i've done this exact same thing - with nachos, so there was an entire layer of chips unable to be eaten and everying spitting out little pieces of paper. wax paper is useless

Two tarte tatins in one week. In the first, the caramel turned black and unbudging in the oven. My friends refer to it fondly as the Tar Baby. The second, for fear of overcooking, featured a top crust that so separated from the apples that, when the moment came to flip the whole thing over, a wet mess dripped right out of the pan. The moral: Anything is ok with enough vanilla ice cream on top.

This isn't really a rookie mistake, just dumb! 2 years ago I had made homemade marsh mellows as gifts for friends for the holidays. I had our realtor come over to see the changes in our renovated house and I was going to make dinner after she left. Well, I preheated the oven and my hubs and I were wondering what was smelling...Well, I left some marsh mellows in the oven, on a plastic cutting board to dry out and they lit on fire, destroying my oven, pizza stone and the smell of my house! We tried to air out the house as fast as possible and our realtor rolled up with every door and window open in our house in the dead of winter! Big mess to clean up!

I am a VERY new cook and even more than that, I am an EXTREMELY new baker. This past Thanksgiving I decided to make pecan pie and I ALMOST used corn oil instead of corn syrup. Luckily my Dad (of all people) saved the day and corrected my mistake. It turned out great and I know my Dad will never let me live it down!

Mine isn't really a newbie mistake so much as a Space Cadet moment. I was making beef stew while on the phone with my mom and was sort of in the process of putting groceries away at the same time. I browned the beef, browned the onions and grabbed a bottle off the counter and poured it in. Now, I like a little red wine in my cooking but never finish whole bottles so I buy the little mini bottles but on this particular trip I also had purchsed a little bottle of sesame oil. Those happen to be approximately the same size.

Suddenly, I realized, uh oh, that I smelled... Sesame? What? And took a good look at the bottle in my hand. Yep, I'd just poured about a cup of sesame oil into the soup-to-be. I ended up putting the meat and veggies into a colander and rincing them. I kind of managed to adapt it to an asian inspired dish, but I'm much more careful with what bottle I have in my hand these days. No more cooking while on the phone and putting groceries away for me!

Not that I have never made mistakes, but my wife's from a few years ago is a classic.
I was working in the basement and my wife, who is not very good in math, asked me "what is one-half of one and one-half cups?" I answered, and upstairs she went.
About an hour later, she came downstairs with freshly baked coffee muffins. On cutting into one, there were big pockets of a tar-like substance. Shades of Exxon Valdez. Yep, instead of 3/4 cups of brewed coffee, she had used 3/4 cup of instant coffee granules!
The next day we went to the park and fed the deer some old bread, and the inedible muffins. The deer loved them, although I did feel guilty later on with visions of the wired deer bouncing all over the park for the next few days.

I was making an apple crisp - that's easy enough, right? Well, I had chopped all the apples, added butter, sugar and paprika - what? yup - I mistakenly put paprika in instead of cinnamon. The containers looked the same in my cupboard and I just grabbed the first one I saw. Lucky while I was stirring I noticed the reddish tint and didn't smell the cinnamon! I rinsed the apples off and added all the ingredients back in. I definitely double check my spices now!

Oops! Always check the expiration date of your yeast. I learned the hard way when the beautiful layered buttered rolls didn't rise and became beautiful layered buttered hockey pucks.

My sister had a great blooper a few years ago. She made a valiant attempt at banana bread, but did not realize that my brother's protein powder was stored in a similar container to the one that holds our flour. The banana bread looked a little funny before it went in the oven, but even worse when it came out. After 45 minutes in the oven, the "banana bread" ended up being a gray brick that was almost impossible to get out of the bread pan. At least it had 50 grams of protein!

Not a terrible mistake, but recent: I was making Orangette's chickpea-parmesan salad, and was planning on adding a dash of liquid smoke with the lemon juice for an extra bit of flavor. I grabbed the small brown bottle in my fridge with the white paper label, and tossed in a few drops.
When eating it later, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't smoky at all. Oops. Turns out I'd shaken in some orange bitters, and not liquid smoke. Similar bottles, same shelf, easy mistake.
However, the orange bitters were still pretty delicious in that chickpea salad!

