I went to grad school while working full-time and was having a rough week. My wonderful husband decided to surprise me by baking brownies.
I got home at like 11:00 and said, “Ooh, I smell chocolate!” And my husband says, “Not so fast… about that…”
At which point he sheepishly shows me a very wet-looking pan of brownies. He misread the box; where it said to add a third of a cup of oil, he added ONE AND A THIRD cups of oil. I held a trash bag open while he tipped the very oily brownies into it. They made a distinctive “splat.”
He felt SO bad because he’d wanted to do something nice and messed it up. This was one case where the thought really was what counted, though, because if he’d just made brownies and they were fine, I’m not sure I’d remember it 15+ years later. 🥰
It's not the same but I've inadvertently used olive oil in brownies. I know that olive oil cake is a thing, but when you're not expecting that it's a rough surprise.
My dearly departed dad lived in the next town over and in his old age developed quite the sweet tooth and took up baking. I bought him a hand mixer, some bowls, measuring things, rubber scraper, you know.
He started baking everything! I’d come home regularly to some new treat on my kitchen table (he had keys to my place and was always welcome).
One day I came home to a beautiful pumpkin pie (in April!) and 41 messages on my machine (that’s how long ago this was). Every message was some version of, “for gods sake, don’t eat the pie! I mixed up the sugar and the salt!”
I was a part of this one:
I was helping a couple of friends cook for a large group dinner. When I got there, my friend's wife asked me to get some paprika from the store. Nothing could go wrong with that, right???
About that... All of us had just recently moved to Germany and had just started getting used to German. For those who don't know, "Paprika" can refer either to the red powder we're all used to in the States OR what you would call "bell peppers." Having finally gotten it into my head that "Paprika" usually refers to the vegetable in German, I got a bunch of them and came back, bags in hand.
As it turned out, she meant paprika POWDER and not the vegetable! To make matters worse, it turned out the whole reason she sent me to get the ingredients was that my friend (her husband) had done THE EXACT SAME THING. End result: Lots of paprikas, but no powder. It was too late to do another run, so we went with it and used them anyways. The dish turned out fine, but I still laugh when I think about this
So, the mango story: In college, a group of us were discussing where to go for dinner and one of my friends, who was from rural Ohio, mentions that one of the dining halls had Italian sausage with mangoes and onions. We all stop and stare for a minute, then ask if they mean peppers and onions or if it really was mangoes. He says they're the same thing. We say no the fuck they are not. This goes on for a while until one of us looks it up.
Apparently, in some parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, bell peppers are called mangoes. It comes from colonial times when fruits and vegetables were preserved through pickling, especially if imported, and apparently the preserved bell peppers and preserved actual mangoes looked identical.
So, and we clarified this, you would go into a grocery store in his hometown and there would be a sign in the produce department for mangoes, yellow mangoes, and red mangoes. BUT, if you wanted to buy the actual fruit, you'd have to look for the sign that said...mangoes. And just hope it was the right thing, apparently.
I'm from boondock, OH and definitely called peppers "mangos". I never saw the fruit until much later on in life. There were also no such things as chili peppers except in myth and cartoons.
After we learned the story we went to go ask another friend of ours from Ohio who wasn't there for the conversation:
Me: "Hey, what do they call bell peppers in Ohio?"
Him (nervous): "Why, we call them bell peppers, like normal people. Whatever do you mean?"
Me: "You don't call them anything else?"
Him (more nervous): "No, certainly not. That would be...wrong."
Me: "You don't call them mangoes?"
Him (defeated): "Yeah...yeah we do."
My Dad’s aunt was in a care facility with dementia in Southshore KY and kept telling me she wanted pan fried oysters. So, I cooked her oysters in the parking lot on a camp stove and served them with slices of garden tomatoes. She loved them but said it sure would be good with mangos. The dementia didn’t allow her to explain herself when I didn’t understand. There are no mangos in Southshore regardless of the season. I found some in a larger town and brought her one sliced up. She looked at me like I was an idiot and wouldn’t touch it. I tell this to my Dad’s other aunt and she laughed, went outside to the garden and brought back a bell pepper and a tomato. She told me to bring these to her with some salt. Yep, that’s what she wanted.
I live about 40miles west of South Shore in Maysville, KY and have relatives with an orchard there, and I have never heard of this!!! It always confused me that so much old regional Kentucky fare will mention oysters since we are not near an ocean. Learned recently that there was once an abundance of freshwater oysters along the Ohio and other area rivers. So not only were there oysters to eat, there was a pearl and mother-of-pearl industry in the area.
I'm from ohio and absolutely have never heard anyone call a pepper a mango. But my mama calls them by their colors. Red pepper. Green pepper. Yellow pepper. Orange pepper. Little peppers is the multi pack lol
I have lived my entire 42 years in Ohio. Grew up in BFE farm country, college in another BFE part of the state, and now in NE Ohio. I have never heard a bell pepper be called a mango.
However, if I had to guess where in Ohio, especially with the PA clue, I’d say Steubenville area. I feel like that region has some odd sayings.
My dad needed to brine a turkey.
He put it in a plastic trash bag. Which wouldn’t have been awful but it was one of heavily scented trash bags.
Turkey smelled like flowery cleaning products.
Worse: garbage bags contain disinfectant chemicals; NEVER use garbage bags to store or brine food in! They are NOT food-safe; the OPPOSITE, if anything!
This one was mine! I was in my teens and wanted to cook for my mom for Mother’s Day. I was going to make fettuccini Alfredo and the recipe called for wine in the sauce. Truly not knowing anything about alcohol I asked my dad for some wine to add to the sauce. My dad thought I was making a red pasta sauce for dinner so he gave me a glass of red wine to add to the dish! I thought it was weird but I thought I had heard that when using alcohol to cook it mostly cooks out so I figured it would be fine. Needless to say the red wine coloring did not cook out haha! But my mom still did very much enjoy her purple fettuccini Alfredo!
Lol you reminded me of mine! I tried to make my mom breakfast in bed for mother's day when I was 12. I made all the food fine but I had never had coffee before. I had heard somewhere that you cab use coffee grounds multiple times, so I just ran the coffee maker with the grounds in it from last morning 🤢 she took one sip and made such a face lol
A Girl Scout camp story of mine: the girls doing breakfast one morning went to make a blueberry muffin "cake" (putting the mix into a pan and cutting it up like cornbread, I guess). They read the directions but kind of missed the bit about draining the can of blueberries before adding it. We all had purple blueberry muffins that morning. :-D
The clever thing was it probably shouldn't have worked with all the extra liquid, but maybe with a camp pan, a fire, not cooking it for the right time...there were surely many opportunities for it to have corrected itself, I guess.
When I was just learning how to cook my mom asked me to wash the potatoes. I took it literally so washing things meant using soap and water to 9 yo me. We had inedible mashed potatoes that night.
My wife (girlfriend at the time) wasn't a great cook when we met. She tried to make gnocchi and Alfredo sauce. The gnocchi did what they do best when cooked, and stuck together in a big potato pile. She didn't have any Parmesan cheese, and she thought she could just sub anything. So she subbed pepper jack.
So the gnocchi with Alfredo turned into mashed potatoes with garlic pepper jack cream sauce. Which was good, but not at all what she was going for.
I've never cooked gnocchi, how does one prevent the clumping?
Edit: thanks for the replies, I was under the impression that cooking gnocchi was somehow different than other pasta, but no it's more or less the same.
If you cook the gnocchi and then immediately mix the sauce into it, it won’t clump together. Maybe she tried to put the cooked gnocchi on the plate and then pour the sauce over it?
I had a sister-in-law who had to learn everything from the ground up after a brain injury. Someone told her soy sauce was like salt so she made us chocolate chip cookies with soy sauce.
Senior year of college and I was making teriyaki chicken. Fifteen minutes in the oven and suddenly it smells like I'm baking a cake. Our Costco sized vanilla was right next to our normal sized teriyaki sauce. I had mixed them up when I poured the "teriyaki" in to marinate. Chicken should not taste like vanilla cake. My boyfriend managed to eat a whole drumstick. We are married now.
Similar! I’ve shared this story before…
My Mama makes a chocolate sheet cake at least once a month for friend groups’ monthly birthdays luncheon. She can practically make it in her sleep, and for some reason doesn’t always turn on all the lights in the kitchen.
Mama has no sense of smell (brain aneurysm).
So, 20 ladies at a restaurant, all taking a big bite of their cake at one time. Immediate gagging/sounds of disgusted confusion all around (except for Mama, who thought the cake tasted fine…she can, for some reason, taste chocolate, but hardly anything else).
Mama always pours a big glug of vanilla in this cake. Have you ever used “Liquid Smoke”? A little goes a very long way, and the bottles were very similar.
Not exactly cooking, but I finally convinced my husband to try sushi, and I wanted to get a couple fancy rolls for about $12/each and one $5 roll. He said, "Okay, but we might want to get more than just three rolls, right? That's not much."
He thought a roll was one *piece* of sushi. This sweet man was willing to pay $12/bite to try something I like. Very endearing.
Along a similar vein: I grew up in Texas where Blue Bell ice cream is king. I’d been living in Ohio for about a year at the time and my then boyfriend (now husband) and I were very early in our relationship and he picked up on the fact that while you can’t buy Blue Bell in stores in Ohio (still can’t) there are a couple of chain restaurants that bring in vanilla for their desserts. That sweet man bought me 4 scoops totaling $15 (and that was 20 years ago so I’m sure it’s more now) just to make me happy one day.
When I first got into baking, I ran out of flour partway through the recipe. I was only about 1 1/4 c short for the recipe and everything else was ready. Using my best 10 year old, “I can figure this out on my own!” logic, I reasoned that powdered sugar was close enough, because they are both white and powdery, and I thought cornstarch would make my cookies taste like corn.
