I dump it. I call my pizza or other delivery place and I go, "Wow, isn't that cool, I learned that Blahblahblah when mixed with blahblahblah means failrific! So cool to learn new things." I say this outloud and in depth. By the time the pizza has arrived I've tried to figure out what I did wrong and move on. It doesn't work if I don't say it outloud. (Mind you that is always outloud to myself but still.)

I love how "pet" and "husband" fall into the same category of undesirable food disposal. ;)

If it's truly inedible, I toss it. All part of learning to cook!
http://www.seejencook.blogspot.com

LOL Annegret, that must be why my OH and dog follow me around all the time!

Saroya, mistakes happen, chalk it up to experience. The only advice I can give you is to prepare well and not be on meds when cooking! :) I salted the rice three times when on allergy meds last time! Luckily the rest of the dinner turned out fine, just added some bread instead...

Good lord don't foist the bad on unsuspecting friends!!! Dump, and order pizza. Guiltlessly. You made a mistake. Whoops. If it's really terribly important to you not to waste food, you can't really try new things because the odds of failure are too high. But if humans had consistently chosen safety over experimentation, we'd be artichoke-less and living in caves. So you're just part of the great chain of evolution! What's wrong with that?

I keep my disasters to myself. If I can't stomach it, I'm pretty sure nobody else could either. I keep a few cans of random gruel in the pantry for that unfortunate occasion.

I hate to toss. I taste - try and improve if I can. However, other night I made the sweet potato fries (think the recipe was on this site) and some turned out okay, but there were quite a few burnt. Decided to bury them in some split pea soup I had made, blended it in, and you you couldn't taste the burnt.

I find blended soups can hide a multitude of "stuff" ... and still taste good. Small bits and pieces you have in the fridge, want to get rid of, etc. It's no small wonder, I never order soup when I go to a restaurant!

This week I made unsuccessful split pea soup (still trying to figure out why it went awry), so i strained the non-mushy peas out and reused the broth, and composted the rest of the failed soup. I'm still feeling guilty and disappointed that the soup failed (I made such a large batch of it too), but better luck next time!

Bread failures make good breadcrumbs, grind them up and toast them.
Depending on what you've overspiced, you have soup.
Burnt things are just Cajun, though if totally charred might be good for fertilizer. (if you're really creative, soap.)

I have chickens (in city limits where they are not yet legal) and they love my mistakes. Do you know anyone with chickens, possibly even secret chickens :)

I have a great food recycling plan, but it only works if you have access to (some) wildlife. I live in a city but I work on a college campus that is loaded with squirrels, crows, and sseagulls. I have gotten into the habit of bringing leftover food in for the animals on campus and they loooooooove it.

The squirrels were especially adorable when eating leftover grilled cheese sandwiches!!! :)

P.S. I love the idea of "secret chickens." :D

I salvage what I can. If it can be turned into something else or burnt part removed I'll do that. I hate throwing away food and, for most things, there is a way to salvage at least part of it.

I recently burned the bottoms of a pan of cinnamon rolls. I cut the burnt bottoms off and made bread pudding. The pudding was really good.

If it's really bad, I throw it out. (I live in an apt and do not want to feed the wildlife...aka NYC rats and pigeons!)

But a lot of times, I try to salvage...soggy veggies can work great in an omelet, or put a bland soup over rice with some spices. If I can make it work, I will. I made not-so-great sauce (from a recipe too!) and I froze some of it so I didn't have to eat it all at once. It will be treasured on some day when I come home with nothing else in the house...I'll steam a ton of veggies, maybe saute some mushrooms, and eat it jazzed up.

In essence, to make it work, I rework it.

I'm a salvager too. I cut off the burnt parts. I add stuff to overspiced dishes until the flavor balances. I recently made a pretty horrible pasta in vodka tomato sauce, and salvaged it by mixing in a roux (which upped the creaminess and cut the overwhelming alcohol flavor).

And if I've done everything I can think of and it's still no good, I compost without guilt. But that rarely happens.