I usually take the dog out, feed him, and make myself a perfect latte every morning right around 10:30 when I wake up... a few months ago I had to get up at 7 for an appointment and in my sleepy rushed haze, I dumped half a can of dog food into my to-go cup....popped the lid on...and drank a very unpleasant sip in the car.

I once tried to make a recipe for cherry ricotta mousse from the Moosewood Cookbook (or maybe Enchanted Broccoli Forest). I think the recipe called for blending the cheese into mousse in a food processor but, since I was fresh out of college, I didn't have one (or even a blender).

I'd always believed that most things could be made with a whisk or a wooden spoon and some elbow grease (and had in the past successfully creamed butter, whipped cream, etc. by hand). Lesson learned - the texture of my hand-mixed ricotta "mousse" was horribly grainy and none of the flavors really combined. Even my ultra-polite and always-hungry housemate couldn't eat more than a bite.

However, I can also attest to the virtues of vanilla ice cream: it was delicious with the leftover cherries and dark chocolate shavings the next night...

I misread a recipe for cinnamon rolls and didn't realize the 6 tablespoons of butter didn't all go in the dough (some was for the icing & buttering the pan). I noticed my mistake before they went in the oven but thought, how bad could it be? They looked great, but were ridiculously rich -- like a cinnamon croissant on steroids. Had to throw them out.

The most memorable mistake in the kitchen for me was from my sister. She was quite new to baking (about ten at the time, I believe) and she wanted to make cookie dough by herself. Unfortunately when she went to put in the baking powder she thought it was 1/2 cup instead of 1/2 teaspoon...needless to say we did not eat those cookies.

I have used wax paper instead of parchment for lining cake pans and not had a problem. Also used to use it to line baking sheets when I made my granola (now i just bake the granola directly on the baking sheets and stir more often). Maybe I'm using a different kind of wax paper? Or maybe I'm just used to the taste of wax in my food???

I am loving these stories.
When I was very little I was baking cookies with my sister and dad. My dad was not a baker...it was a surprise for my mom, who was Christmas shopping....well, we found out that confectioners sugar is not the same as granulated sugar.
I was making Krusckyki last week and I added butter AND shortening, not realizing that this seemed strange. The shortening is what I was supposed to fry the cookies in. Oops!

my sweet husband decided to take up baking (for the most part with great success). A couple weeks ago, he tried to make scones but after 15 minutes in the oven they looked done but kinda weird. We took a bite, looked at each other, and started laughing- they were completely inedible. Clearly, he had made a mistake somewhere. After perusing the recipe I asked him what baking powder he used and he showed me the arm and hammer box…he didn’t know that there was a difference between baking powder and baking soda. We had a good laugh about it and he has since learned to read directions more carefully.

Do I have bloopers!

I consistently undercook chicken/misread cooking times. The biggest hissy fit came when I read that a chicken only needed to cook for an hour, not an hour and a half. Which I realized after I deskinned it and started carving.

The one time I put a pumpkin cake with a nut & coconut topping under the broiler to toasts the nuts, as the recipe said. I pulled it out after the allotted 5 minutes it took to cook it and said "oh, that doesn't look done" and then put it in for another 3. When I took it out, everything was burned to a crisp.

The other time I decided to make chicken jalapeno bacon skewers for an event and broiled half of them for 10 minutes instead of the recipe's 20. Realized it at the event when I bit into one and it was raw (warned everyone else off of those).

I've forgotten to add fruit fresh to various canned peaches, resulting in browned peaches (and much wailing and gnashing of teeth).

I think my favorite though, is when I used some overly sweet blackberry jam to make a sour cream blackberry bread. The recipe makes two loaves. I forgot to put baking soda in and the result was two squat, hard rocks. Still tasty, so I took it to work and everyone loved it. I made a second batch and remembered the baking soda. I also remembered the squat, flat result from the previous batch and decided to put it all in one loaf pan. It took an hour and a half to cook instead of 45 minutes, was HUGE and scorched on the outsides.

Oh, and the time I left apple cider to reduce unattended and came back to the stove to see a pot full of caramelized ash, which was also all over the stove.