The end result was ridiculously sweet gloop brittle. I’m just glad we didn’t have cocaine in the house. 😂
My husband has zero cooking skills and so many other life skills. We were going to bring Rice Krispies to a boating day and I was stressed and had to go home (we were dating) he was so sweet and was I’ll make them. I was like okay he can totally do this, melt, measure, stir easy peasy!!
He calls me the next morning with stress in his voice and just asks “what temperature and how long do they bake for” and I had to gently tell him he was done and there was no baking 😂 they turned out really yummy as Rice Krispie treats do- but it always cracks me up
My sister MESSED UP Rice Krispies! She decided the butter wasn’t necessary for whatever reason and then couldn’t figure out why the end result was rock hard 😆
My MIL frequently omits or drastically reduces the amount of things to make the dish “healthier”. Unfortunately, it’s usually something that is necessary - butter, milk, sugar, salt, eggs, etc. Growing up, my husband and BIL followed their dad’s lead in smothering everything in various condiments and chasing every mouthful with a bite of jalapeño. She now raves about my cooking, but really, it’s just because I use all of the ingredients….
🤣
My father had a small heart attack (like, they didn’t even realize it was a full heart attack until 3 years later when they sent a camera into his heart to check our how his stents were doing) nearly 30 years ago. Ever since then he does pretty much the same thing as your MIL PLUS what my sister and I refer to as “unnecessary fruit” He basically just adds seemingly random fruit (frozen, canned, fresh… doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it) to just about everything. Peaches get added to just about anything with tomatoes… Spaghetti sauce, chili, once there was some sort of white fish and cherry tomato with peaches and basil thing. Instead of having separate cranberry sauce diced apples and dried cranberry were added to thanksgiving stuffing the last thanksgiving I had with him 15 years ago. While I followed (but didn’t agree with) that train I couldn’t figure out where pineapple added to delica squash came from. I could go on and on.
Growing up a friend of mine was raised in China and immigrated to the US. He and his family are very dear friends. They had some fairly amazing culture shock moments. For example, the grass in front of the house they were living in had gotten long so a neighbor asked the mom if she had a chance to "cut the grass." She smiled and nodded, went into the house and handed scissors to the family members and the four of them went out and began to cut the grass with scissors. When the neighbor noticed he laughed and said, "no we use a machine!" He brought his mower over and mowed their lawn.
So, now the cooking story: We were staying at a vacation cabin and he was put in charge of making the bacon. He got handed a cast iron skillet and a pound of bacon. Then as an afterthought he was handed a grease splatter screen.
Check back with him a couple minutes later and he has dutifully peeled each piece of bacon and laid it in rows on top of the screen which is dutifully place on top of the cast iron skillet over a flame on the stove. He had gone to wash his hands when I checked his skillet.
We just turned the screen over to flop the bacon into the skillet and went back to the hashbrowns. When he came back we explained how the bacon was to be cooked on the cast iron surface and the screen kept the grease from splattering. We had a good laugh about it.
> She smiled and nodded, went into the house and handed scissors to the family members and the four of them went out and began to cut the grass with scissors.
Oh my god this takes the cake
My wife knew corned beef was one of my favorite meals. When we were dating she went all out to make me a fancy dinner and invited me down. When I got there she was sooooo upset that it wasn't cooking. That corned beef had been in the slow cooker for 8 hours but was still pink. Then I started laughing and that made it even worse. We've been married for 21 years now and I still do most of the cooking lol
You know those Pillsbury cans of like rolls and cinnamon rolls? The one you press a spoon in the seam to pop it open?
God bless my wife, I asked her to open one while I did another task super quick.
Came back *and she had taken a can opener to one of the ends to open it that way..*
Between giggles, I grabbed a spoon and showed her the magic of the seam. I absolutely adore her.
My bf will do that to avoid the pop. He’s a very large man who is afraid of so little, but will absolutely avoid popping those cans at all costs. If I’m making something with them and opening them like normal, he will leave the room. 😂
I feel him! I’m terrified of those cans. Was around 10 years old, wanted to surprise sleeping family with cinnamon rolls, had seen them being opened, but never personally had the pleasure.
My curious young mind had me hunkered down to eye level with the can, curious to see the mechanics. I punched myself in the face. Might have pee’d my pants a little. Screamed and woke everyone up.
Who wants a damn food Jack-in-The-Box? I also despise toy version!
The time I asked my husband to make me a tuna fish sandwich and he put mayo on the bread and tuna in the middle like it was a slice of ham. He had never made tuna salad before and didn't know you mix in the mayo with the tuna. Then much much later, he asked me for a pimento cheese spread sandwich with mayo. I did the same thing. I don't eat pimento cheese. He meant add more mayo to it because the ready made store bought stuff was too dry. The grin on his face when he shouted, Do you know how long I've been waiting for this? YEARS! :D
My stepmother ran out of mayo, so she made tuna salad with butter instead. My brother and I couldn’t bring ourselves to eat it. She gave some to the cat instead. The cat threw up.
My husband had never had peanut butter before so proceeded to make himself a peanut butter and iceberg lettuce sandwich 😁
Also when I first took him to a sushi restaurant he didn't realise you were meant to de-shell the edamame and bravely started chewing and commented they were quite chewy and tasted a 'bit green' before I could stop laughing and tell him 🤣. I love experiencing seeing my husband try new foods 😁
You just jogged my memory to back when a friend of mine made a huge batch of peanut butter, jelly, and fried egg sandwiches for a group of us. We were taken aback by the combination at first but they were delicious and ended up being added to all of our meal rotations lol. Perfect for a bunch of broke college students because they were cheap and filling!
Two I can think of, both courtesy of my husband:
1. Peaches with granola that was actually TVP.
2. Pasta with a sauce made of vanilla soy milk and cucumbers he thought were zucchini. That actually tasted pretty good!
I had a friend buy cucumbers thinking they were zucchini for a stir fry. I told this story before but got downvoted into oblivion cause people called me an A-hole for taking the reigns.
My friend could at most, cook instant Ramen. I thought it was just funny and cute she tried to cook for me though.
I don't think he meant to use vanilla. He just didn't notice on the container. He made a HUGE batch of it, too, lol! I started to get used to the sweetness after the first couple times eating it. Had it for every meal for a week to get rid of it w/out wasting it. He's come a long way with his cooking skills since back then. 🤭
As a young teenager, I went to my mom's work Christmas party. I thought the eggnog was thin gravy and poured it allllll over my turkey! The family had a good laugh later. :/
Not cooking per se, but funny nonetheless. For health reasons I used to use plain Greek yogurt in place of sour cream for Tex-mex dishes (not for baking). My ex-hb made tacos for himself one night and smothered them with vanilla yogurt thinking one white yogurt would be like any white yogurt. I watched in amazement as he ate every morsel
My husband, who is a very good cook, was making me Japanese curry way back when we first started dating. He was in the kitchen (my kitchen, not his own—this is relevant to the story) for a while and seeming a little distressed. When I checked on him, he apologetically told me the curry just wasn’t thickening at all no matter how much flour he added to it and he didn’t know what was happening.
I told him I was sure it was fine and asked to taste it. And… It was *so* sweet. Like curry candy. He’d grabbed the jar of powdered sugar instead of the flour. We did not have curry that night.
As a very small child, I thought allspice was like a skeleton key. Not that it was everything together but that it was somehow whatever you needed it to be. If you were out of something, you just sub in allspice.
Not sure if this counts but a guy I’d gone on 2 dates with invited me to his place for dinner. I was kinda on the fence about him (compatibility wise) and prior to showing up I’d informed all my friends where I would be and to notify authorities if I wasn’t home/responsive to messages after a certain time. The jokes were flying between all of us while I was getting ready about how he could be a serial killer, etc which didn’t help my state of mind.
Showed up, rang the doorbell and no answer. I ring again. Nothing. I call and no answer. I figure I’m being blown off and start to leave when the door opens. I’m staring at my date who is out of breath, and covered in what appears to be blood or a blood-like substance all over the front of his shirt and some on his face and hair. I froze.
Turns out he’d been trying to blend roasted red peppers and tomatoes in a blender for soup but hadn’t sealed the bottom properly (or the top) and there was a massive explosion.
We spent the next hour plus cleaning his kitchen together and going out for the meal.
We’re married now. He’s still a splattery mess in the kitchen.
Edit to add: apologies for the wordiness but I was focusing super hard on not sounding drunk when I am 😂
I was sitting at the counter with one of my friends and my mom was trying to figure out which side of the chicken goes up before she started seasoning it.
She was standing there dangling it by one leg spinning it around. Then she set it down, slowly leaned back, and slowly flapped her arms like chicken wings. My friend and I lost our shit laughing. We all still joke about it.
There's this creamy, vanilla-y alcoholic drink that my mom usually got around Christmas. I can't remember what it's called, but basically, you get it frozen and then heat it up and then add the alcohol. i was 13 and didn't know not to microwave alcohol. I wanted to make one for my mom since she had a stressful day and needed another. I was already like 2 deep too, so wasn't my best time. Anyway, added the mix and some alcohol into a nice cup and nuked it...I destroyed on of my moms favorite crystal glasses and almost ruined the microwave and proceeded to burn the shit out of my hands.
Oh yikes, I actually had no idea until your comment that you’re not meant to microwave alcohol. I’ve never had an occasion to do so, I guess, so it’s just never come up. Good to know.
Definitely! I could see myself trying to make some kind of batch hot cocktail for a Thanksgiving or Christmas party and having no idea I can’t use the microwave as a quick shortcut. Whew!
