Horrible Kitchen Tales = Dinner On Me!

Oh darn. Contest closed. Shucks. :)

This just happened so it's still fresh in my mind. I was getting ready to make candy cane cookies (peppermint dough, half red, half not red). When I came home from the store I unknowingly knocked over my bottle of red food coloring. A couple of hours later when I returned to start the cookies, I thought someone had been murdered in my kitchen. My white floors and white cabinets were covered in red. A little bottle of red dye goes a long way. I tried to sop some of the mess up with an old towel (I was out of paper towels, after returning from the store!!) and dripped dye all over the kitchen. Fortunately, with some elbow grease, it all came off. However, I'm still finding pink spots in the kitchen.

Here I was a bride of three months living in a one bedroom walk up. Well, I decided to make Thanksgiving Dinner and invite the whole family (12 of us). Crazy I know! I bought a metal picnic table (didn't have a dining room set) and set it up in the living room and borrowed enough folding chairs. Did all my shopping on Sunday. Worked a half day on Wednesday and when I came home I decided to start getting the Turkey and stuffing ready. Cleaned and patted dry the turkey and put him back in the fridge. Now came time for the stuffing. Since I had never done something like this before I went to my Betty Crocker cook book. I added all the ingredients that were listed and used 3 bags of Pepperidge Farms stuffing mix (22 pound turkey). Put that in the fridge and went on to put together the rest of the meal, sweet potato pie, veggies, mashed potatoes, salad. Next morning I got up real early and stuffed the turkey and put him in the oven as per the directions. Company came and the house smelled great. Took out the turkey after 6 hours and it was beautiful My hubby had never carved a turkey so my father-in-law took over. Scooped out the stuffing and he cut up the turkey. The turkey was absolutely delicious. However, we needed the fire department and a fire extinguisher for the stuffing!!! You see, I seasoned the stuffing which was already seasoned. It was completely inedible!!! That was 47 years ago and to this day we still laugh about it. I have never done this again but the memory is Priceless!!!

Joanne Anderson

skylineabode@aol.com

I thought I didn't have any kitchen drama (I submitted a story from my friend Andrea) but just remembered one.
For some reason, I didn't have a square glass baking dish, so I bought one and it even had a nice vinyl lid. I scanned the directions. Then I made lasagna. My recipe called for it to bake covered for part of the baking time. I put the vinyl lid on the pan and put it into the oven. About 15 minutes later, I smelled a horrible toxic smell - the lid was dripping onto the oven floor and onto the lasagna! I was furious at myself and furious that I was losing the lasagna too, so I just scraped that junk off the bottom of the oven, picked it off the top of the lasagna, covered it back up with foil and pretended nothing happened. Unfortunately, when my husband came home, he sniffed and got the whole story out of me - and he is phobic about heated plastic (oh, and other things!) so he refused to eat the lasagna and it was as good as wasted.
As to what I was thinking: of those new silicone baking sheets, etc., and I guess I thought my new lid was one of those! I read care directions more carefully now on new purchases. If you can't be the good example. . .

My story is up and waiting....

http://boogiemum.com/19/i-am-all-about-helping-you...

I like to think of myself as a great cook, but this was a major disaster! In the late 80's I was a young Mother with 2 children that had food allergies. In an effort to become more healthy, I started cooking a few vegetarian meals. Everything went well except for the TOFU. I found a recipe that I thought sounded good and proceeded to make a healthy feast. It smelled good, it looked a little weired, but hey its healthy right? We gave thanks for our meal and started eating. Needless to say it was horrible! My kids tried so hard to eat it because I kinda make them eat a little of everything even if they dont like it. After all its good for them right? I couldnt even eat it so we all decided to give it to the dog and we had grilled cheese. The dog wouldnt even eat it! I have learned the art of tofu now, but my adult children will never let me live that one down.

When I first got married, we lived in a small basement apt. with a fussy landlord. Anyway, being home on Fridays I loved to cook something special..I know I'll make my famous Apple Pie in a brown Paper bag in which you staple the bag shut..This is so good. Lo and behold I make the pie, staple the brown paper bag and off to the oven it goes..Only about 15 mins later the oven is on fire, what do I do is to call my MOM , who tells me to call Fire Dept. so I did, in comes about 6 firemen with axes ready to chop away, I tell them what is in the oven..Well Madman why would you want to bake a pie in a brown Paper bag, and the scoop the pie the throw it in the sink, Opening windows (thought they were going to chop, chop, the windows open). After all the smoke got out of the Apt, much to my landlords dismay, I told the fireman, that this pie was so excellent, don't know it until you try it.Since I never made the pie again, the safest place to bake one would be the fire house..Guess I put the rack down too low on that day..