I seem to have this dilemma every once in a while, and I ususally can't stomach throwing it out the same night I put all my hard work into it. So I box everything up in tupperware and throw it in the fridge, vowing that I will eat it sometime soon.

Usually I don't find it for about a month...and let me tell you bad food sitting in the fridge for a month does not smell good - sometimes I haven't even had the stomach to clean out the tupperware so I just toss it all. I should learn to rid myself of the bad food right away, but I just can't do it!

http://www.abbeycatchat.com

Usually I only have issues with burning things and I cut, scrape away the burned portions and eat the food. (Attention span issues related to oven usage generally).

I can't recall anything coming out gross tasting, but I really really read ALOT of reviews before trying a recipe and I try to use recipes from reliable sources.

I experiment a lot, and I do a fair amount of creative reuse. A tough and boring celery root salad got rinsed off in a colander and the celery root tossed into a pot of beef stew. A boring and undercooked kale dish ended up mixed with spicy tomato sauce and cooked with pasta.

But truly bad things sometimes just have to get dumped. I feel guilty, but I rarely make the same mistakes twice in the kitchen, so chalk it up to a learning experience.

haha...that picture actually happened to me. I tried to bake an angel food cake in a toaster oven and it caught on fire!

It depends...if the flop still tastes okay then I'll eat it. If it tastes bad, it's buried in the garden for the worms to enjoy. I will not foist it off on someone else.

just a thought about tossing the mistakes to feed the wildlife...not sure where you guys live - but i live in a somewhat rural area and I would NEVER do that. Putting any sort of food in your yard or around your house for the wildlife to eat, only teaches them that your house = food. And then you'll have raccoons going through your garbage at night and squirrels on your doorstep. No thank you!

Hot sauce. But then again, I don't bake. Maybe I should reconsider this technique, though, as most of my mistakes lately have involved making food so spicy no one can eat it.

I agree that bread pudding is a great way to save botched batches.

I would never think of giving a flop to friends/family and 99% of the time, we just salvage whatever disaster we cooked up and make the best of it. They can't all be winners and that is the best way to learn.

Here's one of the reason why men dominate the upper echelons of professional cooking. When the screw up a dish they throw it out, it doesn't make them any less of man or for that matter any less of a chef. Women in western culture still live under the expectations of a different age where men came home at 5pm to a home cooked meal and a well made martini. A failure in the kitchen was as much personal failure as it was a technical failure. It was an affront to her womanhood. Such societal expectations have made women excessively risk averse, less prone to take risk, more apt to make the safe meal than risk failure on a more adventurous one. So I guess the answer to your question is simple, get over it, toss it or better yet compost it and start over. Too late? Order Pizza or Chinese takeout.

7lyer: what a male chauvinistic comment!

7yler has a point, if an overly simple and pedantic one. Don't feel guilty if you really screw something up. It's not like you gave anyone salmonella. Be proud that you tried something new! Learn what you can from your experience and then order a pizza.

I cook and bake a lot. I try new things pretty often.

I ROYALLY screw up at least once a month; particularly if I'm stressed, which is when I most enjoy baking. Burnt cookies are SO dissapointing, but nothing like as bad as substituting salt for sugar in them, yeeech!
I've made some really horrific things, which my Fiance tries, and then tells me that, no matter how bad it is, it's still better than he can do, and reminds me that the x I made for dinner last night was fantastic, so I should just move on. I have also given him food poisoning on several occasions, and he's been quite nice about it. Naturally, I never get sick from my mistakes (lucky, I guess?).

I tend to compost anything that my Fiance won't eat; he's got fairly low standards, and will usually eat my mistakes pretty happily. That said, neither of us is above ordering pizza or defrosting something when the mistake is particularly bad. I like to make extra of things I know we like and freeze the leftovers; even if I screw up, we can have something homemade, AND if I don't feel like cooking, we're covered!

Just keep trying. You'll get it!

If it's edible, I eat it. If it's not, I throw it out (composting is not an option here).

Don't let the guilt hinder you. If you do, you won't practice enough... which will lead to more messed up dishes, instead of fewer!