List your culinary disasters.

See, the idea of culinary experimentation is a noble one, but you have to have an innate, deep understanding of flavours and how they work or might work together. It isnt something that comes easily, it takes years of cooking basics and branching out - so I've found, anyway.

BUT ANYONE KNOWS CHOCOLATE DOES NOT BELONG ON FISH :|

Unaware of their potency, using a handful of extra small dried chilis in a pasta sauce. It was more than beyond hot. To even call it hot would be a category mistake, it was in a whole new dimension.

Haha, OMG, Louis, what on EARTH were you thinking? Did you not taste your chocolate and cheese concoction and go "nah, this is horrible, I'm not ruining everything by actually using it"?

My dad once put salt - he figured it was sugar - in his yoghurt. He started gagging. My mum asked what was wrong but he couldn't answer and only pointed at the glass of yoghurt. So what does mum do? Tastes it as well. Dual vomit fest. hahahahahahaha

I once did a pasta sauce with spinach. Had washed it... but not enough. The dirt didn't really add anything. It was horrid. :-)

improvising in cooking is fucking hard, don't ever try and do it until you've been cooking for years.

I always follow recipes but am starting to feel I've some sense of what flavours go together. The only things I improvise on are like marinades for chicken...

In my defence, if I was cooking something with the absolute priority of being nice, I wouldn't be nearly so outlandish. This was as much surreal performance art as it was cookery. With our stomachs as collateral.

Don't start that bullshit. Yesterday you were all "oh my god what have I done" and rightly so, and now you're trying to run the "oh it was performance art" bluff? I just suggest-banned you again.

I think it takes somebody who really hates their family to perpetrate performance art on them.

This incident seems a bit emblematic of yr approach to life, doesn't it, LJ?

yeah exactly if someone in my family did this I'd be raging.

Well, the performance art aspect came in the melted box of Thornton's, and I still hoped that what I made would taste nice; the ingredients were washed, dressed and prepared as food...I'm not denying for a minute that it was a grotesque failure, and that I heavily regret it, and that it was disgusting and wrong-minded etc etc but if you're suggest-banning people for relating anecdotes of their own amusing slip-ups then you really shouldn't be a site moderator. I mean, my latest post was written with the intention of looking at my mishap in a slightly more light-hearted fashion, and you come over all hardman about it? Give me a fucking break. xxp

If this was performance art, I'm sure yr family is grateful you weren't naked. I mean, you WEREN'T naked, yea?

he's not jamie oliver now is he?

I wasn't naked, I had hoped to impress and was thus all cut-up when I realised it had failed, I apologised to my parents (who were understanding and described it as a "learning curve"), and my brothers didn't touch it, opting instead for a pizza. Oh, how I hate them all. Next time I'll fucking include strychnine.

Wait, you hate them for not eating yr awful meal?

Quit riding me or I'll make you a casserole

LJ, you'll be lucky if they don't respond by sneaking a turd into the next meal they cook for you.

Also, don't complain about being ridden when you arrive at the stable with the saddle strapped to yr back.

Owwww.

I made a huge dish of linguine, about 2 pounds, with a kind of rich lemon zest cream sauce. For some reason though I had the impression that "lemon zest" meant the white stuff on the inside of the peel -- what I now know is called "pith." Should have been tipped off by how many lemons and how much time it took to grate as much "zest" as the recipe required. Lemon pith, if you've never eaten it, has the weird quality of tasting really awful but also like something which you can imagine acquiring as a taste -- so I actually ate quite a lot of this, thinking, "this tastes weird but it must just be a challenging flavor I have to learn to appreciate" -- but at some point I called my mom who told me that I'd ruined the whole thing and would I please stop eating it.

Haha ok now thats a mistake I can easily see being made :) In fact I used to get pith and zest confused in my mind too - thankfully I never made a dish out of it though :)

when I first met my husband he had this thing about leftovers & eggs. whether it was leftover chinese food, or steamed veggies, or...whatever, he was always adamant that they worked perfectly in a scramble with a few eggs the following day. I never really enjoyed this trait much, but I tolerated it. Mostly I'd bow out, but sometimes he'd start preparing while I was sleeping and surprise me with a plate of whatever...creation he'd made. This all came to crashing halt on the day that he decided to mix up Country-Style Pork leftovers with his eggs. Country-Style Pork = boneless pork spareribs, covered in this thick, rich brown sauce that mainly consisted of Soy Vey, liquid smoke and other things I can't remember. It was so saucey that, when mixed with the beaten eggs, the eggs stayed in little separated chunks as they cooked in the frying pan...they just didn't want to hang out with the sauce AT ALL. And this was one of those days where he dished it all up for me and then came and woke me up. I sat down, looked at my plate...it looked like dog food and barf. I looked over at him and just said, "Dude, there's no way." The look of it was SO bad I couldn't even try to taste it. He ate one mouthful and spat it into the sink. It was SO very, very wrong. And whenever he gets wistful about his leftovers + eggs = magic breakfast, I remind him of the Country Style Pork fiasco. So now leftovers are just leftovers.

If your husband were raised in the midwest (assuming you are from the states), the leftovers would like have been compiled and made into a hash or casserole. This would probably have been slightly preferable to the "with eggs" option, but not by much.

*likely

We used to make bubble and squeak that way! But only with left over chopped bits of roast veg like potato and kumera and maybe a bit of cbbage and onion.

my husband serves as a warning re: the limits of 'the scramble'.