When I was a preteen, I was visiting at my pastor's house and his wife asked me if I'd like to help her daughter bake a chocolate cake. Her daughter was reading the recipe off the card to me and I was measuring and stirring the ingredients together. When the batter was ready for the oven, it looked a bit strange, but since neither one of us had ever baked a chocolate cake before, we just shrugged and put it in the oven.

Later, when the distinctly non-chocolate chocolate cake came out of the oven, we discovered that 1/2 TEASPOON of cocoa powder is NOT enough to make a chocolate cake turn chocolate once it is baked! Oops! It was good cake, but definitely not chocolate. I never lived that one down!

I was working in a restaurant and in a rush I mistakenly added balsamic vinegar instead of vanilla when I was making whipped cream. Whoops.

I've done the wax paper/parchment mixup, and also cooked chickens upside-down on several occasions because I confused the breast and the back.

I was a precocious gourmet - I loved to cook and cooked all the time when I was 12. My mom asked me to make the french onion soup for her gourmet club one very busy Saturday - I added 1/2 cup of sugar instead of 1/2 teaspoon while caramelizing the onions (oops). I thought it tasted fine. My mother, who did not check the soup before she left, found out at the dinner party what I had done. She took the blame for the failure at the party. Fortunately, the theme was "France," and everyone was already looped from the Chablis and Burgundy. . .

The very first time I used a Jello mold using a great Jello recipe (1977) I put the mold in hot water, unmolded it onto a plate, but did not realize that I held it too long until I opened the fridge to take it out and the whole mold did a rainfall out the fridge.

I was making a buche de noel with my friend for high school French class, and when the recipes called for hazelnuts, we just tossed them into the blender...without realizing that you had to shell them first. Her mom almost fell over, and we had to start from scratch with the batter!

About a week ago, I was making a spinach artichoke dip. The recipe said to blend everything together in a food processor. I don't have a food processor, so I used a blender instead. Unfortunately, this blender seems to be on its last legs and has to really strain to blend simple things, let alone cream cheese, chopped artichokes, etc. So to help it along, I had a wooden spoon that I would stick in the blender as it was running . . .ok, you can probably see where this is going, right?
Suffice it to say, there was a loud cracking noise and the spoon shattered (my favorite one, too). However, I was able to salvage the dip.

My mom had a cooking snafu a few years ago that her mother never let her live down - she was cooking beans on the stovetop in a Pyrex dish (which she didn't notice is clearly labeled not to do) - regardless when we turned the gas off the whole dish SHATTERED across the stovetop.

My worst cooking snafu involves preheating without checking the oven first. I had purchased some aluminum pans with lids, and stored them in my oven. The pans were fine but the plastic lids melted and caught on fire.

I was making my second cheesecake in two days. The first time I had the hardest time keeping the batter in the largest bowl that I had (it was short and wide and the mixer sprayed the batter everywhere). So for the second one, I grabbed an old pot of my boyfriend's that we never used. As I was mixing, I noticed little black flecks through the batter....and it wasn't vanilla. The teflon coating was coming off of the inside of the pan. Needless to say, I ended up with one cheesecake and the old pot went in the garbage.

Just last week I was in charge of baking the stuffing for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a recipe I've made dozens of times and I made a double batch and put them both in the Pyrex casserole dishes to bake. One dish went into the oven in our RV, the other went into the oven in the house. After only about 60 seconds in the oven in the RV, the glass exploded in the oven and pieces of glass and stuffing were everywhere. Apparently, the dish I used was a *new* version of Pyrex that isn't ovensafe...I learned my lesson to always check now!
We all had a good laugh at dinner and fortunately, had that other pan of stuffing!
http://www.seejencook.blogspot.com

Fancy holiday dinner for a college girlfriend. I was making roasted red pepper pasta sauce with a recipe off the internet. Whatever crummy printer I used printed out the measurements wrong (or bad copy/paste not sure).

As I was pouring the 1/4 CUP of salt into the sauce, I was thinking This seems like a lot of salt... It was supposed to be 1/4 TSP.

The back up jarred sauce, just kind of ruined the whole idea of the thing.

I put curry in my rice and beans instead of cumin. "Nuf said. Don't try this at home.

