOAK IT OVERNIGHT AND TRY TO HACK IT OUT WITH A MACHETE so you have to throw out the entire blasted thing.
And face the humiliation of your friends who TRIED to moisten it with coffee to pry it out of the dish.
It’s a kitchen disaster, alright :).
Good Luck! Pampered Chef has some great things! I hope you win
Too many baking disaster to share. I can never live up to my super-baking mother. I’m sure I’ll blog about it one day. Good luck!
I don’t have one in particular, but I am notoriously good at forgetting ONE ingredient – and it tends to be the most important one. I’m really good at substituting, but still. I’ve been halfway through a sugar cookie recipe before realizing I don’t have enough sugar. Oops. 😉
I have so many cooking disasters, it’s hard to narrow down to just one! I’d say the worst (and totally not my fault) was when my oven died Thanksgiving morning as I was cooking dinner for 14 people. We ended up with rotisserie chicken and sides from Boston Market. Not the dinner of my dreams.
I’ve had so many kitchen disasters, it’s hard to know where to start. My BIGGEST one wasn’t a cooking mess. I was a teenager and decided to start the dishwasher for my mom. But I used liquid soap rather than the dishwashing powder.
Oh. My. Word. Suds everywhere. Totally ruined the floor. Thankfully, my mom had wanted a new floor for a long time.
I’ve had so many kitchen disasters that I started doing s segment on my blog called “My Homemade Crapiness.”
I LOVE Pampered Chef! Good luck!
I did something similar to you. Added TABLESPOONS instead of TEASPOONS of chilli powder to chili when I was 8 or so. Explosive chili to say the least.
We learn from our mistakes. Look at the magic you create in the kitchen these days. You create and INSPIRE.
I don’t do recipes unless that includes ordering pizza from the Internet. 🙂
Linking up a bit late but so happy to have found you!!
God I could use a day at the spa as A college student, I need a massage so bad.
HA! Once I was making chipotle mayo and instead of one chipotle pepper I added one CAN of chipotle peppers. Talk about inedible!
I don’t know that it was my first kitchen/cooking disaster and I know it wasn’t the last, but it IS the one my brothers still talk about to this day nearly 25 years later! Our parents were gone and I was in charge of dinner – enter Hamburger Helper, every teenagers friend. It was a taco one and seemed simple enough to make. I was lacking one ingredient – tomato sauce. We did have tomato PASTE, so, I figured not much different, add some water, you have tomato sauce, right? NOT. That stuff was SOOOO nasty, the dog wouldn’t even eat it! Dessert for that meal wasn’t any better. Chocolate chips in cherry Jell-O do NOT taste like chocolate covered cherries. Trust me.
My brothers and I still get a kick talking about that meal. I think we finally ended up eating PB&J sandwichs. My husband is just grateful I’ve learned a thing or two since then.
Good luck with the PC contest. Love their stuff.
Ah, the baking soda/baking powder disaster — I have a feeling we’ve all been smacked by that one at least once!
I don’t have a link to share, but my biggest disaster was trying to replicate my mom’s chili recipe from memory. It wasn’t close to chili…but it made a nice pasta sauce!
I’d have to say mine was when I was learning to cook, I think I was nine, I made spaghetti. Let me juat say I never knew spaghetti could crunch. *ahem*.
This sounds like something that would happen to me. I also learned the hard way that you should always measure everything out very carefully before you begin. I ended up with a completely inedible coke for my Dad on Father’s Day one year because I did not add enough sugar.
Oh, that’s pretty easy. I definitely think it’s the time we had company, (I can’t even remember who now), and I made my world famous deviled chicken. I still love that dish.
Aaaaanyway, I was whipping through that recipe and got to the salt and mistook a “t” for a “T”. I put two TABLESPOONS of salt in instead of teaspoons.
BIIIIIIIG difference! And, boy was it gross!
You’re right! Read carefully! 😉
OH! And then there was the time I cooked a pound of sausage instead of hamburger meat to make a beef stroganoff. I had a stuffy nose at the time and didn’t smell what would have been obvious to anyone else… until I tasted it! Eeeew! At least we didn’t have company that night!
I was uusing the new doughnut maker my mum had bought. The recipe said to use baking soda, but i used bi-carb soda, not realising they were different (hey i was only young!) lol, needless to say, they were awful 🙁 I never attempted to use the doughnut maker again…..
aren’t you loving this contest? love all the great stories that are coming in! finally got a minute to read through your post…love that the experience stands out so clearly in your mind. btw…wish so much I could have taken you up on the dinner offer last night on FB. 😉 and tonight. and probably tomorrow night too.
YIkes! I bet those “muffins” were awful! I have to admit I did hte same type thing but with salt in cookies!
wow wow wow wow wow
Looks so tasty. I don’t know to do a cake, neither a cupcake, or pie, anything.
I did a cake three times, one worst that other. Last time the cake was burned and sunk by the center
You can see and laught 😀
http://www.flickr.com/photos/giozi/4857120737/
My cooking diaster is a little different, when my husband and I got married I couldnt really cook anything. The first year of our marriage was nothing but the different varieties of hamburger helper that were out at the time. My husband was very gracious and would eat the meals every night that I would cook them. Finally one day he asked me if we could eat something else besides hamburger helper…thats when I started to learn how to cook….needless to say my hamburger helper days are over and now I actually cook regular meals…LOL
That would have to be the time I forgot I was hard boiling eggs (yes, I can even mess that up.) I went upstairs and started watching a movie. A few hours later I heard gun shots coming from downstairs. It was the five eggs exploding one by one. The pan was black and ruined. The eggs exploded in a 20 foot radius. AND I had nothing to eat for lunch.