I have a wonderful friend in Tenn. who is a wonderful cook and sends me scrumptus recipes which never fail..Well one day she send one for Monkey Bread (its like a Cinnamon Roll) working with yeast etc, got it all together and wow it smelled so dam good put it in pan and popped in oven.OK, the times goes off and off to take bread out of oven. Oh My but the bread puffed up so much it was overhanging over the pan and prob. would of kept going if I hadn't cooled it down..Hey it tasted great, but I had to take a picture and send to my friend, we still get the biggest LOL over that..To this day I still don't know what I did wrong, followed the directions..Reminds me of Lucy baking the bread and it exploding out of the oven!!!!

OMG Suzanne I laughed pretty hard at your telling of your story! Glad you're ok now. :)

Karen what I want to know is how did you food poison them? As an instructive lesson to me (I think I ate something bad recently and want to know where I went wrong!)

Last year, my husband and I hosted Easter dinner at our house for his family and my family . My mother inlaw is from the hillbilly mountians for Virginia and they cook a little differently then we do here in south georgia. For example, when she cooks stuffing, she puts LOTS and LOTS of a spice and it taste like xmas trees. So my dad does not eat any of her dressing and it is very dry. Well, my parents know not to eat it because they dont like it. Well my dad thought it was safe to eat everything else because I had made it. Well, I had made 2 dozen deviled eggs and my MIL had brought one dozen of deviled eggs. Well when she makes deviled eggs, she ONLY puts MUSTARD in her eggs so they are very tangy and NASTY to me. My father is normally very quiet but he had gotten one of her eggs and when he bit into it he YELLED OMG BECK what did you do to these eggs they are horrible!@ My shy MIL spoke up and said I made those!! Everyone in the family started laughing at my dad and he was so embarissed. We still joke with him about the nasty eggs to this day!!!

Well my worst Thanksgiving is the year my family still refers to as the year that I tried to kill them. On Thanksgiving eve, I made some dinner for my kids. I was too busy to eat. Well.. about 11 pm my youngest daughter starts moaning that her stomach hurts, and then immediately begins to throw up. She's just miserable. Well just as I'm getting her settled my middle child who was around 16 at the time, says she's not feeling so good. So now we have 2 of them fighting over the bathroom. Well my son is my oldest, he was 17 then, and he's laughing at them, but then the laughing was cut short. He got sick too. I gave all 3 of them food poisoning. I got up Thanksgiving and still made the meal, and none of them even looked at it, they were too sick. They said I tried to poison them because I never got sick. So I ate my thanksgiving dinner alone, in between taking ginger ale to very ill children. By that Saturday they were well enough that they nibbled on some of the stuff, but most of the huge meal got thrown away.

Normally, I think of myself as a pretty good cook and know my way around a kitchen. I honestly to this day, do not know what happened. I was home with my then five year old. My oldest two were at school and my husband was at work. For lunch that day, my son decided he wanted fish sticks. No problem, heat the oven and pop them in....seems simple doesn't it. Well, halfway through the cooking process, I smell something burning. Surely, it couldn't be the fishsticks, they haven't been in long enough. I open the oven to check on them and flames shoot out. I quickly close the oven and turn it off. Smoke starts pouring out. I raise the windows, so now smoke is coming out of the windows. My neighbor see the smoke and calls the fire department. Meanwhile I call my husband tell him what had happened and me, my son and my dog rush out the front door.
The firemen come and are going through the house. Just then my husband pulls up sees the firemen and assume the house must be burning down. Luckily, it was just the oven and could be saved. The firemen leave, along with my husband. The excitement is over and my son and I go back in the house. He is still hungry for lunch....so back to the fishsticks. Can't use my oven, but hey, I have a toaster oven. Guess what, the stupid toaster oven caught on fire when I tried to cook the fishsticks in there.....can you believe it! Two fires in one day. Needless to say, it has been quite a loooong time since we have had fishsticks. Oh, and by the way...my son got a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich for lunch.