I was just about to post mine when I read kristenrl's above... when I was 12, I DID make a pecan pie with corn oil instead of corn syrup! It was for Mother's Day, and my mom tried to eat a piece just so I wouldn't feel bad, but it was truly awful.

More recently, while making pasta with a tomato-vodka sauce, I used raspberry vodka by mistake. The smell of the hot vodka hitting the pan was so sickly sweet but I didn't want to waste the sauce, so I boiled the hell out of it and then added tons of grated parm to try to cover it up. I definitely noticed a funny taste in the background but my husband didn't seem to notice.

Man, reading these reminded me of yet another snafu I did. I was cooking pork chops from a recipe and thought I could sub cayenne for paprika. After all, they're both peppers, right? The results were so spicy they were inedible and I ended up using them in jambalaya the next day (with no other spices, of course). The worst part was this was New Years Eve and when I went to go put in my contacts 4 hours later, my eyes burned horribly after putting them in since I had cayenne on my fingers. I wore glasses going out that year.

I put a pizza together on my counter and covered it with toppings...and then realized that I forgot to put it on the baking sheet first. Soooo I had to try my best to peel it off of some wax paper and transfer it to the baking sheet for the oven, causing every single bit of the pretty toppings to come off (with some landing in the floor -- 5 second rule, right?). I just had to re-flatten the dough and start completely over! It wasn't as pretty as the first time around, but it sure tasted good when it was done!

tweihnai , My sisters did the very same thing! They were about 10 when they tried to make snickerdoodles. They put in 1/4 cup of baking soda instead of 1/4 tsp. My mom yelled at them so bad for that and the mess they had made (and didn't clean), that they're 23 today and still don't enjoy cooking.

So glad to see that everyone's got one of these! My first foray into using phyllo dough didn't go so well. The layers of dough were rolled together when I took them out of the box, and I didn't notice that the first layer was actually paper! Unfortunately my recipe called for layers of phillo to be rolled, baked and sliced, so the paper was completely spiraled throughout the entire thing! What clued me in was how difficult it was to cut!. Impossible to eat without first unrolling the entire thing to remove the paper. My family STILL brings this up (over 10 years later) whenever I bring a dish!

I was looped on some cold/flu syrup one winter and decided that chicken pot pie was the ticket.

I made it through most of the recipe until it told me to thicken the filling at the end with some cornstarch. I added the cornstarch and then kept adding more, making a slurry each time, but the stew refused to thicken properly.

I tasted it too but with my cold my tastebuds were on the fritz so I couldn't tell that I was adding more and more cream of tartar not cornstarch (both bought bulk and stored in similar jars) until it was too late. The whole pot was a sour, sour mess we had to throw away.

I now fastidiously label everything in the kitchen plus I stick to reheating and toast when I'm sick. And I always make a roux-based pot pie now, never a cornstarch thickened one. Multiple lessons learned.

ok so I am a new cook and now incredibly nervous reading all of this! hehe.

I just bought my first frozen phyllo dough and have no idea what tricks I need to know in order to bake it around some brie and spanakopita.

Any tips from those of you who have learned all of this over the years?

I have a bagel blooper, too. We used to make bagels fairly often. One time, my husband and I were making them together. We'd done it enough that the recipe was easy and we had a great time. Everything went perfectly until we took our first bite. They tasted like... nothing. Turns out, two cooks was too many - we both thought the other one had added salt.

They were sort of salvageable, with enough salt on the cream cheese, but they definitely looked MUCH better than they tasted.

When I was younger and starting to bake things from scratch, my muffins wouldn't rise. This happened several times, and my mom (who never bakes anything that didn't come out of a box or a tube) mocked me mercilessly, blaming it on my using an eggless recipe.

As it turns out, the dense muffins were mostly her fault. I found out that baking powder loses its effectiveness over time, and asked her how long she'd had hers. As it turned out, the stuff was older than me! I threw it out, bought a new tin, and everything I've baked since has been perfect.

My mistake happened almost 30 years ago, but I've never tried to make bagels again! Everything went great, but my recipe said to boil the bagels before baking...in water with baking soda added. I was a complete novice to the world of bagel-making, and did what the recipe said. Well, those bagels looked so very beautiful when they came out of the oven, but were so bitter I had to throw them out. I couldn't believe it after so much work, and for the life of me don't know why this recipe said to put baking soda in the water.