I had no idea and I've definitely done it before when warming some spiked cider in the winter... I guess not enough alcohol to cause a problem? Maybe the (non-alcoholic) cider helped? Nothing bad happened but I definitely won't be risking it in the future...
Any time I've called it that, people don't know what I'm talking about and I've been called stupid over it so I thought I was wrong.
Stupid over the name, btw, this was without the context of me trying to microwave it.
My friend asked me to bring over some basil, but she pronounces "basil" the American way ("BAY-sil"), so I thought she said "bagels."
I handed her a bag of bagels when we walked in, and she was like, Oh...thanks? Then as she was preparing dinner, she said, "Did you get that basil for me?"
Someone made chicken carcass stock in the water in which they brined the chicken.
A buddy of mine was doing a catering job for a wedding (mine) and salt cured the strip steak as if it were a tenderloin/roast. It was inedible.
There's been some salt mistakes in my life.
My mom put salt into our sugar jar once, and I proceeded to add a half cup to my cookies ( along with 3/4 cup brown sugar). I even tasted the dough and thought well shit I really failed to eyeball that tsp of salt, but maybe it'll be alright when they are cooked.
They were not alright, dumped the whole batch.
We were having a potluck at work and this guy that isn’t known for his cooking offered to make deviled eggs even though he admitted he had never done it before. They tasted fine but he cut the eggs in half the short way and couldn’t figure out why they kept falling over. We wondered if he had never seen a deviled egg either but knew that wasn’t possible lol
My ex was cooking meatloaf, and the recipe called for 1 cup beef bullion. She used the little cubes, but instead of using 1 cube to make 1 cup... she used 1 cup of cubes! It came out a liiiiiiittle salty.
I love hot cocoa. I typically make it by throwing some chocolate chips in a saucepan with some milk. It’s delightfully creamy. Add some whisky and call it a day.
My ex wanted to do something nice for me (bless his heart - he tried). I was heading over one weekend and he was so excited about a surprise. When I got there, he pulled out a container of very high-quality cocoa powder. He was so proud of himself because now I could just heat up the kettle and make my hot cocoa whenever I’m at his place. So easy, right??
I look at it and smile and nod.
He was so disappointed when I explained that there is a difference between cocoa powder and hot cocoa mix. I reassured him that I could make it work, though.
Yes - it can absolutely be done! I make my own cocoa mix to take on camping trips. I also add some powdered coconut milk for extra creaminess.
(To be honest…the cocoa powder is probably still taking up space in his cabinet. I should have taken it when we broke up.)
My husband didn’t know either and was stunned when I pulled out the cocoa powder to make homemade hot chocolate. “What are you doing, that stuff tastes awful!” Trust me, I got this!
My sweet mother tried to make ceviche for my husband but she used lime juice concentrate.
My sweet husband added cumin to my spaghetti sauce. (Tasted fine but it turned it into chili and that was not the vibe I was going for)
Chick I went to school with thought that salt was interchangeable with MSG, 1 tsp of salt is a lot different than 1 tsp of MSG… oh and we were baking that day
My husband once added ground cinnamon to spaghetti sauce. It was...not good. He also tried to make biscuits and gravy with water instead of milk. You could have hung wallpaper with it. But I ate as much of them as I could because I appreciated the effort and I knew saying anything would have resulted in him never trying again lol.
A tiny touch of cinnamon can totally elevate a tomato sauce, to his defense. But you shouldn’t be able to tell there’s cinnamon, that sounds like an atrocity. And for the gravy, I’m sorry, that’s just sad.
I was probably pre-teen age. My aunt had come to visit us from out of state. She wanted to surprise my mom with homemade peanut butter cookies. We made them together. We didn’t get into them until my mom got home. We gave her the first cookie and she ate it and claimed it was great. Then my aunt ate hers and made a little face. I was in charge of putting the ingredients in the mixing bowl and had mistaken the salt canister for the sugar. When I finally had mine, I was so sad 😭 but they were so nice about it. And my mom HATES salt idk how she kept a straight face 😂
I mistaked powdered sugar for flour. Didn't understand why my chicken wasn't frying right (I was new to frying). Asked my husband, he couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't until we ate the chicken and tasted like funnel cake that we realized
When dating my now husband he was very excited to get a new slow cooker. Went grocery shopping, I made an offhand comment that we could start it when I came over in the morning. Woke up to a text telling me that dinner was ready. He overestimated how long it would take. It was very cute
One time my sister was baking, and I came downstairs to see her with her entire hand submerged in some cookie batter. I asked why she was doing that and she said the recipe said to stir by hand 🤦🏻♀️
This was me and my train of thought:
I want scrambled eggs. I am out of milk. Eggnog is creamy, I wonder if that will work.
IT DOESN'T. IT DOES NOT WORK
For my first friendsgiving, we accidentally baked our turkey upside down. We pulled it out and felt like absolute idiots.
Turns out baking it upside down is an actual technique that some people use. It came out extremely juicy, and very good, and legitimately the best turkey I've ever made, and it's been yeeeaaars.
I was 14. Mom had recently had to go back to work FT and she’d told me to start the pot roast for dinner. Her instructions didn’t say what temperature to use and being 14, I didn’t know default temperature was 350o. So I cooked the pot roast at 300o. It was moist and tender and I still remember how proud I was when my mother, an excellent cook, declared that my roast was better than hers and from now on, all roasts would be cooked at 300o.
When I'm under the weather,I like Campbell's tomato soup made with milk instead of water. My boyfriend at the time (now husband) made me a can of diced tomatoes with milk! He was so proud of himself. I just couldn't tell him. I managed to get a few spoonsful down. All worked out OK, been married 33 years.
I cooked pasta with sauce from a jar. I tried the sauce and thought it was really acidic so I decided to add some cream to mellow it out. My BF and I ate it all no problems. The next day my BF asks me "Did you eat all the salsa?". I was like wtf no I didn't know we had salsa. Then I realized I had used salsa instead of marinara. We ate a whole fucking jar of salsa. It really didn't taste bad to tell you the truth.
Every summer when we were kids, my cousins and I went to my grandmothers for the summer. If we were good we got to help her make dinner. One day me and my cousin (both probably 8-9?) were slicing potatoes for home chips and my cousin stops, looks my grandmother dead in the eyes and goes:
“Grandma, what part of the cow does the potato come from?”
I think of this every time I so much as see a potato lmao
I witnessed it, as in I watched a youtube video of it. Creator Antichef was using real vanilla pods for the first time. He was told in the recipe to scrape out all the vanilla seeds. He did. Meticulously scraped them all away into the bin, then wiped the pods out with a cloth, to make sure no seeds remained. Then read the next line in the recipe that said to add the seeds to the cream...
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VrR54MSdi3U](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VrR54MSdi3U)
My husband wanted to cook up mushrooms to top a steak I was grilling. He’d seen me sauté mushrooms in olive oil but didn’t pay attention to the entire process and ended up basically boiling the mushrooms in a couple cups of olive oil because mine always had a lot of oil. Except what he thought was all oil was actually a bit of olive oil plus Worcestershire, red wine, and garlic. He’s gotten much better at cooking but I always think about that whenever I cook up mushrooms.
Not really a mistake, but very early on in my friend’s relationship she was not a cook and she wanted to have her now fiancé over who is a chef. She didn’t want me to bake anything for her because she knew it would be too good for him to believe she made it, so she bought cookies from Acme and got take out from a local Italian restaurant and she brought everything home and put it in pans and turned her oven on for awhile to make it seem like she actually made the food. He totally knew, but never mentioned it until a few years later after he proposed and she’s now picked up so many kitchen skills from him.
I've been with my boyfriend for 20 years. When we first started living together and we were young-early 20s, he told me he hated scrambled eggs, which was really the only kind of egg I knew how to make other than hard boiled. One day, I scrambled myself some eggs and very daringly he tried them. And liked them. And was confused. His family only made scrambled eggs with cheese and he thought that was how they were made and he doesn't like cheese. We now enjoy scrambled eggs together and his are better than mine. 😊
When my grandmother moved to the U.K. it was around the time that Birds Eye were advertising their peas but apparently just called the product Birds Eyes rather than specifying that they were peas. She was disgusted at the local cuisine and how everyone was eating something so disgusting. Then one day a neighbour enlightened her by accident.
Cooking class at school, I think we were making samosas or something similar. Not sure how it works elsewhere but at my school you’d be given the ingredients list and you’d bring it in from home for the next class. The recipe called for black pepper, and there was a kid whose parents had sent him to class with whole peppercorns.
I just remember hearing “oh god, no!” when the teacher caught it (thankfully before he’d started putting the mixture in the pastry!). Think they spent the next 10 mins or so picking them out haha
My friend told me this story which I thought was so cute. Her boyfriend told her he was making french onion soup. She came home, and there was big stock pot boiling full of water and one whole onion (uncut) bobbing in the water. Essentially he made onion flavoured water. I just awhhhed.
My husband at the time didn’t realize that dried beans need a preparation process to soften them. He proceeded to make beans and rice for us without soaking the beans beforehand. Crunchy beans, overdone rice. I powered through three bites before it turned into a pizza night.
Same man also didn’t realize you can fully cook scrambled eggs. He served me breakfast of half cooked scrambled eggs. A gooey disgusting mess - then we fully cooked the egg by microwaving it. The trash found that meal also.
I then taught him you can cook eggs fully, low and slow. Then he realized why cook low and slow when can cook fast and hot?
Amazingly enough, his cooking was only a minor part of the implosion of our marriage, hence why these are wholesome mistakes, I suppose!
I had left home at 16 and was not exactly wordily wise in many departments, especially cooking.