My in-laws came to visit. They live several states away so we do not see them that often. I was very nervous trying to make the perfect meal. My MIL routinely cooks for large event dinners and she seems to do it without stress or sweat. I find boiling water a challenge. Wanting to desperately prove I have skills beyond making the best buttered toast on this side of the Atlantic I forge ahead on the Sunday meal. Surprisingly things seemed to be going fine at the start then slowly it started to deteriorate into blood, sweat and tears….emphasis on the blood. Starting to feel the strain and feeling time has turned into a slow motion nightmare I tried to speed up the process. Slicing onions on my handy dandy straight from State Fair mandolin slicer my hand slips off the safety stabby thingie that hold the onion while you slice. I am sure real cooks don't say "stabbie thingie" but professional pop up toaster chefs do. Sure as you know it the next thing I realize is my thumb has been mandolined sliced, wide, hard and deep. Feeling a little sick to my stomach realizing I have just filleted myself I look to see that indeed blood is spurting all over my food preparation area and :::gasp::: my beloved toaster. Not good. To make a long story short, because really, this is a very long story (Feel free to insert people screaming, "Where's her thumb, where's her thumb?") Don't worry people it was still attached...well.....mostly. I spent 5 hours in the emergency room and came out with a thumb bandage the size of a small breed dog. Let's just put it this way folks, I am sticking to toast.

I have to share a second disaster story! It can't be a coincidence that both of my stories involve my dad cooking.

My dad decided to cook red snapper for my whole family one evening. We all sat down with our plates and were eating our meal. I kept noticing these round swirls in the meat of my fish and was picking at them because I had never seen anything like them before. I picked one out with my fork and was inspecting it on my plate when I realized what it was, a curled up worm!! Ugh! I immediately yelled, "Stop eating! There are worms in the fish!". Everyone stopped and we realized that we all had them worms in our pieces of fish and were repulsed. My dad immediately got really angry that no one wanted to finish their food and yelled at me for spoiling everyone's appetites. Can you believe that?! They all agreed that they were glad I had told them. My mom called the grocery store and got a refund, but to this day, I don't think one person in my family can touch red snapper and that was about 15 years ago.

My kitchen horror story would have to be the tacos that almost burned our house down when I was about 14. I was sitting on the couch watching tv and doing my homework and my dad was cooking dinner in the kitchen. He put a skillet of oil on the stove to heat up to fry some tortillas and got into an argument with my mom who was standing across the room. He followed her into their bedroom and continued to argue. I didn't realize that the stove was on and wasn't paying any attention to what was going on in the kitchen. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw flames shooting up, out of the skillet and looked over just in time to see the upper kitchen cabinets catching fire. I screamed and rushed over there. My mom came running in, grabbed the pan, and started to run to the kitchen sink, which was full of soapy water. The pan burned her hand, and she dropped it on the floor, which at the time was carpeted. Grease spilled onto the carpet and caught it on fire. I was screaming, "No! Baking soda!" My mom picked the pan back up and dropped it into the sink of water and burning oil flew in all directions. I finally got ahold of a box of baking soda and poured it all over the burning areas and put them out, but not before half of our kitchen was damaged from the flames and my mom and I had suffered some smoke inhalation. LOL To this day, I'm still paranoid about frying anything at home and I never do it without the box of baking soda sitting right next to the stove!

This story is on behalf of my friend Andrea (and I'll tell her to email you if she wins).
Andrea is not a cook, but she's game. She and her college friends had a dinner club, and on her first evening to host it, she decided to make curry and a pumpkin pie. She carefully measured out the curry spices and the pumpkin pie spices, and then carefully dumped the curry spices in the pumpkin mix. When she realized, the pie was in the oven, so Andrea soldiered on with the curry. Close to dinner time, Andrea was cooking and chopping wildly, and the pie was done. She jerked it out the oven to cool. A noise. Hmmmm. Andrea lifted the pie to the light over the kitchen sink to inspect it, and PLOP CRASH, the bottom of the pie plate with the hot pie fell neatly over the rim between the sink basins! She screamed and laughed - what could she do?? And the rice boiled over.
Andrea couldn't resist tasting a bit of the pie that didn't have glass shards in it and reports that it was delicious. . .
The rest of the dinner party, I guess, was not memorable - that was never part of the retelling!

Oh man, do I have some horror stories! I wish I was good at writing, I'd participate. Maybe I can talk my husband into writing it. =P

here is my worst memory of thanksgiving diner in our family.
several years ago we were all having thanksgiving dinner at my aunts house. she is a terrible cook too. most foods she cooks are done by microwave. we all sat down at the dinner table and were eatting the dinner she cooked. someone cut a bit farther into the turkey for their second helping and saw there was a foreign object in the turkey. so needless to say it was pulled out. it was the bag with all the turkey insides in it and next out comes the neck. my aunt say hey where did those come from. LOL. we said OMG you didnt clean the turkey out. she said no are you supposed to. and we were all sick the next day. YUCK

Maybe this would MAKE to get out of the house on a "non" child date. Oh if my husband would get so lucky.