Kitchen Blunders and Mishaps

After a recent recipe fail, I started thinking of other times spent in the kitchen where things didn’t quite turn out as planned.  You know what I’m talking about…recipes gone wrong and other crazy mishaps.  It’s like there are little gremlins running around trying to mess you up!  So y’all, I’m sharing some of my blunders and mishaps as wells as those from others.

Mine…

Doesn’t the cherry cobbler above left look as fine as can be?  I sure thought it did; so I took lots of pictures before digging in.  As soon as I took my first spoonful out, I discovered I had cherry cobbler soup (above right)!  You see, I’d never made anything with fresh cherries and was looking at various recipes to see what others had done.  I thought I had added the right ingredients so the cherries would thicken up some, but that purely was not the case!  I’ll rework this one day, but not anytime soon I can tell you that.  Don’t you just cringe when you’ve spent good hard-earned money on a dish that doesn’t turn out?  Anyway, it wasn’t a total loss as my hubby dug the cherries out to put on ice cream!

You’ve probably all had Watergate Salad made with pineapple, Cool Whip, instant pistachio pudding and sometimes marshmallows.  When I made this for the first time many years ago, I had gotten the recipe from a friend over the phone.  I missed one very important part of the instructions – you add the dry pudding to the mixture.  Since you usually prepare the pudding mix with milk, that’s what I did.  I wound up with Watergate Soup instead of a nice creamy dessert salad.  What is it with me and these unplanned dessert soups?  Maybe I’ll start a new trend! 

I once put a frozen self-rising crust pizza into the oven and forgot to remove the cardboard off the bottom.  Thank goodness I had it on a pizza pan instead of directly on the oven rack.  There certainly was no crisp crust that night!  Believe you me, that mistake hasn’t happened again.

One night a few years ago, it was spaghetti night out our house.  After my hubby and I had put pasta on our plate and added the sauce, we reached across the counter to set our plate on the other side by our bar stools.  I can’t remember who set their plate down first, but as soon as the first one set their plate down, the food slid right off the plate and onto the bar stool.  If that wasn’t wacky enough, the other one did the same thing just seconds later!  We still laugh about that “spaghetti mishap times two” to this day and have been very careful about setting our plate of pasta down ever since!

Have you ever been frustrated with the shell coming off when peeling boiled eggs?  That happened when I was supposed be making my special deviled eggs for a family potluck some time ago.  Half the egg was coming off with the shell.  As soon as I saw these ugly eggs wouldn’t cut it on a platter, I wound up making egg salad sandwiches and cutting them in triangles.  Same taste…just not in the form my family was used to.

When I was young and just learning my way around the kitchen, I salted country ham while heating it in the pan!  Oh no, time to reach for the ice water!

Another mistake during my inexperienced early years was emptying the crab boil seasoning in the pot with the seafood instead of leaving it in the bag.  This made for one very interesting meal.

Theirs…

A friend of mine way back invited me over for dinner one night for corned beef and cabbage.  She had never cooked cabbage before and didn’t know that it cooks down to nothing.  Well, with that said, she only put 6 to 8 cabbage leaves in the pot!  Do you think I was still hungry after that? 

My former neighbor told me about an inexperienced cook she knew who prepared dinner for a guest and thought a clove of garlic was actually the whole bulb.  Imagine her dinner guest’s surprise at that meal…time for a bottle of mouthwash!

When the whole family went out of town for the holidays one year, we all stayed in a big house with two kitchens.  My mom decided to make some bean soup for everyone to enjoy.  She had bought dried beans by the cupful and it was hard to judge just how much to use (not like buying a bag of beans from the grocery store).  The soup kept expanding and what started off being one pot of soup ended up being two pots.  That’s OK, it was great to have that much soup around when the temperature was below 20 degrees!

After ordering chicken Caesar salad at a restaurant one night, I noticed the salad tasted awfully hot.  I spoke with the manager and he then went to check with the kitchen.  He came back in a few minutes and said the cook had used a tablespoon of pepper in his measurements for the dressing instead of a teaspoon.  Hot stuff!  See, even restaurant cooks and chefs mess up sometimes.

My all-time favorite “blunder” story is still my Granny’s “Pink” Chicken and Dumplings.  Check it out by clicking here if you haven’t read it.

Yours…

Now that I’ve shared my blunders, it’s your turn.  Come on now…let’s hear about them.  I know you’ve just got to have one or two to share.  We can all relate…and I’m sure we could all use a laugh!