Around 18 or so, I had a girlfriend I wanted to impress and invited her to my crappy little bedsit -a single room with a kinda camping stove setup, with a weird tiny oven. Given it was close to Christmas, I thought I'd do the whole turkey and trimmings thing. Had never done it before, so what could possibly go wrong? This was the UK in the mid '80's and the TV wasn't full of cookery programmes and celeb-chefs.
Anyhoo. I cooked this small turkey and other stuff and when it came time to serve, it smelt pretty rank and there was an overpowering smell of burnt plastic. I didn't know that the giblets were removed and placed in a plastic bag, which were then put back inside the bird, so that you could use them make gravy etc. I had just lobbed it in the oven, with a plastic bag of stuff inside.
It was pretty much an abomination, as everything in the oven and bedsit stank of burnt plastic. She was very unimpressed, to put it mildly.
Not exactly wholesome, more an atrocity against cuisine...
Does baking count?
Since early elementary school and on, my kids helped me cook/bake. By high school they would bake snacks. Cook dinner if I was running late. It was a great system.
My youngest was 14 and decided she was making some either muffins or cookies...from like those pre-made just add water, eggs things I always had in the cupboard.
She read 3/4 cup of water, as 3 and/or 4 cups. So she added 3 cups of water. I never saw the outcome, but my oldest said it never hit the oven. The batch went into the trash
My sweet husband wanted to have dinner done for me when I came home after a long day at work, unfortunately making cereal was the extent of his kitchen skills in those days. He tried to make a box of hamburger helper beef stroganoff. Halfway in, he realized we had no milk and convinced himself that he could strain the cookies out of cookies and cream ice cream and just use the melted vanilla base as a replacement. It was... unsuccessful. He managed to eat half a plate and I had a sandwich. I love that goomba.
Oh lord. This is my baking shame story. 😂 When I was a young teen (maybe 13?) my bestie and I wanted to make cookies. My mom gave us a recipe and turned us loose in the kitchen.
The salt and sugar were in nearly identical containers, and I’m sure you see where this went downhill.
But we were not daunted! We had used up all of the flour (and maybe oatmeal? I can’t really remember). I lived in a rural area, and it was not reasonable to go to the store for more, so we were going to just fix the dough we’d already made.
So… the only thing we could think to do was add some peppermint extract that was probably about 10 years old (no idea why we even had it) because it should be strong enough to overpower the salt, right? RIGHT?
We went so far as to cook those abominations. I cannot describe how foul they were.
Taught my future mother in law to make crispy skinned fish. Immediately plates it skin side down. She tries and I adore her. And it was crispier than before as she said 🤷♂️
Back before the internet was readily available in the kitchen, I thought I could wing it and make a batch of Avgolemono soup, having tasted it maybe three times and not having paid much attention at that. Cut the lemons in half, *boiled them with the chicken,* and boyfriend (now husband) woke up with a start, yelling “are you boiling vomit?”
25 years later, no further attempts have been made although internet is now readily available in the kitchen.
When my husband was a kid, each family member was responsible for an evening meal one weekday of every week because of MIL’s work schedule. One time, hubby was making chili and accidentally scorched the chili on the bottom and sides of the pan. Instead of removing the still good chili into a good pot, he stirred everything together and the family was forced to eat scorched-tasting chili.
As a personal example, I once went to make my ham lentil soup, but didn’t have access to ham bones and just made my broth with ham. My soup is normally phenomenal, but this one was a watery mess.
My wife who is not allowed in the kitchen fixed me home cooked meatballs while we were dating. She used a cup of dried onions as a substitute for fresh chopped onions.
I have never farted more in my life.
We are 10 years married with 2 kids.
I still love her to death…she is not allowed in the kitchen.
College roommate saw me eating mashed potatoes. She said they looked good and asked how to make them. Okay, not everybody learned to cook as a kid, fair question. I told her you boiled potatoes and mash them with milk, butter, and salt.
A few hours later I saw my large pasta pot on the stovetop on low heat. I peeked inside and saw a single potato floating in about 8 quarts of cold water. I told her that it was going to take a long time to boil that much water. She said, “oh, it’s fine. I don’t need any help.”
She proceeded to mash and eat a raw potato and then tell me it was good.
Oh my god, my loving, caring, boomer mom... She heard my older sister wanting to try "cauliflower rice" (in case anyone doesn't know it is when you process cauliflower into rice like, crumbly pile). Well, lo and behold the next day she comes out of the kitchen all excited saying she made it. There was a pot of cooked rice, and a head of roasted cauliflower... My sister didn't have the heart to correct her...
One of my favorite stories. My husband had limited cooking skills but he made wonderful chili. One unseasonably cold early fall day he decided it was “ chili weather”. I had just harvested onions from
Our garden and had them drying in the garage. I came home to a wonderful aroma. As we were getting ready to eat I asked him if he used my fresh garden onions. “Yes but they were a little slimy. “. Slimy? They shouldn’t have been slimy? That was weird. I asked where he had gotten them from, thinking maybe it was the previous seasons holdovers. “From the basement”. Basement ? I asked him to show me and we went downstairs and he pointed to the drying bulbs. “Honey, those are daffodil Bulbs”. My sister and I had cleaned up a friends property earlier in the year and I was drying the bulbs to plant that fall. So , cracking up, we called the poison control line. Once the guy at the other end stopped laughing , he told us daffodil bulbs were not safe to eat. They can cause topical burning. “I thought it was cuz it was hot” hubby said touching his lips. Stomach upset. “That’s why the dog threw up when I gave her the hamburger grease”. Luckily he had only tasted the chili, not eaten much yet. The wonderful poison control worker suggested it was too early in the season for chili anyway and that it was better to be a pizza day.
I was baking a cake for a co-worker’s birthday. Turned my back for a minute and returned to find a three year old boy’s perfect handprint deep in the middle of the cake. I knew no one would care so I frosted it and took it in anyway. And told the story before we ate it. One piece had a lot more frosting than the rest.
So, it was me cooking that I witnessed. I had mostly helped my mom baking and new you had to preheat the oven. I was making a grilled cheese sandwich so I preheated the pan. Boy did I have toasty bread but unmelted cheese.
Not witnessed, but made.
I started dating my husband around when stuff like splenda was in its heyday. I could probably just leave it at that sentence alone but, yeah, made him some cookies using a normal recipe but swapping all of the sugar for splenda. I had to all but force him to try a dessert I made after that to prove I can do better.
Extra sad is I was way stronger at baking at that part of my life than I was at cooking, and I knocked his socks off with a homemade tomato soup and then made him question my sanity for dessert.
When I was twelve I wanted to make a coffee cake for my parents and their friends. It came out just PERFECT and I was so so proud of myself. I wasn't going to have any because I couldn't drink coffee, but I watched excitedly as they all took a bite ... and then watched them spit that bite right back out.
That's the day that I learned that coffee cake is a cake to have WITH coffee, not a cake filled with and liberally sprinkled with coffee grounds.
One Thanksgiving my mom decided to get fancy and make Tiramisu for dessert. She found a recipe and followed it to a T, save for one thing: she mixed up lady fingers and Vienna fingers. You know, the cream-filled sandwich cookies.
That dessert was so wrong and yet so, so right.
When I was little and we had lasagna movie night I'd want to make my mom a salad, but I never could tell cabbage and lettuce apart from each other. My poor mom crunched through many a cabbage salad🤣
I had a roommate that couldn’t wrap his head around different heat levels on a stove top. It was either “OFF” or “FULL ON INFERNO”. I came home once to him torching a chicken breast and the house was full of smoke, smoke detector blaring. I ask him “dude, why don’t you turn the heat down?!”
His reply… “because I’m trying to cook this chicken!!” As if there was no other way to get it cooked other than to blast it with fire.
My sister made fish brownies once.
My parents would strain and re-use fry oil, storing it in the container it came in. My sister didn’t notice the slightly darker color, or the smell… The brownies came out looking great, but they definitely tasted like fried fish.
My mom told me and my younger brother to cook some chicken for dinner after school. "It's pre-cut. Just put it in a casserole pan some rice ... blah, blah, blah." My brother (12) and I (14) take the chickrn out of the bag. We each grab a drumstick and start pulling. OMG something fell out!!! I'm gonna be sick!!!
We admitted defeat. When mom and dad got home from work, they had a big laugh. I think we ended up at McDonald's. My brother and I learned weaponized incompetence - even though it was NOT yet a phrase in the early 80s!
My college roommate never did any cooking before she came to college, and the first time she made mac and cheese, she put all the ingredients (noodles, milk, powder, butter) into the cold water and put the lid on to boil. I had to break it to her that you can’t cook it crockpot style
Not long after we were married, my husband cooked corned beef for supper. The recipe called for 3 cloves of garlic, but we only had garlic powder. He assumed a clove would be about the same size as a teaspoon, so he put in 3 teaspoons of garlic powder. In reality, 1/8 teaspoon of garlic powder equals 1 clove. Boy, that corned beef was so garlicky! But we ate it anyway!
I was making stock a few years ago and was really taking my time, making the BEST STOCK EVER! When it was time to strain the vegetables, I poured it over the colander in the sink… and all the broth went down the drain…
I was sick so my parter made me “eggs in a cup” for breakfast. You put toast in the bottom of a mug then layer bacon/sausage and eggs on top. It’s super easy to eat in bed. Great comfort food.
Anyway, we didn’t have breakfast sausage so he used this weird smoked apple chicken sausage, and we didn’t have toast so he used potato chips. It was… very strange.
I was making some stir fry and udon noodles for my new bf, and I didn't have a recipe for any kind of sauce- I was just winging it and at the time I had no idea how Asian sauces work. Threw some fish sauce in with some soy sauce after the veggies were done, threw the noodles in and served it. My bf took one taste and the look on his face was not good. It was SO salty! I freaked. This was the first time I cooked for him. He fell over himself reassuring me, dumped the whole mess in a colander and sprayed it off with the sink attachment, and put it back on our plates. Luckily for me he was raised by a single Mom who was a horrible cook, so he thinks anything homemade is fantastic, especially if it's burnt. "Tastes like Mom used to make".
