The year was 1995. It was my first year being married and my husband and I were spending it alone in Minnesota without any relatives or the normal family traditions to comfort us. I had planned dinner to be a combination of the best of both of our family favorites until the dog jumped up, knocking my elbow, sending the casserole across the room and eventually taking out a house plant and a freshly baked pie. I thought the world had ended.
I won't lie... there were tears. The dog was scared after a scolding, but then rejoiced in the new found buffet on the floor. My husband and I were sad briefly, but after analyzing the situation, we realized that no one else could have pulled off such a stunning act of ridiculousness.
So there we sat, on the kitchen floor while the dog ate the gravy and meaty bits out of the casserole that was oozing down the door and onto the floor. We laughed and told stories of years gone by and other family disasters and silly tales. We ate pie partially covered in casserole and although we scraped off the icky bits, and I've made better pies since, to date, it was one of the greatest meals we've ever eaten.
Although we didn't have our family or any meal that resembled a true holiday feast there's something oddly beautiful about food flying through the air in slow motion. Not many can say they've spent Christmas with their loved one, eating off the floor watching the dog try to get gravy out of her whiskers and we're glad we made the most of it.
Do you have a terrifying meal disaster that stayed sour or turned out to be ok in the end? Share your story in the comments below!
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i don't have any major disaster stories, but i do have one from my mother...
37ish years ago, my mother attempted to make dinner for my father. they were recently married, and she wanted to make a good impression on him.
they were pretty poor, and their options were very limited, so she attempted to make a box of macaroni and cheese. without boiling the noodles.
they went out for dinner that night...
Well, I don't know if it qualifies as a "kitchen" disaster but.... I made two beautiful pumpkin pies, first time ever that my crust was perfect! Along with homemade whole wheat dinner rolls and cranberry-persimmon sauce, I packed them in a big box with other store-bought goodies to take from Southern California to Phoenix to my husband's sister's for the holiday.
Unfortunately, when my husband packed up the truck, my big box'o'food was left behind in the garage!
Thankfully, our neighbor was able to break in and eat it all up! One for the storybooks... :)
By the way - this was last week, Thanksgiving 2010!
This past Thanksgiving, I attempted my first turkey and homemade apple pie. Turkey turned out beautifully. The pie however, was another story. I took it from the oven floor to a cold cookie sheet which shattered the pie plate, at 5:30p, right before dinner was about to be served. Luckily no one was hurt, but my poor boyfriend had to run out and buy pie before the grocery stores closed at 6.
The kicker was, the pie was really pretty! No cracks and just the right amount of color. Oh well, guess I'll be needing a nonstick pie pan for Christmas, haha.
One Christmas I was helping my parents make dinner in the kitchen when we noticed the ceiling looked a little saggy. We decided to ignore it, but it decided otherwise. Just as we were about to eat water burst from the ceiling drenching everything in that corner of the kitchen and practically flooding the floor. Apparently there was about a week's worth of leaky pipe water just waiting for an opportune moment to strike.
My boyfriend bought some dried chickpeas at the Indian grocery store to save money over canned chickpeas. So one night he filled a huge pot with enough dried chickpeas to feed 10-15 people and covered it with a bunch of water to soak overnight. Once he put the lid on it, though, he forgot about it and let it sit on a cold burner for 3 1/2 days. When I went to use the kitchen I noticed a pot in the corner, lifted the lid, and was faced with an entire spaghetti pot densely packed with orange foam. The kitchen immediately filled with a distinct cheesy smell. We poured the whole mess into the sink and tried to wash the foam down the drain, but the more we ran the water the foamier--and cheesier-- it got, billowing out of the sink, into the floor, and over the counters. I grabbed a bucket and started tossing buckets-full of foam into the backyard, which at that point smelled pretty cheesy too. Puffs of foam became airborne as they traveled from my balcony to the yard and began to float into the neighbors' yards. We finally washed what was left down the drain and threw the solid chickpeas in the compost. Our kitchen smelled like cheese for a few days. I called the smell, "garbonzarella," while he called it, "garbonzola."
One year we were celebrating my mom's birthday at my parents' house. We had gotten a chocolate chip chiffon cake with white chocolate shavings from a wonderful local bakery. We were bringing it in to sing happy birthday, and my dad got the bright idea of carrying the cake pedestal by the stem. Except that the cake was sitting on the pedestal on just a doily, and the pedestal was crystal. Slippery!