As I've been reading the comments, all I can think about is the episode of Friends where Rachel makes the trifle and adds ground beef and peas, and everyone pretends to eat it to not hurt her feelings (except for Joey, who eats everyone else's leftovers, too).

"I mean, what's not to like? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!"

I work in a professional bakery, and usually things are baked with a pretty high degree of accuracy. One time, one of the bakers forgot to set the timer for a batch of challah rolls. She moved on to other projects, completely forgetting them. It was several hours later (after the baker had gone home, not reminded of her baking bread), when I tried to bake some cookies and I noticed that there was something already in the oven. The challah rolls were a brilliant, shiny black, all the way through. They almost seemed like they were made out of ceramic, by how shiny the egg wash had made them, and how completely black they were. We figured they were in there for about 3 1/2 hours, and luckily only got drier and drier without starting a fire.

Not that I haven't made mistakes, but another good mistake was my friend's mom who was making fresh peach pie. She did all the crust, peaches, and added the seasonings. Instead of her spice bottle of cinnamon, she grabbed the bottle of taco meat seasoning! The mom noticed right at the end, but figured it was too late to fix it and baked the pie anyways. No one in the family liked it except my friend, who kind of enjoyed the spicy, sweet, salty flavor.

When I was little, home alone and hungry, I wanted a peanut butter sandwich. The problem: we didn't have peanut butter. Solution: we did have peanuts and butter. So I sat in front of the tv watching afternoon cartoons, mashing peanuts and butter.

A Nigella cake recipe called for lining the tin with clingwrap. I had memories of my stepdad heating dinner in the oven without removing the clingwrap (with disastrous results), so I was very apprehensive about following her instructions. In the end I decided to follow the recipe, but the Melted Plastic Cake that resulted has forever ruined my trust in Nigella Lawson.

:) This post may go down as the most answered in history! Love reading these answers; and here's one more:
I had just moved out of the house and had begun cooking on my own. It was one of those nights where you're missing home and really want some comfort food, just like mom made. So, naturally I chose to make some good old fashioned mac and cheese (not from the box!). What could be simpler, right? Macaroni pasta, some cheese, a little milk to keep things moist. Simple. Well, yes, if you remember that the pasta must be cooked first. Yup, that was the crunchiest mac and cheese ever. I think I ended up having a hotdog fr dinner instead.

When my sister was first married, she decided to take on Thanksgiving dinner for the two of us and our husbands. She called the night before and we went over all the things she was to do. We got to their apartment on T-day and she said she wasn't sure the gravy would work because her turkey did not have any giblets with it, only a neck. We managed to cobble together the gravy with a little help from a can of chicken stock, so all was well.

There was a funny smell in the kitchen, but we figureed that it was just the oven-she had not used it before. The turkey looked wonderful! Her husband went to trim off the big flap of skin on the front of the turkey--and I thought--remove the stuffing that was baked in there. No stuffing!! Out came the bag of giblets! The turkey still tasted ok, but she will never live that down. Her kids think it is very funny!

@sparrowsgo: that clingfilm cake is notorious in some circles!!

Apparently there are certain plastic wrap brands in the UK that are ok for baking (which I find entirely weird) but the recipe doesn't specify this and there are many, many, many people who have posted about melted clingfilm all over their ovens, into their cake, and ruined cakepans.

@jamina1: When I was about 12, a friend and I decided to make jello, and we grabbed a pyrex bowl and stuck it on the stove top to boil. Fortunately, we were irresponsible cooks and left the kitchen - moments before it exploded!

When I was in eighth grade, in family studies, my class made pizza. My group, we later realized, had already ruined our pizza by accidentally doubling the salt. But just for icing on the cake, we managed to set our oven to the self-clean cycle when we put our pizza in. It became a sort of fossilized pizza.

JanH: I did the same thing with my first Turkey. I couldn't figure out why I didn't get any gibblets, but found them cooked in the bag when carving the bird.

When I was a teenager I baked a marvelous rubbarb pie with homemade pie crust. It looked and smelled great. Unfortunately I had picked swiss chard from my friends garden instead of rubbarb and it tasted horrible!