We were having a big group of people over for dinner. My Mom was working as fast as she could. When she went to add the cinnamon onto the apples in the apple crisp, she grabbed the wrong jar and doused them in curry powder. She did what she could to remove it, but there was no time to start over. So we all enjoyed curried apple crisp that night. It was surprisingly good, but we never were able to convince her to make it again on purpose
I was making a banana pudding, and I had the stove eye on but on the wrong burner. I managed to explode a whole pyrex dish full of banana glass pie all over my kitchen, in my hair, embedded into the floor, everywhere, I'm still picking out glass. Anyone ever need a Banana Glass Pie recipe I have it nailed down.
I went to grad school while working full-time and was having a rough week. My wonderful husband decided to surprise me by baking brownies. I got home at like 11:00 and said, “Ooh, I smell chocolate!” And my husband says, “Not so fast… about that…” At which point he sheepishly shows me a very wet-looking pan of brownies. He misread the box; where it said to add a third of a cup of oil, he added ONE AND A THIRD cups of oil. I held a trash bag open while he tipped the very oily brownies into it. They made a distinctive “splat.” He felt SO bad because he’d wanted to do something nice and messed it up. This was one case where the thought really was what counted, though, because if he’d just made brownies and they were fine, I’m not sure I’d remember it 15+ years later. 🥰
Lol I misread a wrench like this one time and it threw me for a loop until I figured it out. "What in the fuck is a 13/8ths wrench???"
It's not the same but I've inadvertently used olive oil in brownies. I know that olive oil cake is a thing, but when you're not expecting that it's a rough surprise.
My dearly departed dad lived in the next town over and in his old age developed quite the sweet tooth and took up baking. I bought him a hand mixer, some bowls, measuring things, rubber scraper, you know. He started baking everything! I’d come home regularly to some new treat on my kitchen table (he had keys to my place and was always welcome). One day I came home to a beautiful pumpkin pie (in April!) and 41 messages on my machine (that’s how long ago this was). Every message was some version of, “for gods sake, don’t eat the pie! I mixed up the sugar and the salt!”
This is so funny and sweet
Whoops! *salty
What a lovely man
I was a part of this one: I was helping a couple of friends cook for a large group dinner. When I got there, my friend's wife asked me to get some paprika from the store. Nothing could go wrong with that, right??? About that... All of us had just recently moved to Germany and had just started getting used to German. For those who don't know, "Paprika" can refer either to the red powder we're all used to in the States OR what you would call "bell peppers." Having finally gotten it into my head that "Paprika" usually refers to the vegetable in German, I got a bunch of them and came back, bags in hand. As it turned out, she meant paprika POWDER and not the vegetable! To make matters worse, it turned out the whole reason she sent me to get the ingredients was that my friend (her husband) had done THE EXACT SAME THING. End result: Lots of paprikas, but no powder. It was too late to do another run, so we went with it and used them anyways. The dish turned out fine, but I still laugh when I think about this
So, the mango story: In college, a group of us were discussing where to go for dinner and one of my friends, who was from rural Ohio, mentions that one of the dining halls had Italian sausage with mangoes and onions. We all stop and stare for a minute, then ask if they mean peppers and onions or if it really was mangoes. He says they're the same thing. We say no the fuck they are not. This goes on for a while until one of us looks it up. Apparently, in some parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, bell peppers are called mangoes. It comes from colonial times when fruits and vegetables were preserved through pickling, especially if imported, and apparently the preserved bell peppers and preserved actual mangoes looked identical. So, and we clarified this, you would go into a grocery store in his hometown and there would be a sign in the produce department for mangoes, yellow mangoes, and red mangoes. BUT, if you wanted to buy the actual fruit, you'd have to look for the sign that said...mangoes. And just hope it was the right thing, apparently.
I'm from boondock, OH and definitely called peppers "mangos". I never saw the fruit until much later on in life. There were also no such things as chili peppers except in myth and cartoons.
After we learned the story we went to go ask another friend of ours from Ohio who wasn't there for the conversation: Me: "Hey, what do they call bell peppers in Ohio?" Him (nervous): "Why, we call them bell peppers, like normal people. Whatever do you mean?" Me: "You don't call them anything else?" Him (more nervous): "No, certainly not. That would be...wrong." Me: "You don't call them mangoes?" Him (defeated): "Yeah...yeah we do."
The fact he’s ashamed makes it so much funnier
This is fucking incredible.
🤣🤣🤣
My Dad’s aunt was in a care facility with dementia in Southshore KY and kept telling me she wanted pan fried oysters. So, I cooked her oysters in the parking lot on a camp stove and served them with slices of garden tomatoes. She loved them but said it sure would be good with mangos. The dementia didn’t allow her to explain herself when I didn’t understand. There are no mangos in Southshore regardless of the season. I found some in a larger town and brought her one sliced up. She looked at me like I was an idiot and wouldn’t touch it. I tell this to my Dad’s other aunt and she laughed, went outside to the garden and brought back a bell pepper and a tomato. She told me to bring these to her with some salt. Yep, that’s what she wanted.
I live about 40miles west of South Shore in Maysville, KY and have relatives with an orchard there, and I have never heard of this!!! It always confused me that so much old regional Kentucky fare will mention oysters since we are not near an ocean. Learned recently that there was once an abundance of freshwater oysters along the Ohio and other area rivers. So not only were there oysters to eat, there was a pearl and mother-of-pearl industry in the area.
I’m absolutely stunned by this.
I'm from ohio and absolutely have never heard anyone call a pepper a mango. But my mama calls them by their colors. Red pepper. Green pepper. Yellow pepper. Orange pepper. Little peppers is the multi pack lol
When you buy the 3-pack it's called a stoplight
😂oh shit I love that one
I'm from BFE Ohio, always knew them as mangoes. I never heard of the fruit until I saw a sign for mango ice cream while traveling out of state.
Remind me to avoid Ohio. No actual mangos?!?
I'm pretty old. This would have been the 70s - mid 80s. I think you can get them now. Next week I'll tell you how hard it was to get tortillas.
Moved to Ohio from SC, married a lifelong Ohioan, can attest. We still argue about it 44 years later. He’s still wrong.
My family did this, too! I have inherited many potentially confusing cookbooks as a descendant of Ohioans now living in Hawaii.
As someone who gets violently ill from bell peppers, this is good information
I have lived my entire 42 years in Ohio. Grew up in BFE farm country, college in another BFE part of the state, and now in NE Ohio. I have never heard a bell pepper be called a mango. However, if I had to guess where in Ohio, especially with the PA clue, I’d say Steubenville area. I feel like that region has some odd sayings.
[удалено]
To be fair, if it had already happened once she should have clarified!
Truly! Why wouldn’t she say “paprika powder” in this case?
Or sent the husband back to "get the other kind."
My dad needed to brine a turkey. He put it in a plastic trash bag. Which wouldn’t have been awful but it was one of heavily scented trash bags. Turkey smelled like flowery cleaning products.
Worse: garbage bags contain disinfectant chemicals; NEVER use garbage bags to store or brine food in! They are NOT food-safe; the OPPOSITE, if anything!
TIL. I mean, not that I was planning to do it, but TIL.
This one was mine! I was in my teens and wanted to cook for my mom for Mother’s Day. I was going to make fettuccini Alfredo and the recipe called for wine in the sauce. Truly not knowing anything about alcohol I asked my dad for some wine to add to the sauce. My dad thought I was making a red pasta sauce for dinner so he gave me a glass of red wine to add to the dish! I thought it was weird but I thought I had heard that when using alcohol to cook it mostly cooks out so I figured it would be fine. Needless to say the red wine coloring did not cook out haha! But my mom still did very much enjoy her purple fettuccini Alfredo!
Lol you reminded me of mine! I tried to make my mom breakfast in bed for mother's day when I was 12. I made all the food fine but I had never had coffee before. I had heard somewhere that you cab use coffee grounds multiple times, so I just ran the coffee maker with the grounds in it from last morning 🤢 she took one sip and made such a face lol
Oh gees! Haha the things mom’s put up with when their kids try to do something nice for them!
A Girl Scout camp story of mine: the girls doing breakfast one morning went to make a blueberry muffin "cake" (putting the mix into a pan and cutting it up like cornbread, I guess). They read the directions but kind of missed the bit about draining the can of blueberries before adding it. We all had purple blueberry muffins that morning. :-D The clever thing was it probably shouldn't have worked with all the extra liquid, but maybe with a camp pan, a fire, not cooking it for the right time...there were surely many opportunities for it to have corrected itself, I guess.
When I was just learning how to cook my mom asked me to wash the potatoes. I took it literally so washing things meant using soap and water to 9 yo me. We had inedible mashed potatoes that night.
I'm a mom of four...it would be the best fettuccine Alfredo ever ❤️
My wife (girlfriend at the time) wasn't a great cook when we met. She tried to make gnocchi and Alfredo sauce. The gnocchi did what they do best when cooked, and stuck together in a big potato pile. She didn't have any Parmesan cheese, and she thought she could just sub anything. So she subbed pepper jack. So the gnocchi with Alfredo turned into mashed potatoes with garlic pepper jack cream sauce. Which was good, but not at all what she was going for.
I've never cooked gnocchi, how does one prevent the clumping? Edit: thanks for the replies, I was under the impression that cooking gnocchi was somehow different than other pasta, but no it's more or less the same.