As we walked in with the cake, I was walking ahead of my dad, carrying our family's traditional birthday candle, lit (rather than candles on the cake). He must have gotten too much momentum in the arm, because the cake went flying off the pedestal and landed face down on my back!! Somehow my dad caught the cake before it slipped off my back onto the floor, and he got it right-side-up on the pedestal. We brought it back to the kitchen, nudged it back into shape, and brought it out more carefully a second time. It had a big dent out of one side but it was still beautiful and still delicious!
KittyWrangler I have no idea how chickpeas work or why they would foam or smell cheesy - which I think made your story that much funnier. Thanks for the good laugh, what a ridiculous I Love Lucy scenario...
A friend of mine had never baked a pie before. So she came over to my house -- I was going to help her with her pie crust.
She made the perfect apple pie. It was beautiful. She decided to take it outside to cool. She had the pie in one hand and a chair (to set the pie on) in the other hand.
As she stepped out the front door, she tripped -- flinging her perfect apple pie across the front lawn.
We retrieved the pan and ate the bits that clung to the bottom with vanilla ice-cream. It was still good.
A friend of mine invited us over for Easter a few years ago and we were greeted at the door with the smell of burning plastic and my friend who said "we're eating spaghetti because I put the ham in the oven with the plastic still on it."
The year is 2002, it is the 4th of July. It's the first year our vacation house, built by my grandparents and designed by my mother, has been fully functional. My dad is making fried chicken. Everything is going well, the dogs are drooling over the smell, as are the rest of us. Suddenly, a crash breaks the jovial mood, as scalding oil floods the kitchen. The oil had turned the new stovetop into a greased pig, and the pot had finally given way to gravity. "THE WOOD FLOORING!", my mother screams.
Fortunately, there was enough chicken already done, and we were able to corral the dogs, who had decided this was a clear sign that they were allowed to get at the crispy bits in the boiling oil. Lessons were learned (by the dogs), the paper towel industry got a boost, and the meal was salvaged, but the kitchen smelled like fried-chicken-oil for a few weeks.
It was pretty glorious, from a safe distance.
Last Christmas, a multiple-person family disaster: Sister broke an entire bottle of olive oil at 10:30 am; we were late getting back from family photos, so prep was rushed, my other sister (not a cook at all) overbeat the mashed potatoes, resulting in mashed paste; my mom overestimated the time needed to cook a turkey breast, yielding overcooked turkey; I managed to drop a chunk of the turkey on the floor while carving; the turkey could have been fixed if there was gravy, but the pan juices were burnt to the bottom of the roasting pan, and we'd forgotten canned gravy at the store, so no gravy. My mother, who doesn't normally drink, told me to bring in the bottle of wine. Oy.
@ladyseven Ha! of COURSE, the brand new handmade family heirloom floor. Man, those scalding oil disasters are the worst. BTW, it's pretty cool that your family got together to build a house!
@mimee25 lol, I'm glad the unexplained foam made the story funnier to you, because at the time it really made it more horrifying.
December of sixth grade, I had offered to make a cake for my Environmental Club Christmas party. The day before, I painstakingly made a sheet cake, and was stunned when it actually came out of the pan with no heroic efforts. I carefully iced and decorated it, then went to go cover it. My mother stopped me.
"No, no, you'll mess up the icing! Just leave it uncovered."
The next day, I went to go pick up the cake. Again, my mother stopped me.
"No, you'll drop it. Let me carry it to the car."
We walked out to the car, where I opened the back door and watched as she leaned in to place the cake on the back seat. Her purse shifted, and time slowed as the cake did a full 180 and landed, icing down, on the back seat.
The fabric back seat.
That hadn't been vacuumed since it was bought.
We somehow got the cake back onto the plate and ran back inside. We picked off as many fuzzies as we could, then applied another layer of icing.
My classmates thought the cake was great. I, needless to say, didn't try a piece.
I don't have any super big disasters under my belt, just one pot of overbeaten mashed potato paste and one saucepan of some pretty terrible giblet gravy (two separate Thanksgivings).
These stories remind me of my favorite episode of Friends. The gang keeps getting super awesome cheesecake delivered to them by accident, and at the end they fight over it and it ends up on the floor. Everyone's on the floor picking at it with forks when Joey enters the hallway looking horrified, at which point he pulls a fork from his pocket, gets on the floor with them and asks what they're eating. Priceless.
Also, one of my favorite Homer Simpson quotes, "Mmmm, floor pie."
Ooops!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sjohnston/3691304101/in/set-72157621007051032/
Sorry Martha Stewart Star Jams.
Last year at thanksgiving. My mom put the cranberries on the top shelf of the fridge. My mother has the nickname of "grace" for a reason, and cranberries went EVERYWHERE. Two peoples' sweaters were completely covered, we cleaned cranberries off the walls and surfaces. Two months later I was changing the lightbulb and found a stray cranberry on the ceiling fan!