Not exactly a cooking mistake but .. .The Russian deli up here in Washington Heights sells pitted sour cherries in large plastic containers. Yummy. I bought one, took it home. In the middle of the night, I wanted a snack of partially defrosted sour cherries. Put some in bowl, nuked it in the microwave for only 19 seconds. Took a mouthful. Tasted sorta funny.

Turns out that the Russian deli sells chicken hearts right next to the sour cherries. Bleh.

Boy have I had bloopers! My last one was where I made a rice dish that was supposed to have curry powder in it. I unwittingly grabbed for cayenne instead! We couldn't figure out why the curry seemed so spicy, but we ate it anyway. It finally dawned on me what had happened while I was doing the dishes. My mouth was still on fire.

On another occasion I made an apple pie for Thanksgiving. The recipe called for something like a tablespoon of lemon juice. There was a typo on my copy of the recipe, and I made it with something like 1/4 or 1/2 cup of lemon juice. Very sour, indeed!

ooh, me too! For New Year's Eve, 1999 we had about 8 people over for dinner. I had prepped the ingredients for cream cheese flan, a dessert I've made many times before. I popped the pan in the oven right before we sat down to dinner. When time was up I checked the oven... hmm, some browning going on, but still liquid underneath! We served coffee and ice cream, and I left the flan to bake some more. Four hours later, with the smell of warm sugar filling the house, but still no solid flan, I finally gave up and turned off the oven. It wasn't until we were cleaning up next morning that I realized I'd forgotten to put the eggs in the mixture! :)

Ditto on the Thanksgiving apple pie. I accidentally put salt into one instead of sugar (they had the same type of container), so in goes 2 cups of salt.

And what's worse was that it was also the dessert I brought with me to a colleague's Thanksgiving potluck. SO EMBARRASSING!

And even worse, I didn't get to show off my pie-making skillz :P

A friend of mine (who is an extremely good cook now) tells a great story about the time he messed up the frosting for a carrot cake he was making. Now he makes sure everyone knows the difference between cream cheese and cottage cheese...

Oh, wow, this is an interesting topic. Got one blooper of my own too...

I'm the kind who love to try out new things and that applies to my cooking as well. btw, i'd consider myself an amateur in the kitchen. One fine day, i tried making my own beef balls. Well, i kinda 'memorised' the recipe and sort of go at it based on what i remembered. Somehow, alonng the way i experimented with eggs or more flour, etc. I tasted every batch i made.

Guess what? In the end i just gave up. Was too full of the 'test speciments'. Some were too soft, some too rubbery, some were extremely out of shape, etc. After about 3 hrs, finally made one batch which resembles the real thing. Phew!

Now, i just buy the ready made ones :)

I finely diced a gladiolus bulb instead of a shallot once. I thought it looked kind of funny, but I grew the shallots and I thought it was just a deformed one.

My mom still tells this story, and I think it's been 20 years.

me and my dad made pickles once, many years ago - he read the recipe to me and i dumped the ingredients together. but, as pickle recipes are for *vast* quantities, we made a half recipe. except the salt. they were pretty tragic. i think we eventually used all of them finely diced and stirred into tuna, which seemed to be the only way they were near edible.

to this day he claims i mis-measured it. i swear that he misread it to me. which makes it a much better story to tell together =)

I can't remember what I was making, but I once burned chocolate when I was trying to melt it (not knowing that I needed to put it in a double-boiler instead of just straight into a pan on the stovetop). The smell is horrible and one not easily forgotten. My mother has never let me forget it. 20 years later and she brings it up from time to time. I've never burnt it since, that's for sure.

Last month, I was making vegan cupcakes for a potluck at work. I wanted to prove that cupcakes can be tasty and vegan. I could not understand why the frosting was not coming together, it was so crumbly. I added more butter, all the butter I had. When I finally got the consistancy right I tasted it. It was not sweet.
I had used corn starch instead of confectioners' sugar.

The next day I labeled all EVERYTHING.

Never assume the 7-Up delivery guy at Safeway can successfully help you pick out beef for kabobs. I was responsible for bringing beef kabobs to a barbecue and I had no idea what kind of cut to buy. He happened to be rolling by and I asked for his opinion and he said, "What about those (pointing to a family packs of meat) they're already cut into cubes." Yes! How convenient!

