What are your cooking disasters?

by AaronB
(Detroit, Michigan)

There are times where we bite off more than we can chew, and even the most solid cooking methods and techniques can't reverse the fact that we just used salt, instead of sugar in a dish, or picked up habaneros cause you thought they were "Baby yellow peppers".

I don't look at these stories as negative things, but as good learning pieces, beacons of warning, and downright entertaining :).
So come on, what's the "best of the worst" that you guys have to offer? :D For me, I have two that come to mind.


~ I was on an Indian food kick for a while after a trip to see my fiancé in the UK. After having a couple curries in their restaurants out there, I was truly inspired. So I learned their technique out there, and started making a few of my own (quite successfully at that).

The problem came when I tried to make the dreaded Nan bread, which is their version of a pita.

I had picked up a recipe/method from a fella, and tried putting it together. I should have known not to even try it by some of the warnings on his recipe. The dough comes out really sticky; This dough is hard to handle. All this, while I personally have about the same fineness with dough/baking as a blindfolded hippo!
So I put the stuff together and the dough didn't rise as expected. The dough was sticky, and impossible for me to handle without adding a ton of flour to it. At the end, Instead of these loverly soft and subtle flatbreads, I ended up with these thin, tasteless cracker like things that caused you to cough and gag because of the excess flour I had put in just to work with the stuff!

Several hours (and beers) later, all I had was a bin filled with sad dreams of nan, as well as a kitchen that was absolutely destroyed.

~Another was working with my chilled cold cucumber soup. This particular dish is a standard soup that I make that people tend to love and ask me to make again and again. It's quick, easy, refreshing but to me it had started to get boring. I mean, the flavor was there, but how can I improve on it? Three words came to mind.
Make it spicy.
So I did. I added about 6 or 7 chilies to the soup, and pureed them up when that step rolled around. Upon initial tasting, it had a bit of a burn on the lips.

I didn't realize that I was putting thai chilies in there. And those things have a kick. I woke up the next morning with my hands burning from the chilies (this admittingly was one of those too late at night, and too many beers too late to be cooking kind of things), as well as half of my face. I couldn't figure what was up at first then I tried the soup.

You know how your chicken wings become spicier when you put them in the fridge for a while?
Yeah. That happened. Ten fold. It was one of those things where a friend was about to try it, and I had to yell DON'T TRY THE SOUP!!!

Respect the chili.