My aunt got married a few years ago. She's a pastry chef, and had made her own incredible cake. The cake was on a card table, and she and her new husband were carrying the whole rig out into the garden when the leg snagged on the door frame and the cake hit the floor. Everyone was horrified, except the bride. Without a moment's pause, my aunt reached down, picked up a lump of cake and fed it to her new husband. A good marriage omen if ever I saw one!
I don't have one about me (that's funny, anyway). But when I was about 8, my mom, decided to make cherry pie for dessert. Because we were eating with friends, she decided to double my grandmother's pie dough recipe for the first (and last) time. Too bad she didn't knead it in two batches. The pies looked and smelled perfect coming out of the oven. Small problem. The crust was so tough we couldn't cut into them with a cleaver. No exaggeration, we gave our friends' doberman some of the dough scraps we'd cooked alongside the pie ... and the dog COULDN'T CHEW THEM. Needless to say, we teased mom about 'the iron-clad pie' for days.
It wasn't completely a kitchen failure, but one Easter about a decade ago, there was a huge windstorm and the power at our house was knocked out. On top of that, my brother had the stomach flu, and my grandparents were visiting. We ended up having KFC takeout for dinner, since they still had power! It was kind of an awful holiday, and Easter hasn't ever been the same to me since...
My mother's husband, at the time, had moved into his parents home. The father had passed away the year prior, and his mother was ill as well. I drove an hour and a half to visit for the day. Someone I was wrangled into cooking the meal.
The turkey was cooking for an hour or so when it started to smoke in the oven. There was a strange odor as well. After removing everything from the oven, there was nothing to be found. After further investigation I found a tuft of hair in the broiler area....curious and frightened at the same time, I went further in. There was a rat and rabbit both "burned"...
Guess what..............they were warm and we had spaghetti for Thanksgiving =)
One year when I was a child, our oven broke on Thanksgiving day. The turkey was thawed, but still raw. We still had the stovetop, but no oven. My dad went to the 7-11 and bought little pies, and my mom sawed up the raw turkey and microwaved it in batches. My sister and I thought it was great fun, but my parents weren't so thrilled. Everything was cooked in time to eat dinner, though :)
My dad is not a great cook (my parents are divorced), and there was one Thanksgiving when he so dramatically overcooked the turkey that when he tried to lift it out of the roasting pan onto the serving platter the meat and bones detached from each other entirely.
He also attempts to forage jerusalem artichokes from our backyard and cook them in an appetizing (read: edible) manner every year. He's had really only VERY limited success.
This isn't holiday-related, but my worst cooking disaster is related to the improper disposal of lobsters.
One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories involves a near-disaster: five minutes before chow time, my mother tested the turkey for doneness, and the thermometer somehow EXPLODED inside the turkey. She burst into tears, but my quick-thinking brother was already on the phone with 1-800 Butterball (and I, cell phone in hand, was ready to call out for a pizza). Luckily we managed to salvage most of the turkey, and after a few glasses of wine, my mom managed to join in the laughter.
Also, I bring it up every year.
@jskwa It's not a holiday kitchen disaster if it's not brought up every year.
My dad used to cooked once a year - for Thanksgiving. Nothing special, just turkey, potatoes, canned yams, canned cranberries and store bought rolls. Every year he'd get busy with the turkey or potatoes and forget the rolls in the oven until the fire alarm went off. It happened so often it became one of our family traditions! We cook the meals now, but we still reserve a roll or two to burn in the oven... its just not Thanksgiving until the fire alarm has gone off.
My family has one of these stories. It gets told every year at Christmas dinner.
My mother, 7 months pregnant with her second child took up my Grandmothers offer to "have Christmas dinner" at her house. So, my family (I wasn't born yet) packed up their station wagon and drove 4 hours in a blizzard in Saskatchewan on Christmas morning... to arrive at my grans house to discover that my grandmother (she's a real gem) had meant "come and MAKE Christmas dinner for the ENTIRE family", and that my grandmother hadn't even put up a tree that year!
Not wanting to ruin everyone's Christmas, my mom spent the entire day in the kitchen on her feet making a christmas FEAST.
So, the meal was laid out on table ready to be enjoyed, my dad brings in the bird places it on the table. Christmas was saved! Everyone went to sit down and my grandma says first she wants to take a picture of this beautiful meal.
She shoo's everyone out of the frame, and just as she takes the photo the table colapsed. Right down the middle!
