What's your funniest cooking/baking mistake that you will never forget? (wine, russian)

[GatorinCary]

I make this dish where I bake chicken in a roaster, then take the chicken out and put the roaster on the stove, and pour in red wine vinegar and some garlic. So this one time, I had roasted the chicken, and taken it out, poured in the garlic and vinegar...then the door bell rang....we were fumigating the house for days.

[fennec2009]

I can't believe I forgot this one. I think I was in middle school and my parents had a bunch of people over to swim and have dinner. I got hungry in the early afternoon and couldn't wait until dinner and thought fried eggs sounded delicious, so I put three eggs in a pan, lightly covered it with tin foil, then went downstairs for some reason, intending to return in a couple minutes. Of course I forgot about the eggs, and since the kitchen was upstairs, and everyone was down on the patio/in the pool, no one noticed until the smoke alarm was set off. Since there was a home alarm system, every time the detector went off the fire department was dispatched automatically. I've never been so embarrassed! We had to open the balcony door and the front door, set up a large fan between the two, and try to blow the burnt egg smell out/bring fresh air in. The smell lasted at least a week and is NOT pleasant.

[Mrs. Skeffington]

The first Thanksgiving dinner I hosted in my home was almost the last. Prior to that, we'd always gone to my parents' or DH's. That year, I bought a 15 pound turkey and realized that I did not own a roasting pan. I asked DH to get me one, and he brought home a cheap one made of flimsy disposable foil. It was not sturdy enough to support the big turkey, and it soon collapsed in the oven, leaking grease all over the bottom of the oven and filling the kitchen with smoke.

It was embarassing because DH's parents were there at the time, and they are strict vegetarians. We'd always had tofu turkey at their house, but it being my house and my Thanksgiving dinner, I wanted real turkey. And I almost asphyxiated everybody with it.

I've since acquired a a large heavy duty metal roasting pan.

[Justin Time]

A friend told me about her delicious and easy new recipe for chipotle shrimp served over rice.
She said to get a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, use a couple peppers, and use some of the adobo sauce-
-depending on how spicy I wanted the shrimp.

I figured that I would just use the whole can since it was only an 8 oz. can and everyone likes spicy food.

I noticed that everyone kept getting more water and more rice. So, I asked, is it too spicy? Are your eyes watering?

Well, it was only edible if you ate a tiny bit of shrimp and sauce with a lot of rice.

[Hunter Wold]

When I was about 10 I starting my "cooking experiments". I opened a can of Franco American spaghetti and
added spices to it; including some "meat tenderizer"...not sure if I ate the whole
can, but always remembered that episode...

HW

[lubby]

Made duncan heins brownies 1 month ago and cooked them way too long. They were hard like paver stones LOL

[Sally_Sparrow]

My wife once offered to fix me a salad. She brought it to me and said "Hey we were out of the croutons you like but I found some others in the pantry.." I looked in the bowl and there were little bitty croutons, which I didn't remember ever buying, but whatever.

Took a bite of salad with a couple of these bitty croutons on the fork and they about broke my tooth! Turned out, what she had found in the pantry was a bag of stuffing mix, the kind with little cubes of hard dried bread. It's like chewing pea gravel.

Another story of someone else's mistake: I was dating a guy back in my late teens. He was from "up north" somewhere, I can't recall exactly. One night he invited me to his apartment for a home cooked meal, and he knew that I'd grown up eating a lot of typically southern comfort foods. He was super proud that he'd managed to include fried okra in the dinner.. and that's exactly what it was. Chopped up okra, pan fried in oil, no batter! I didn't have the heart to tell him (at first), but he knew something was not right and kept asking until I finally told him what one expects when you talk about "fried okra" in the south.

My most recent error, that my sons both remind me about constantly, was baking related. That's why they keep reminding me, I guess. I am known in my family as THE baker. I am not much of a cook beyond keeping folks alive but I can bake like nobody's business and I've been successfully baking since I was a kid. I am always the one people come to when a cake is needed for a special occasion.

The thing is, I am better at the taste side of things, vs. the pretty. I don't attempt fancily decorated cakes, preferring to keep it simple and focus on flavor. So when I decided to make a specialty cake for my son's 13th birthday, I went with a store bought sheet cake. I planned to cut it in sections to "build" the cake, which needed to be a stacked rectangle. I was trying to make a TARDIS cake (from the show Doctor Who) and I planned out each detail to make it look as amazing as possible. I cut up the store cake and assembled it into the proper shape but when considering frosting (I have never worked with fondant so I didn't bother trying that!) I needed it to be a very specific shade of blue. I was advised to use decorator food coloring to tint a basic white frosting until I got the desired shade of blue, instead of the generally available food coloring from the grocery store.

So, I made the frosting, and I kept adding color and adding color. Finally I got the perfect color, not realizing that it would darken tremendously as it dried. The cake, which was supposed to be a lovely medium blue (and was, when first frosted), looked so dark it was almost BLACK. The worst part is that all of that food coloring tastes really awful when you use too much, and turns everyone's fingers and mouth/tongue black. Combine that with the store bought cake which was really pretty dry and awful and it was my first ever total cake disaster. My son kept trying to make me feel better by telling me I'd gotten the shape and details down perfect though. His friends tried so hard to be polite but you know something is really wrong when teenagers only manage to get a few bites into a slice of cake before abandoning it.

[Foodmuse]

I've had many, I really will have to think about it. Although at the time none seemed funny.

[70Ford]

Followed a cookbook microwave egg recipe. (A long time ago, when microwaves were new.) The cookbook never said pierce the eggs. Just crack an egg over a pat of butter in a microwave proof cup. I did. I put that sucker on nuke. The egg successfully stuck to the top of the microwave .. via rocket butter power.

[PegE]

I had the cake batter overflow the pan one time. The run off was delicious. lol