I have once made an "alfredo" sauce while stoned using everything white and vaguely dairy or cheese-like in the kitchen at the time. Shit was delicious in the moment tho.

I made muffins once and forgot to put in the flour.

I made a "quick and easy" pasta recipe where you combined everything (pasta, sauce, water) at the start but forgot the water part and wound up with a burned mess and a takeout pizza.

Made some spinach cannelloni, which typically call for a pinch of nutmeg. With the filling still hot in the pan I decided I couldn't taste the nutmeg so I added some more. Still couldn't taste it. Added some more. Still couldn't taste it. Added some more ... until ... It was a culinary disaster of the mildly psychedelic variety.

I have once made an "alfredo" sauce while stoned using everything white and vaguely dairy or cheese-like in the kitchen at the time.

this reminds me of various dairy products I used in lolcollege (yeah, probably stoned) to prepare Kraft dinner when there was a dearth of milk and/or butter: sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese, yogurt, salad dressing. I guess this doesn't really count, though, as I typically dumped in enough ketchup after the fact to obscure any taste differentials.

I have once made an "alfredo" sauce while stoned using everything white and vaguely dairy or cheese-like in the kitchen at the time.

A friend who was at that time a horrible cook once called me for help after she tried to make a "cream sauce" by using every white liquid she had - mayonnaise, sour cream, yogurt, eventually some flour - everything except cream. She apparently though being white and liquid was enough.

Once I made scones with plain flour by mistake and wondered why they came out like little rocks :(

The biggest disaster I can recall making is a stew that had an artichoke in it, broken up into its leaves. I was about to toss it as inedible, but my Ugandan housemate insisted that I not and he ate the whole thing (without the hard parts of the artichoke leaves, of course).

Oh I absolutely hate to have to throw good food away because it's been ruined. Luckily it doesnt happen to me too often - burning's the only problem these days thanks to a completely useless electric stove which I suspect has a broken thermostat as it just gets way too hot even if I only put it on 100C :(

have never read this before now, good show all

sargnt88 (4:12:49 AM): just for the record
sargnt88 (4:12:52 AM): a run down of louis' recipe
sargnt88 (4:14:06 AM): tilapia, lemon, oregano, olive oil, red wine, chopped tomato, onion, an entire box of luxury chocolates, an entire wheel (? what the hell? lol british has an actual wheel of cheese) of camembert cheese

continuing on the "all dairies are not the same" tip:

This one time I was VERY DRUNK and housesitting for my aunt around christmastime and I had one of those packages of 7-minute pasta alfredo.
So the recipe called for milk, but I didn't have any, but I DID have eggnog, which had me all excited about my new creation: the Xmas Pasta.
So of course I cooked it and of course i didn't even taste this probably already horrible concotion before I went through my aunt's spice cabinet to see how it should be seasoned.
I finally decided on a blend of lemon pepper ("Heeeyyy! I like pepper! and I LOOOVEE lemon! this'll be great!!!") and celery salt (similar thought process).
By the time it was finished it was reaalllllllllllyyyyyy far from edible. The dog wouldn't even touch it. But never wanting to waste food I popped open a couple cold cans of Schlitz and forced it down. ahhh, good times.

what is wrong with yall

Also, to make it bearable I doused it with Tony Chachere's, which is this fantastic southern Louisiana spice blend that sort of makes everything taste better.

(xpost) evidence suggests that none of us can cook...

*I* can cook, damn y'all, and I haven't made such culinary "experiments" since I was 16 and bored. Geez. Its not that hard to whip up a tuna pasta or a beef casserole by sticking to the basics!

i mean how could you seriously think that egg nog would be an acceptable substitute

are you retarded?!

no offense!!!!

I know rite. Its sweet!

i mean if you were fucked up, mayyyyybe

Mind you this reminds me of the time I was going thru the fridge when living at parents and saw a jug of liquid and, being a juice jug, I thought "oh nice, pinapple juice!"

And I took a big slug, only to find out it was some kind of horrible fat runoff from cooking :/ BLEUGH.

egg nog is bad, making a sauce for fish from a box of chocolates + a wheel of cheese is just taking it to a whole other level imo

you know, that's not even abt 'dont you know how to cook?' that's like 'have you ever eaten food in yr life?'

once missed the fact that the rice vinegar was supposed to be diluted, so I added it straight to the rice, resulting in the vinegar-iest sushi rice ever. the first bite was good--ooh, flavorful!-- but each additional bite made you progressively queasier.

this thread is A+ hilarious

i haven't had any chocolate-and-cheese-on-fish culinary disasters lately (fuck, EVER), but i did recently make rice pudding out of the following ingredients:

leftover rice
cardamom seeds
milk
2 sugar packets
2 international delight vanilla creamers
7-8 crumbled ginger cookies
raisins

and it was pretty good.

(this was at a rental house i was sharing with friends and we didn't have vanilla extract, but for some reason there were those gross creamers.)

sometime last year i made chicken broth from a chicken i had roasted and eaten and then i accidentally left it (the broth) out on the counter to cool for too long.

then i thought, oh why not use it? i made chicken soup for my tired husband and we wound up with food poisoning. oops.

My mum's freezer died so she made a veg 'rage' curry that we had to eat for about 3 weeks.

All the frozen veg from the plot, in a curry, whether it worked or not.

And the slightest complaint was met with a steely look.