My disasters tend to be expensive. Like when I forgot that I was boiling water until the pot began to smoke, I picked it up to remove it from the burner, and the bottom separated sending little beads of hot metal all over the floor. Somehow I managed to not get burnt (and thankfully my kids who were little at the time were not in the kitchen). But I did ruin a pair of shoes and the one-piece beautiful linoleum floor was beyond ruined– huge burnt pockmarks were everywhere. Which I promptly “forgot” to tell my landlord about. Until moving day. Lost that deposit. So that’s my disaster: BOILING WATER. I know.
Good Luck!
Beware!!! I checked with Pampered Chef. People must submit their stories through the official Pampered CHef Facebook page in order to qualify for a chance to win any prize at all. Commenting on this blog will not allow to win any prizes. The person who posted it is not authorized to enter people into any drawing.
Hi Stephanie!
Actually — I am a blogger participating in one half of The Pampered Chef Spill It! Contest giveaway :-). By commenting here on my post people are helping me :-). Because, the blogger with the most comments will win the $3500 Shopping Spree AND a $125 Spa Gift Card.
IF I win — I’m going to give my $125 Gift Card to one of the people who commented on my blog and helped me to win.
There is ALSO a second part to this contest — that is what is specified at the bottom of my post 🙂 People can go to The Pampered Chef’s Facebook page and enter to win the Fan giveaway there.
I tried to make it as clear as possible — sorry for any confusion you may have seen.
Hope this cleared it all up!
🙂 Rachel
In 10th grade, I had some sort of Assignment for English, that involved bring a food dish from a certain time period or region or something.
I made some sort of lemon bread thing, but instead of the 1 tsp of salt it called for, I added a CUP. (Yes, a cup)
It was AWFUL, I can’t remember much beyond warning people that it was a huge failure and not to eat it. I also remember the teacher’s assistant (a Senior!) who had thing for me ate TWO slices! LOL…
I still shudder when I think about the taste of that stuff.
I’ve shared the flaming S’mores brownies here before. (marshmallows + oven on broil + not watching them closely = FIRE!) That is the first thing I think of when I hear “kitchen disaster”.
I’m quite notorious for stepping away from the kitchen when something is in the oven. I try to always remember to set a timer because I’ve overcooked and ruined so many things.
My mistake that still gets brought up is not reading the ingredient list correctly. My sister and I thought we would be awesome and cook for my husband (who usually cooked for us). We were going to use the new waffle maker and make from scratch waffles. Sounded so yummy for an Easter morning suprise. Well we got all the ingredients and began adding and stirring and we managed to make one HUGE ball of something that I think was dough, and since we added the melted butter last it was a huge ball of doughy SHINNY substance. It was at that moment that the husband came home and looked at our creation, and while we were laughing so hard he figured out for use that the recipe called for 1 1/4 cups of milk…not (one ..as we should only use it once) 1/4 cup like we had read it to read. Needless to say we don’t cook waffles anymore at our house.
I always tend to overcook/burn cookies. Even the frozen pre-cut ones. I’m the world’s worst baker. 😉
My biggest disasters have always been borne of trying to get through a recipe too quickly. In my opinion, few things are worse that chocolate chip cookies that don’t have salt in them. 🙁
I always boil over my alfredo and hate cleaning it up!!!
My story predates the origin of this sites creator by about 5 decades! When I was a child of single digit age I was allowed to make my own breakfast on Saturday mornings when I got up to watch cartoons on the 1 TV station in lexington, Ky. I am not sure what it was that I was making but I do know that I left it on the stove, gas burners, and went back to check on the show I was watching. My father opened the for to the TV room about 30 minutes later to tell me about how the house had filled with smoke….all but the TV room. I was able to finish watching my TV show…..standing up! Oh yes, the next time I fixed breakfast I believe I was married.
Cook???? Whats that!! HaHa……….. Best of Luck to you Rach
Love the stories everyone has shared. Good Luck!!!
Fruit pie….bubbled over…smoke….alarms….you get the picture! 🙂
One of my greatest kitchen disasters was when I over-baked cookies, because I wasn’t paying attention to the timer that beeped at me, and the cookies burned to a charred crisp. My entire apartments smelled of ash for a week.
One of MANY uh-oh’s: A curry beef dish that I had made several times to much praise…I decided to make it for my mom, and I must have used tablespoons vs. teaspoons for the hot curry paste. I simply couldn’t eat it. My head wanted to blow right off. But the underlying flavor was still so wonderful, my mom couldn’t NOT eat it. Bless her. 🙂
That baking soda/baking powder thing sounds so similar to me. I recently did the same thing and just totally forgot to add whichever one it called for. I had a very large pancake, a very large, tasty, chocolate pancake to take to the get together I was rushing to. No time for do-over. And again, this was just this past year, so I don’t have age to blame it on.
Well, at least you remembered to add that particular ingredient. I did the same thing as a teen except I did NOT add either baking soda or powder and my cake would NOT rise. I made the same cake not once, not twice, but three times before I realized that the flour at my aunt’s house was NOT self-rising! Apparently, that makes quite a difference! 😉 Big fan of the self-rising flour!!!
Cute story. I mean, baking soda… baking powder…. what really is the difference?