The entire meal became a pile of mess on the dining room carpet...
My mother cried, my grandmother was upset that her carpet was ruined, my many aunts and uncles did thier best to keep my mother from going into labour. They rescued what they could and my mom said we'd never travel for Christmas again.
32 years later, we have never had another Holiday meal at Grandma's house.
Mine was a practice holiday dinner "horror story." I had 4 friends over in July to be my guinea pigs for a practice run of me hosting the annual family Christmas dinner. I knew that if the meal turned out poorly #1-they'd still be my friends and #2-they'd happily eat the pizza would order for my "plan B."
I did everything as if it was December to work out the timing: cleaning my apartment, shopping, prep work, etc.
I planned a pretty ambitious main course: Beef Wellington. 3 friends were in the living room enjoying the h'ors devours. 1 friend was opening the wine.
I had the beef wrapped in the duxelles and puff pastry. I had realized that I wanted the tempurature probe to go into the "back side" of the Wellington. As I was turning the baking sheet around on the counter it slipped out of my hands and THUD the Wellington hit the floor. I let out a loud "OH NO!" My friend opening the wine started laughing. My other friends yelled, "What happened?"
I got the Wellington back on the baking sheet (within the "mandatory" 5 seconds) and walked to the living room to deliver the bad news and shared that I had washed the floors they day before.
They looked at each other and each said, "I'm good. Let's eat it."
We had a wonderful "Christmas in July" dinner and everyone happily volunteered to be guinea pigs for future practice dinners.
Some years ago, my parents had a bunch of family over. My dad's really good at making espresso using a stovetop pot, so he was going to make enough for everyone. For some reason, he forgot to put in the gasket after he washed the pot. Well the coffee pot blew up in his face and spilled everywhere. It happened so fast and no one really saw what happened. We all thought the pot or the coffee hit him in the face or in his eyes, which it did, but it wasn't as bad as we feared. It was just spilled coffee, but it could've been worse.
This doesn't quite qualify as a disaster, but we still repeat the story every year. Years ago at Thanksgiving dinner my younger sister was complaining that the food on her plate was touching. My mom piped in saying, "Well, dear, if you only take a small portion of everything, it will all fit on your plate without touching," indicating her plate as an example. We all stared at her food for a minute until my dad asked sweetly, "Honey, are you eating off a platter?" She had apparently grabbed a serving dish instead of a plate and was mortified that she'd filled up a dish twice as big as everyone else's while lecturing on portion control.
She will still blush when we bring it up at family gatherings.
A friend cooked a large turkey dinner for a bunch of guest. When she opened the oven, the roaster pan slid off of the rack and the turkey tumbled onto the floor. She picked it up, rinsed it off, carved it, and noone was the wiser!
Years ago (before I was born actually) my aunt brought her new boyfriend home to meet the family for Christmas. Every year my mom and her three sisters get together with my grandma for Christmas dinner and holiday partying. Upon meeting my aunt's new boyfriend the family was overjoyed, there would be someone to leave behind to watch the food while they ran out to the store for a couple of last minute shopping excursions. Giving him instructions to put the turkey in the oven at 2pm, and preheat it a few minutes earlier.
Setting an alarm he preheated the oven on time and stuck the turkey in. When the rest of the family returned they noticed a strange smell, and quickly discovered the plastic cutting board the turkey had been on in the oven under the turkey. The oven rack kept the cutting board in one piece, but it ended up as strings of melted plastic and made the bottom half of the turkey inedible.
He is now one of the best cooks in the family, and he has that cutting board hanging in his wine cellar to remind him how well he did impressing the family regardless of the melted chaos.
This reminds me of a joke I learned 40 years ago, when I was ten years old: "What world catastrophe happened when a waiter dropped a platter at Thanksgiving? It was the downfall of Turkey, the overthrow of Greece, and the destruction of China."
I had spent all day making this gorgeous perfect amazing vegan pumpkin ginger "cheese"cake. It was cooking super well, and I had even bought a new spring from pan from williams and sonoma that day just for this cheesecake. Geust were over when the cheese cake was ready to be done, so I walked into the kitchen and in my excitement to get the cheese cake out of the oven I hit the spring latch. To my horror and lack of cordination I then tripped hitting my hand on the oven rack tipping the pan and spilling the molten contents everywhere. My oven and myself were covered. I just sat on the floor and wept. My poor boyfriend had to clean me and everything else up.
A couple of Easter's ago, Central Texas got about 8 INCHES OF SNOW! Our power went out "Easter Eve" Our big meal was cancelled, but the whole family slept downstairs near the fireplace and we made smoores and drank beer that was kept cool by our "beer-gloo" (snow in an ice chest) - We made some great family memories together, mostly because it is so hard to fall asleep with your entire 16 member family in the room.