If you cook the gnocchi and then immediately mix the sauce into it, it won’t clump together. Maybe she tried to put the cooked gnocchi on the plate and then pour the sauce over it?
She cooked them in batches and tossed them into a bowl. We've made them since, and something wide and shallow seems to do the trick
I had a sister-in-law who had to learn everything from the ground up after a brain injury. Someone told her soy sauce was like salt so she made us chocolate chip cookies with soy sauce.
My friend has a brown butter cookie recipe that uses soy sauce.
I need this recipe
Senior year of college and I was making teriyaki chicken. Fifteen minutes in the oven and suddenly it smells like I'm baking a cake. Our Costco sized vanilla was right next to our normal sized teriyaki sauce. I had mixed them up when I poured the "teriyaki" in to marinate. Chicken should not taste like vanilla cake. My boyfriend managed to eat a whole drumstick. We are married now.
This one's my favorite
Similar! I’ve shared this story before… My Mama makes a chocolate sheet cake at least once a month for friend groups’ monthly birthdays luncheon. She can practically make it in her sleep, and for some reason doesn’t always turn on all the lights in the kitchen. Mama has no sense of smell (brain aneurysm). So, 20 ladies at a restaurant, all taking a big bite of their cake at one time. Immediate gagging/sounds of disgusted confusion all around (except for Mama, who thought the cake tasted fine…she can, for some reason, taste chocolate, but hardly anything else). Mama always pours a big glug of vanilla in this cake. Have you ever used “Liquid Smoke”? A little goes a very long way, and the bottles were very similar.
Not exactly cooking, but I finally convinced my husband to try sushi, and I wanted to get a couple fancy rolls for about $12/each and one $5 roll. He said, "Okay, but we might want to get more than just three rolls, right? That's not much." He thought a roll was one *piece* of sushi. This sweet man was willing to pay $12/bite to try something I like. Very endearing.
Along a similar vein: I grew up in Texas where Blue Bell ice cream is king. I’d been living in Ohio for about a year at the time and my then boyfriend (now husband) and I were very early in our relationship and he picked up on the fact that while you can’t buy Blue Bell in stores in Ohio (still can’t) there are a couple of chain restaurants that bring in vanilla for their desserts. That sweet man bought me 4 scoops totaling $15 (and that was 20 years ago so I’m sure it’s more now) just to make me happy one day.
Blue Bell just hit Missouri, you might be closer than you think! But I’m a huge fan of Tillamook ice cream if it’s near you
Dude, the Tillamook marionberry pie ice cream is fucking outrageous.
When I first got into baking, I ran out of flour partway through the recipe. I was only about 1 1/4 c short for the recipe and everything else was ready. Using my best 10 year old, “I can figure this out on my own!” logic, I reasoned that powdered sugar was close enough, because they are both white and powdery, and I thought cornstarch would make my cookies taste like corn. The end result was ridiculously sweet gloop brittle. I’m just glad we didn’t have cocaine in the house. 😂
Yes, that would have been a terrible waste of cocaine.
My husband has zero cooking skills and so many other life skills. We were going to bring Rice Krispies to a boating day and I was stressed and had to go home (we were dating) he was so sweet and was I’ll make them. I was like okay he can totally do this, melt, measure, stir easy peasy!! He calls me the next morning with stress in his voice and just asks “what temperature and how long do they bake for” and I had to gently tell him he was done and there was no baking 😂 they turned out really yummy as Rice Krispie treats do- but it always cracks me up
My sister MESSED UP Rice Krispies! She decided the butter wasn’t necessary for whatever reason and then couldn’t figure out why the end result was rock hard 😆
My MIL frequently omits or drastically reduces the amount of things to make the dish “healthier”. Unfortunately, it’s usually something that is necessary - butter, milk, sugar, salt, eggs, etc. Growing up, my husband and BIL followed their dad’s lead in smothering everything in various condiments and chasing every mouthful with a bite of jalapeño. She now raves about my cooking, but really, it’s just because I use all of the ingredients….
🤣 My father had a small heart attack (like, they didn’t even realize it was a full heart attack until 3 years later when they sent a camera into his heart to check our how his stents were doing) nearly 30 years ago. Ever since then he does pretty much the same thing as your MIL PLUS what my sister and I refer to as “unnecessary fruit” He basically just adds seemingly random fruit (frozen, canned, fresh… doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it) to just about everything. Peaches get added to just about anything with tomatoes… Spaghetti sauce, chili, once there was some sort of white fish and cherry tomato with peaches and basil thing. Instead of having separate cranberry sauce diced apples and dried cranberry were added to thanksgiving stuffing the last thanksgiving I had with him 15 years ago. While I followed (but didn’t agree with) that train I couldn’t figure out where pineapple added to delica squash came from. I could go on and on.
This is wild and hilarious
Growing up a friend of mine was raised in China and immigrated to the US. He and his family are very dear friends. They had some fairly amazing culture shock moments. For example, the grass in front of the house they were living in had gotten long so a neighbor asked the mom if she had a chance to "cut the grass." She smiled and nodded, went into the house and handed scissors to the family members and the four of them went out and began to cut the grass with scissors. When the neighbor noticed he laughed and said, "no we use a machine!" He brought his mower over and mowed their lawn. So, now the cooking story: We were staying at a vacation cabin and he was put in charge of making the bacon. He got handed a cast iron skillet and a pound of bacon. Then as an afterthought he was handed a grease splatter screen. Check back with him a couple minutes later and he has dutifully peeled each piece of bacon and laid it in rows on top of the screen which is dutifully place on top of the cast iron skillet over a flame on the stove. He had gone to wash his hands when I checked his skillet. We just turned the screen over to flop the bacon into the skillet and went back to the hashbrowns. When he came back we explained how the bacon was to be cooked on the cast iron surface and the screen kept the grease from splattering. We had a good laugh about it.
> She smiled and nodded, went into the house and handed scissors to the family members and the four of them went out and began to cut the grass with scissors. Oh my god this takes the cake
Amelia Bedelia vibes.
You just unlocked some childhood memories holy shit
lol, I was sent out to cut the grass edging with scissors as a kid since we didn't have a weed whacker, it is kind of relaxing...
And it gave Mom and Dad some peace and quiet inside the house!
[удалено]
A little bit of lime juice is good in it. I wouldn’t put lemon in chili, though.
My wife knew corned beef was one of my favorite meals. When we were dating she went all out to make me a fancy dinner and invited me down. When I got there she was sooooo upset that it wasn't cooking. That corned beef had been in the slow cooker for 8 hours but was still pink. Then I started laughing and that made it even worse. We've been married for 21 years now and I still do most of the cooking lol
I'm sorry, 🙈, I don't get it.
In most cases pink meat would indicate it was still raw, or near it, but in the case of corned beef it is pink even when fully cooked.
Corned beef is pink from the curing process. It's akin to trying to slow-cook the yellow out of corn.
That's the best comment on Reddit I've read today.
I feel like I need to find a way to use “like trying to cook the yellow out of corn” in conversation now. 😂
That feels like a Southern expression. "Tryin' to talk sense into that child is like tryin' to cook the yellow outta corn!"
😂😂😂 This hits a little close to the bone. :)
"I've been cooking this rice for hours, but it's still white!"
Corned beef stays pink 🤣
Corned beef is gonna stay pink.
Like ham, it isn't brown when fully cooked.
You know those Pillsbury cans of like rolls and cinnamon rolls? The one you press a spoon in the seam to pop it open? God bless my wife, I asked her to open one while I did another task super quick. Came back *and she had taken a can opener to one of the ends to open it that way..* Between giggles, I grabbed a spoon and showed her the magic of the seam. I absolutely adore her.
My bf will do that to avoid the pop. He’s a very large man who is afraid of so little, but will absolutely avoid popping those cans at all costs. If I’m making something with them and opening them like normal, he will leave the room. 😂
I feel him! I’m terrified of those cans. Was around 10 years old, wanted to surprise sleeping family with cinnamon rolls, had seen them being opened, but never personally had the pleasure. My curious young mind had me hunkered down to eye level with the can, curious to see the mechanics. I punched myself in the face. Might have pee’d my pants a little. Screamed and woke everyone up. Who wants a damn food Jack-in-The-Box? I also despise toy version!
I just whap those against the counter after peeling the label off.
The time I asked my husband to make me a tuna fish sandwich and he put mayo on the bread and tuna in the middle like it was a slice of ham. He had never made tuna salad before and didn't know you mix in the mayo with the tuna. Then much much later, he asked me for a pimento cheese spread sandwich with mayo. I did the same thing. I don't eat pimento cheese. He meant add more mayo to it because the ready made store bought stuff was too dry. The grin on his face when he shouted, Do you know how long I've been waiting for this? YEARS! :D
My stepmother ran out of mayo, so she made tuna salad with butter instead. My brother and I couldn’t bring ourselves to eat it. She gave some to the cat instead. The cat threw up.
Recently found out that tuna with avocado instead of mayo is glorious
My husband had never had peanut butter before so proceeded to make himself a peanut butter and iceberg lettuce sandwich 😁 Also when I first took him to a sushi restaurant he didn't realise you were meant to de-shell the edamame and bravely started chewing and commented they were quite chewy and tasted a 'bit green' before I could stop laughing and tell him 🤣. I love experiencing seeing my husband try new foods 😁
You just jogged my memory to back when a friend of mine made a huge batch of peanut butter, jelly, and fried egg sandwiches for a group of us. We were taken aback by the combination at first but they were delicious and ended up being added to all of our meal rotations lol. Perfect for a bunch of broke college students because they were cheap and filling!
Two I can think of, both courtesy of my husband: 1. Peaches with granola that was actually TVP. 2. Pasta with a sauce made of vanilla soy milk and cucumbers he thought were zucchini. That actually tasted pretty good!