I diligently skewered, seasoned and marinated overnight about 8 lbs. of the stuff. Just as I proudly finished grilling the first batch, my friend said, "Those smell great! I made the mistake of using beef stew once and that stuff is so marbled it takes hours to-.." And right then my eyes shot up at him and I screamed, "OH NO!!!!! I think I used stew meat too!"

That was some of the tastiest and toughest barbecue I've ever had in my life!

I have had a few bloopers of my own, but none are as good as the legendary story of when my mother made dumplings when she was first married. Something went terribly wrong with the recipe and her little dumplings were like rocks. Not wanting to put something so wet into the garbage, she decided to flush the little guys down the toilet. Dumplings absorb water... and expand...

Um, gloria71?

Vegans don't eat butter. :/

As for my blooper, I accidentally grabbed cinnamon instead of the all-purpose seasoning when seasoning some steaks once... Same size bottle, same red cap, same shelf. Oops!

When I was a kid, my mother asked me to go pick some chives for her in the garden we had in the back yard. I had only a fuzzy idea of what chives looked like -- and that's why I uprooted all of her irises.

I actually wasn't a bad cook as a kid -- my friend across the street and I would often make cookies or cakes or brownies together -- so I generally did well in 7th grade Home Ec class. Except for one day, when I managed to somehow MELT the no-bake cookies in that day's class. Not burn them, not underbake them (they were no-bake, anyway). MELT them. Even the teacher couldn't figure out what the hell I'd done wrong.

I also once tried to crack an egg by tapping it on a flat surface, like Alton Brown was saying you should do -- except I tapped a little too hard and SMASHED it all over the flat surface instead. Said flat surface also happened to be the top of my stove, which was ON, so I had raw egg running into the burners and making a LOVELY smell. I had to turn off the stove and fish scrambled egg out of everything for several minutes.

All of this pales in comparison to the time I tried to make Dublin Lawyer for a college boyfriend, but that's more of a case of not knowing what the hell I was doing than making an obvious mistake, so that's another story.

i have done this also when i should've known better. i was making a walnut toffee for my sweet potatoes this thanksgiving. i didn't have any parchment to put it on so i thought wax paper should be fine. wrong! most of it would not come off. i was not happy.

i also once wasted 4, count 'em, 4 cans of sweetened condensed milk trying make dulce de leche in my microwave. burnt it beyond recognition, 4 times in a row. how stupid do you have to be to keep trying something that obviously wasn't going to work? i walked across the street to try to do it in our church's microwave & it worked beautifully. my stubbornness finally paid off! :) also, i think this means i need a new microwave.

I tried to warm up the jar of maple syrup on the stove. Yep - in the glass jar. Of course, said glass jar went "pop" and there was maple syrup *everywhere*.

A couple weeks ago I decided to fry up some turkey kielbasa sandwich for brunch with the BF. I chopped it into rounds and cooked it up with some onions and paprika, and even though it looked delicious, he and I were picking little strands of tough stuff out of our mouths the whole time.
That casing around the sausage? The one with the company's name printed on it? Turns out you have to take that off BEFORE you cook the sausage.

(I made the rest of it today, though, and it was perfect and casing-free. :D)

This isn't my blooper, though I've certainly had a few. A few years back my roommate came home from work, boiled some water for pasta, threw the spaghetti in, and while she waited for it to cook... fell asleep on the couch. I came home probably 2 hours later to find foot-high flames shooting out of the pot! The black muck on the bottom of the pot was impossible to scrub out - we ended up throwing the whole thing away. We spent the better part of the next year offering to make her coffee anytime she planned on cooking. :)

this past thanksgiving i had my first public blooper .. my sister insists on the parker house rolls that are in the metal container already. Well, stopping somewhere ON thanksgiving day all I could find were no-name brand ones in a plastic container. Well, being used to the other ones, when the oven was preheated, i stuck those suckers in.. when my mother went to take them out, she started laughing hysterically. The plastic had melted! Luckily she keeps a not-stick mat on her oven racks and the rolls came right off of the melted plastic ... My boyfriend laughed that I can cook so well most things, but pre-made rolls, I failed!