The first time I ever attempted to make cupcakes from scratch (as a teen), I messed up the ingredients and the cupcakes sank in as soon as I pulled them out of the oven. My mom said it wasn't in the budget to make a new batch and instead we just slathered on the icing extra thick. No one was the wiser, but I do get reminded of that fiasco from time to time.
Second - last Thanksgiving I was in charge of making the stuffing. I made it in two Pyrex dishes and had them baking in the oven of our RV when the glass must have touched the side of the oven and exploded. Glass got everywhere and had shot out of the oven into the camper. Luckily, no one was hurt and the second container of stuffing was cooking safely in the house! :)
I had only been dating my now-husband a couple of months when I threw a dinner party to introduce him to some friends. Walking to the table I dropped half the dinner down the wall onto the floor. Instead of freaking out like I normally would, I laughed and opened another bottle of wine. He then told me he loved me - for the first time. :)
@kay_jay - that is HILARIOUS. Thanks for the great laugh in the middle of a boring work day.
not a total disaster, but my mom once grabbed my box of oregon chai tea from the fridge thinking it was chicken broth. in her defense, the boxes are the same size and color. she was making chicken marsala. it was disgusting. but funny! so so funny. ended up being unsalvageable but we had fun tasting it and making 'eeeeew' noises and faces.
So, it was the first time I hosted Thanksgiving in our new home. It was my first time making a Turkey for 17...the whole shebang. My family was less than patient when dinner wasn't ready at 5:30 as planned. My cousin's wife walked into the kitchen and asked where she should set down her green bean casserole since all available counter space was occupied. In a moment of sheer madness I told her to set it down on the stove (a HOT electric burner to be exact). About half an hour later the green bean casserole (packed into a Pyrex) completely EXPLODED in my kitchen right before we sat down to eat! There were shards of glass everywhere-even in my hair and it took all of my strength not to burst into tears! Four years later there is a little piece of green bean casserole inside the oven door (which I cannot get to for the life of me) taunting me and serving as a little reminder of the very first Thanksgiving we spent in our home.
Dropping the container of JUST made homemade eggnog on the floor pulling it out of the freezer (eggnog wasn't frozen and the plastic container shattered like glass), floor, cabinets and walls a mess.
@paigep - WOW! almost the same story!!!!!
the pumpkin cheesecake disaster of 2007. my mom was making one large, and 3 small cheesecakes. we decided to peek at them, just before the timer went off. they were lovely. mom put on her oven mitt and pulled out the rack. they looked like they needed a little longer, so she went to push the rack back in. turns out, she didn't have the rack.... only the jelly roll pan they'd been in, and it flipped, spilling everything. weeping on the floor, the whole deal. so sad.
I'm Jewish and was celebrating my very first Christmas with my boyfriend and his family. Their family tradition is to pop a breakfast casserole in the oven after opening presents. We prepped the casserole and everything was going fine--until it came time to take it out of the oven. Somehow, as I was pulling the dish out, I managed to drop it on the floor. Luckily, only a little bit of the food wound up on the ground and we were still able to enjoy our casserole. To this day, though, they still joke about how the Jewish girl tried to ruin Christmas.
My Mom makes homemade yeast rolls for every holiday. One year she forgot to add the salt in the recipe. They weren't a total disaster, just tasted a little off. The real kicker was that she had made extra and gave them to her friends. Every year when she make the rolls we ask her if she remembered the salt!
It wasn't a holiday but I was making dinner one night, something pan fried I think, and even being beyond competent in a kitchen, somehow everything was wrong. I was very upset that day for whatever reason and just remember pouring a good pour of oil in the pan and before I could get the meat in, it was popping and splurting in gushes out the pan. I reached for the knob to turn it down and a gush went over my hand. I reached with the other, same thing. I tried to move the pan, burned again. It was bizarre. I've fried my whole life and this was like my food was attacking me. I eventually got the pan off the heat and turned off the stove but a few minutes later I remember my husband coming home to find me slumped over crying my eyes out with out COVERING the hood and like a sea all over the stove running down to the floor. We found some later as far as the kitchen table!
When I was MUCH younger (probably like 10 or so I think), I didn't know that flavored oils, you know, actually tasted like their flavor.
I wanted to make box brownies, and the only oil I could find in the house was ......lemon herb olive oil.
I was so proud of my achievement, you can imagine my disappointment when my brownie-excited mom bit into one and grimaced.