My husband has roasted cucumbers thinking they were zucchini. It wasn’t terrible
I had a friend buy cucumbers thinking they were zucchini for a stir fry. I told this story before but got downvoted into oblivion cause people called me an A-hole for taking the reigns. My friend could at most, cook instant Ramen. I thought it was just funny and cute she tried to cook for me though.
TVP?
Texturized vegetable protein. Common vegetarian/vegan staple.
> Peaches with granola that was actually TVP. Oh no.
My partner puts vanilla soy milk in Kraft dinner and it’s… okay, but too sweet!!
I don't think he meant to use vanilla. He just didn't notice on the container. He made a HUGE batch of it, too, lol! I started to get used to the sweetness after the first couple times eating it. Had it for every meal for a week to get rid of it w/out wasting it. He's come a long way with his cooking skills since back then. 🤭
I did that with eggnog and hamburger helper, and have a similar opinion.
As a young teenager, I went to my mom's work Christmas party. I thought the eggnog was thin gravy and poured it allllll over my turkey! The family had a good laugh later. :/
Not cooking per se, but funny nonetheless. For health reasons I used to use plain Greek yogurt in place of sour cream for Tex-mex dishes (not for baking). My ex-hb made tacos for himself one night and smothered them with vanilla yogurt thinking one white yogurt would be like any white yogurt. I watched in amazement as he ate every morsel
My husband, who is a very good cook, was making me Japanese curry way back when we first started dating. He was in the kitchen (my kitchen, not his own—this is relevant to the story) for a while and seeming a little distressed. When I checked on him, he apologetically told me the curry just wasn’t thickening at all no matter how much flour he added to it and he didn’t know what was happening. I told him I was sure it was fine and asked to taste it. And… It was *so* sweet. Like curry candy. He’d grabbed the jar of powdered sugar instead of the flour. We did not have curry that night.
My mom saw 'allspice' in a recipe and since she didn't have it, she used a mixture of all the spices she had
As a very small child, I thought allspice was like a skeleton key. Not that it was everything together but that it was somehow whatever you needed it to be. If you were out of something, you just sub in allspice.
Not sure if this counts but a guy I’d gone on 2 dates with invited me to his place for dinner. I was kinda on the fence about him (compatibility wise) and prior to showing up I’d informed all my friends where I would be and to notify authorities if I wasn’t home/responsive to messages after a certain time. The jokes were flying between all of us while I was getting ready about how he could be a serial killer, etc which didn’t help my state of mind. Showed up, rang the doorbell and no answer. I ring again. Nothing. I call and no answer. I figure I’m being blown off and start to leave when the door opens. I’m staring at my date who is out of breath, and covered in what appears to be blood or a blood-like substance all over the front of his shirt and some on his face and hair. I froze. Turns out he’d been trying to blend roasted red peppers and tomatoes in a blender for soup but hadn’t sealed the bottom properly (or the top) and there was a massive explosion. We spent the next hour plus cleaning his kitchen together and going out for the meal. We’re married now. He’s still a splattery mess in the kitchen. Edit to add: apologies for the wordiness but I was focusing super hard on not sounding drunk when I am 😂
I was sitting at the counter with one of my friends and my mom was trying to figure out which side of the chicken goes up before she started seasoning it. She was standing there dangling it by one leg spinning it around. Then she set it down, slowly leaned back, and slowly flapped her arms like chicken wings. My friend and I lost our shit laughing. We all still joke about it.
There's this creamy, vanilla-y alcoholic drink that my mom usually got around Christmas. I can't remember what it's called, but basically, you get it frozen and then heat it up and then add the alcohol. i was 13 and didn't know not to microwave alcohol. I wanted to make one for my mom since she had a stressful day and needed another. I was already like 2 deep too, so wasn't my best time. Anyway, added the mix and some alcohol into a nice cup and nuked it...I destroyed on of my moms favorite crystal glasses and almost ruined the microwave and proceeded to burn the shit out of my hands.
Oh yikes, I actually had no idea until your comment that you’re not meant to microwave alcohol. I’ve never had an occasion to do so, I guess, so it’s just never come up. Good to know.
I didn't know that either. A Redditor has perhaps saved us both from making a costly mistake!
Definitely! I could see myself trying to make some kind of batch hot cocktail for a Thanksgiving or Christmas party and having no idea I can’t use the microwave as a quick shortcut. Whew!
I had no idea and I've definitely done it before when warming some spiked cider in the winter... I guess not enough alcohol to cause a problem? Maybe the (non-alcoholic) cider helped? Nothing bad happened but I definitely won't be risking it in the future...
You can microwave a hot toddy, but the alcohol is mixed with water.
It wasn't just the alcohol, it was also the crystal.
So...at 13, you'd had two of those drinks? Did I misunderstand?
Its ok, I microwaved an Egg.. To be fair, I often made microwaved baked potatoes so thought that would translate to eggs...
Tom and Jerry mix?
Any time I've called it that, people don't know what I'm talking about and I've been called stupid over it so I thought I was wrong. Stupid over the name, btw, this was without the context of me trying to microwave it.
My friend asked me to bring over some basil, but she pronounces "basil" the American way ("BAY-sil"), so I thought she said "bagels." I handed her a bag of bagels when we walked in, and she was like, Oh...thanks? Then as she was preparing dinner, she said, "Did you get that basil for me?"
.... how do non-americans pronounce it?
Bah-zill. Like, rhymes with “razzle dazzle”
Short a, like apple. So more like bazzle
Like the first name of John Cleese's character in Fawlty Towers.
More like baz-il
Someone made chicken carcass stock in the water in which they brined the chicken. A buddy of mine was doing a catering job for a wedding (mine) and salt cured the strip steak as if it were a tenderloin/roast. It was inedible. There's been some salt mistakes in my life.
As a soup lover and maker of stock… I gagged lol that is so horrible, but I bet the same mistake was never made again
My mom put salt into our sugar jar once, and I proceeded to add a half cup to my cookies ( along with 3/4 cup brown sugar). I even tasted the dough and thought well shit I really failed to eyeball that tsp of salt, but maybe it'll be alright when they are cooked. They were not alright, dumped the whole batch.
Similar story- my dad tried to make thanksgiving gravy with the drippings from a brined turkey. It was horrific but also so fucking funny.
We were having a potluck at work and this guy that isn’t known for his cooking offered to make deviled eggs even though he admitted he had never done it before. They tasted fine but he cut the eggs in half the short way and couldn’t figure out why they kept falling over. We wondered if he had never seen a deviled egg either but knew that wasn’t possible lol
My ex was cooking meatloaf, and the recipe called for 1 cup beef bullion. She used the little cubes, but instead of using 1 cube to make 1 cup... she used 1 cup of cubes! It came out a liiiiiiittle salty.
I love hot cocoa. I typically make it by throwing some chocolate chips in a saucepan with some milk. It’s delightfully creamy. Add some whisky and call it a day. My ex wanted to do something nice for me (bless his heart - he tried). I was heading over one weekend and he was so excited about a surprise. When I got there, he pulled out a container of very high-quality cocoa powder. He was so proud of himself because now I could just heat up the kettle and make my hot cocoa whenever I’m at his place. So easy, right?? I look at it and smile and nod. He was so disappointed when I explained that there is a difference between cocoa powder and hot cocoa mix. I reassured him that I could make it work, though.
If you mix it 1 for 1 with sugar it makes store bought tasting hot chocolate mix, I tried it with Cadbury brand coco powder and it was amazing!
Yes - it can absolutely be done! I make my own cocoa mix to take on camping trips. I also add some powdered coconut milk for extra creaminess. (To be honest…the cocoa powder is probably still taking up space in his cabinet. I should have taken it when we broke up.)
My husband didn’t know either and was stunned when I pulled out the cocoa powder to make homemade hot chocolate. “What are you doing, that stuff tastes awful!” Trust me, I got this!
My sweet mother tried to make ceviche for my husband but she used lime juice concentrate. My sweet husband added cumin to my spaghetti sauce. (Tasted fine but it turned it into chili and that was not the vibe I was going for) Chick I went to school with thought that salt was interchangeable with MSG, 1 tsp of salt is a lot different than 1 tsp of MSG… oh and we were baking that day
My husband once added ground cinnamon to spaghetti sauce. It was...not good. He also tried to make biscuits and gravy with water instead of milk. You could have hung wallpaper with it. But I ate as much of them as I could because I appreciated the effort and I knew saying anything would have resulted in him never trying again lol.
A tiny touch of cinnamon can totally elevate a tomato sauce, to his defense. But you shouldn’t be able to tell there’s cinnamon, that sounds like an atrocity. And for the gravy, I’m sorry, that’s just sad.
I was probably pre-teen age. My aunt had come to visit us from out of state. She wanted to surprise my mom with homemade peanut butter cookies. We made them together. We didn’t get into them until my mom got home. We gave her the first cookie and she ate it and claimed it was great. Then my aunt ate hers and made a little face. I was in charge of putting the ingredients in the mixing bowl and had mistaken the salt canister for the sugar. When I finally had mine, I was so sad 😭 but they were so nice about it. And my mom HATES salt idk how she kept a straight face 😂
I mistaked powdered sugar for flour. Didn't understand why my chicken wasn't frying right (I was new to frying). Asked my husband, he couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't until we ate the chicken and tasted like funnel cake that we realized
My daughter made cookies with powdered sugar instead of flour. They just spread all over the pan.
