Top 11 Cooking Fails

Yet another gem from the old valley. There were a lot of great stories added to this but the old site was messed up and I couldn't view any of the comments. Oh well, enjoy.


Hello! And welcome to my first official countdown on this site. This is something I was thinking about today and figured you guys would get a kick out of it. I was racking my brains trying to come up with the eleven worst cooking failures I've ever seen/heard in my life. Why 11? Because like the Nostalgia Critic, I like to go above and beyond. Best part is, some of these are mine.


Number 11: "Okay, where's our REAL dinner?"
When my sister and I were kids, our Mom had gallbladder surgery and had to stay in the hospital, which meant our old man had to cook dinner for us. Now, keep in mind; the old man tried to get out of jungle duty during Vietnam several times to no avail, until he finally lucked out by becoming a cook. The only problem is that he can't cook to save his freakin' skin. How these men didn't leap over the counter to strangle the life out of him, I'll never know. Anyway, he only knew how to make a handful of things, which included rice. So he par-boiled some rice, opened up a small can of del monte plain tomato sauce and poured it over the rice. He handed this nasty, tasteless mess to us and we just looked at him like, "you're fucking kidding, right?" But no, he wasn't. My sister choked it down; I took one bite and went to bed hungry. The next day, I went to the hospital to visit my Mom and she shared her chicken lunch with me. It had no salt, no spice, nothing, they just boiled that fucker, and it was ten thousand times better than that old bastard's sauce rice. Blechh! Another fail of his is when he tried to make us Matzoh Brie and it came out looking like a big black sheet of soot.
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Number 10: Petit Zeros
One day I was trying to experiment with making petit fours out of cheesecake. But because I didn't have any more tin baking cups, I used these flimsy little spiderman paper baking cups. I figured they were baking cups, they should be good for baking, right? Well, cheesecake needs to cook for an hour or more to fully solidify, but I thought smaller ones would take shorter. Survey says: EEEET! Not only did they not solidify, but the paper cups caught on fire! All the batter dripped onto the the bottom of the oven and blackened, it was disgusting! Wasn't even my oven so I had to sit there scrubbing it for hours. Gawd, never, ever again.

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Number 9: Impossible is Nothing.
My sister managed to burn water. Yes, she's just that talented. She set up a pot of water and sat down to watch buffy or whatever and didn't realize it until all the water evaporated awayand kitchen started smoking. Actually, come to think of it she did the same thing with beefaroni.... and hard boiled eggs... and twirly pasta, and probably a lot more stuff I haven't been told about.
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Number 8: Mmm, poison muffins.
One day I tried to make blueberry muffins for a party. Everyone had been hyping up my baking skills to the host so the standards were set pretty high and I was nervous. In the middle of making them,I realized I had no more baking powder. By now it was late on a sunday night and nothing was open. So I find baking soda in the fridge and I'm like, "they're the same thing, right?" WOW, were they NOT the same thing. I didn't get a chance to try them until we were en route to the party. I was horrified; they had the aftertaste of battery acid. My friend actually spit hers out the window, it was an absolute nightmare. We had to stop off at an all night grocery store to pick up a box of entemanns cookies. lol
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Number 7: No Instructions are Idiot-Proof
My sister bought one of those frozen pizzas from the grocery store one day. I was on my way over to her house but she lived in Long Island and it took me two and a half hours to get there. (2 trains, 1 bus, pure hell) Though she promised she'd share the pizza when I got there. So I'm looking forward to seeing my nephew who was an infant then, and some free pizza. When I showed up, there was this awful smell when I opened the door, and I'm thinking "gods, I hope that's not coming from her apartment", but it was. Apparently, the stupid bitch threw the frozen pizza into the oven while trying to prepare a bottle at the same time and forgot to take the protective plastic off the damn thing first. It all melted all over the metal grating and while she was sitting there trying to pick it off, the baby was in the other room hysterical crying. Not only did she manipulate me into being the instant babysitter, but she managed to get me to pay for a pie from the pizzaria across the street. Yeah, never again. Don't even trust my little sister to get you a glass of water, let alone successfully bake a frozen pizza. Einstein had a saying, "However idiot-proof they make something, the universe will always make a better idiot."
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Number 6: I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts
I get frustrated easily. I once bought a whole coconut thinking I could just magically get it open with my mind or something, I don't know. I'd never tried to open one before and thought it was a lot easier than it was. Well, it's not fucking easy, okay? I tried for nearly 3 hours with everything I could think of and finally got so fed up that I took my fire axe to it. Yes, I totally flipped my shit on a goddamn coconut and chopped it to bits like a lunatic, screaming my head off. Bits of shell, meat and water got EVERYWHERE. Even on the ceiling. A few minutes later, the cops showed up at my house because one of my neighbors heard me and thought I was murdering somebody. When they saw the mess, they busted out laughing. Let's just say I was lucky the cops had a healthy sense of humor or I'd either be in jail or locked up in the laughing acadamy for that little stunt. *Sighs* ....Fucking coconuts...
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Number 5: Pine Sol Camel Vomit
This is from my online cookbook on grouprecipes, complete with pictures of the fail!
http:/ / www.grouprecipes.com/ 35288/ cucumber-noodles-failed.html
The basic gist is that I tried to make one recipe, didn't have the money, the patience, the tools or the expertise, so I failed worse than anyone has ever failed at a recipe ever. It was gross even just to look at. And yet, my trusty sidekick a.k.a. Chef Kelsey a.k.a. my roommate at the time a.k.a. the teenaged son I never wanted ate it all up anyway! lol I miss that mother fucker.
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Number 4: The Two-In-One Chicken Fail
My old friend Bex (short for Rebecca) wasa riot to cook with. She's the one who originally inspired me to become a caterer because we often mused about going into it together. I heard this story from her dad about how badly she screwed up a whole roast chicken one day. But keep in mind that when this happened, she was like....13, and neither of her parents cooked so like me, she had to learn everything the hard way. This is a two-way fail because a) she didn't quite comprehend the whole 30 minutes bake time/per pound of meat idea so she started the bird late. So in her mind, if it had to cook for 2 1/2 hours at 350F, she could put it up to 550F for an hour and it would turn out magnificent! b) What made this worse is that nobody told her she had to remove the package of giblets before putting the chicken in the oven.
When that hour or so was up, she opened the door and her dad said the whole kitchen was filled with dense, black smoke and the whole inside of the oven was on fire. The plastic had pretty much exploded inside the bird and it was completely inedible. Bex cried about it for two whole weeks. When she graduated high school, every time she tried to get into a cooking school, her parents would bring this instance up and say no. She's currently working in advertising. Oh well. Chicken/Career fail.
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Number 3: Rachael Ray is a Robot! >=C
Speaking of fire, have you ever seen that thing that Rachael Ray does where she pours liquour into a dish, tips the pan into the flame and lights the alcohol on fire to make flambe'? Well, my stupid ass tried it with a Flambe' Peaches recipe. Maybe I was too skiddish about the fire, or I wasn't quick enough or something, but I tipped it a bit at the wrong angle and suddenly my sleeve was on fire!! I freaked out and recoiled my arm, not realizing that I was still holding the pan that was now a blazing inferno. The peaches, the burning alcoholic sauce and the fire just went flying all over the kitchen and spilled all over the floor. I ran to the sink, took the spray hose thingie and soaked down myself, the stove and all over the floor. To this day there are bare spots in the lenoleum in my old man's kitchen. Haha, man, I'm a loser.

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Number 2: Danielle's Brownie Flambe'
I love my best friend, I really do, but that woman should not be allowed anywhere near a kitchen. Besides the fact that she chopped off the tip of her pointer finger trying to saw an acorn squash in half, and make a bundt cake that tasted like a dish sponge, but one day she got it in her head to make brownies. But she didn't bake them, no. That's too mainstream for Dani. She broiled them. Not only that, but she put them a half an inch away from the flame, forgetting that brownies rise. Well, her father was sitting there in the kitchen while they were incinerating, and Dani was busy doing other things. He noticed the flames licking out of the stove door and very calmly got her attention. With a big smile, he motioned to the oven and kindly suggested that her brownies might be on fire. Her reaction from what was recounted later was downright hilarious. She tried to beat it down with an oven mitt and when that didn't work she had to use the extinguisher. Her mom was furious because the oven was ruined but her dad just laughed and laughed, kinda like I did when she told me the story. The good news is that she never tried to make brownies again.
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And the Number 1 worst cooking fail of all time: Really, Really Dark Toast
My ex lover was really funny in the kitchen. He had absolutely no clue what he was doing. And fucking up once, twice or even a whole shitload of times never dissuaded him from trying. One day I was in the shower and he was hungry and there was nothing to microwave, so he attempted to make himself buttered toast. Though I guess nobody told him that he had to butter the toast AFTER it comes out of the machine. Yes, a fail can be that epic where this dumb piece of shit actually put butter on bread and shoved both slices into a toaster. Well, needless the say, the smoke alarm went off. I come running out of the shower in a towel to find that half the kitchen is on fire. He's running around with a little plastic tupperware container trying to put it out and I'm like "OMFG, you're like a goddamn child, I can't let you out of my sight!!" We got the fire put out and he somehow manipulated me to take part of the blame to his mom. Gah! *Bangs head against keyboard* Retard test- uber mega zord FAILED!

If you have a story you'd like to add to this, be my guest. If not, at the very least I hope this made you smile.