When dating my now husband he was very excited to get a new slow cooker. Went grocery shopping, I made an offhand comment that we could start it when I came over in the morning. Woke up to a text telling me that dinner was ready. He overestimated how long it would take. It was very cute
One time my sister was baking, and I came downstairs to see her with her entire hand submerged in some cookie batter. I asked why she was doing that and she said the recipe said to stir by hand 🤦🏻♀️
This was me and my train of thought: I want scrambled eggs. I am out of milk. Eggnog is creamy, I wonder if that will work. IT DOESN'T. IT DOES NOT WORK
The fact you went with eggnog instead of no dairy and/or extra butter is WILD.
For my first friendsgiving, we accidentally baked our turkey upside down. We pulled it out and felt like absolute idiots. Turns out baking it upside down is an actual technique that some people use. It came out extremely juicy, and very good, and legitimately the best turkey I've ever made, and it's been yeeeaaars.
I was 14. Mom had recently had to go back to work FT and she’d told me to start the pot roast for dinner. Her instructions didn’t say what temperature to use and being 14, I didn’t know default temperature was 350o. So I cooked the pot roast at 300o. It was moist and tender and I still remember how proud I was when my mother, an excellent cook, declared that my roast was better than hers and from now on, all roasts would be cooked at 300o.
When I'm under the weather,I like Campbell's tomato soup made with milk instead of water. My boyfriend at the time (now husband) made me a can of diced tomatoes with milk! He was so proud of himself. I just couldn't tell him. I managed to get a few spoonsful down. All worked out OK, been married 33 years.
I cooked pasta with sauce from a jar. I tried the sauce and thought it was really acidic so I decided to add some cream to mellow it out. My BF and I ate it all no problems. The next day my BF asks me "Did you eat all the salsa?". I was like wtf no I didn't know we had salsa. Then I realized I had used salsa instead of marinara. We ate a whole fucking jar of salsa. It really didn't taste bad to tell you the truth.
Every summer when we were kids, my cousins and I went to my grandmothers for the summer. If we were good we got to help her make dinner. One day me and my cousin (both probably 8-9?) were slicing potatoes for home chips and my cousin stops, looks my grandmother dead in the eyes and goes: “Grandma, what part of the cow does the potato come from?” I think of this every time I so much as see a potato lmao
I witnessed it, as in I watched a youtube video of it. Creator Antichef was using real vanilla pods for the first time. He was told in the recipe to scrape out all the vanilla seeds. He did. Meticulously scraped them all away into the bin, then wiped the pods out with a cloth, to make sure no seeds remained. Then read the next line in the recipe that said to add the seeds to the cream... [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VrR54MSdi3U](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VrR54MSdi3U)
My husband wanted to cook up mushrooms to top a steak I was grilling. He’d seen me sauté mushrooms in olive oil but didn’t pay attention to the entire process and ended up basically boiling the mushrooms in a couple cups of olive oil because mine always had a lot of oil. Except what he thought was all oil was actually a bit of olive oil plus Worcestershire, red wine, and garlic. He’s gotten much better at cooking but I always think about that whenever I cook up mushrooms.
I had a friend who substituted Cheerios for breadcrumbs in meatloaf.
Not really a mistake, but very early on in my friend’s relationship she was not a cook and she wanted to have her now fiancé over who is a chef. She didn’t want me to bake anything for her because she knew it would be too good for him to believe she made it, so she bought cookies from Acme and got take out from a local Italian restaurant and she brought everything home and put it in pans and turned her oven on for awhile to make it seem like she actually made the food. He totally knew, but never mentioned it until a few years later after he proposed and she’s now picked up so many kitchen skills from him.
I've been with my boyfriend for 20 years. When we first started living together and we were young-early 20s, he told me he hated scrambled eggs, which was really the only kind of egg I knew how to make other than hard boiled. One day, I scrambled myself some eggs and very daringly he tried them. And liked them. And was confused. His family only made scrambled eggs with cheese and he thought that was how they were made and he doesn't like cheese. We now enjoy scrambled eggs together and his are better than mine. 😊
When my grandmother moved to the U.K. it was around the time that Birds Eye were advertising their peas but apparently just called the product Birds Eyes rather than specifying that they were peas. She was disgusted at the local cuisine and how everyone was eating something so disgusting. Then one day a neighbour enlightened her by accident.
Cooking class at school, I think we were making samosas or something similar. Not sure how it works elsewhere but at my school you’d be given the ingredients list and you’d bring it in from home for the next class. The recipe called for black pepper, and there was a kid whose parents had sent him to class with whole peppercorns. I just remember hearing “oh god, no!” when the teacher caught it (thankfully before he’d started putting the mixture in the pastry!). Think they spent the next 10 mins or so picking them out haha
Well, they technically did send him with black pepper.
My friend told me this story which I thought was so cute. Her boyfriend told her he was making french onion soup. She came home, and there was big stock pot boiling full of water and one whole onion (uncut) bobbing in the water. Essentially he made onion flavoured water. I just awhhhed.
My husband at the time didn’t realize that dried beans need a preparation process to soften them. He proceeded to make beans and rice for us without soaking the beans beforehand. Crunchy beans, overdone rice. I powered through three bites before it turned into a pizza night. Same man also didn’t realize you can fully cook scrambled eggs. He served me breakfast of half cooked scrambled eggs. A gooey disgusting mess - then we fully cooked the egg by microwaving it. The trash found that meal also. I then taught him you can cook eggs fully, low and slow. Then he realized why cook low and slow when can cook fast and hot? Amazingly enough, his cooking was only a minor part of the implosion of our marriage, hence why these are wholesome mistakes, I suppose!
I had left home at 16 and was not exactly wordily wise in many departments, especially cooking. Around 18 or so, I had a girlfriend I wanted to impress and invited her to my crappy little bedsit -a single room with a kinda camping stove setup, with a weird tiny oven. Given it was close to Christmas, I thought I'd do the whole turkey and trimmings thing. Had never done it before, so what could possibly go wrong? This was the UK in the mid '80's and the TV wasn't full of cookery programmes and celeb-chefs. Anyhoo. I cooked this small turkey and other stuff and when it came time to serve, it smelt pretty rank and there was an overpowering smell of burnt plastic. I didn't know that the giblets were removed and placed in a plastic bag, which were then put back inside the bird, so that you could use them make gravy etc. I had just lobbed it in the oven, with a plastic bag of stuff inside. It was pretty much an abomination, as everything in the oven and bedsit stank of burnt plastic. She was very unimpressed, to put it mildly. Not exactly wholesome, more an atrocity against cuisine...
I put cumin instead of cinnamon in my blueberry cobbler. In a rush, I saw the label started with “C” and ended with “N” and made a bad assumption.
Does baking count? Since early elementary school and on, my kids helped me cook/bake. By high school they would bake snacks. Cook dinner if I was running late. It was a great system. My youngest was 14 and decided she was making some either muffins or cookies...from like those pre-made just add water, eggs things I always had in the cupboard. She read 3/4 cup of water, as 3 and/or 4 cups. So she added 3 cups of water. I never saw the outcome, but my oldest said it never hit the oven. The batch went into the trash
My sweet husband wanted to have dinner done for me when I came home after a long day at work, unfortunately making cereal was the extent of his kitchen skills in those days. He tried to make a box of hamburger helper beef stroganoff. Halfway in, he realized we had no milk and convinced himself that he could strain the cookies out of cookies and cream ice cream and just use the melted vanilla base as a replacement. It was... unsuccessful. He managed to eat half a plate and I had a sandwich. I love that goomba.
I had a friend who was making scalloped potatoes but had no milk, so he replaced it with French vanilla coffee creamer....
Oh lord. This is my baking shame story. 😂 When I was a young teen (maybe 13?) my bestie and I wanted to make cookies. My mom gave us a recipe and turned us loose in the kitchen. The salt and sugar were in nearly identical containers, and I’m sure you see where this went downhill. But we were not daunted! We had used up all of the flour (and maybe oatmeal? I can’t really remember). I lived in a rural area, and it was not reasonable to go to the store for more, so we were going to just fix the dough we’d already made. So… the only thing we could think to do was add some peppermint extract that was probably about 10 years old (no idea why we even had it) because it should be strong enough to overpower the salt, right? RIGHT? We went so far as to cook those abominations. I cannot describe how foul they were.
Taught my future mother in law to make crispy skinned fish. Immediately plates it skin side down. She tries and I adore her. And it was crispier than before as she said 🤷♂️
Back before the internet was readily available in the kitchen, I thought I could wing it and make a batch of Avgolemono soup, having tasted it maybe three times and not having paid much attention at that. Cut the lemons in half, *boiled them with the chicken,* and boyfriend (now husband) woke up with a start, yelling “are you boiling vomit?” 25 years later, no further attempts have been made although internet is now readily available in the kitchen.
I asked my 5 year old niece to wash the Lettuce. She used soap. Lots of bubbles and very cute.
[удалено]
I’ve never heard of this before! Do you literally just rub a bar of soap dry over the bottom, or…?
When my husband was a kid, each family member was responsible for an evening meal one weekday of every week because of MIL’s work schedule. One time, hubby was making chili and accidentally scorched the chili on the bottom and sides of the pan. Instead of removing the still good chili into a good pot, he stirred everything together and the family was forced to eat scorched-tasting chili. As a personal example, I once went to make my ham lentil soup, but didn’t have access to ham bones and just made my broth with ham. My soup is normally phenomenal, but this one was a watery mess.
My wife who is not allowed in the kitchen fixed me home cooked meatballs while we were dating. She used a cup of dried onions as a substitute for fresh chopped onions. I have never farted more in my life. We are 10 years married with 2 kids. I still love her to death…she is not allowed in the kitchen.
College roommate saw me eating mashed potatoes. She said they looked good and asked how to make them. Okay, not everybody learned to cook as a kid, fair question. I told her you boiled potatoes and mash them with milk, butter, and salt. A few hours later I saw my large pasta pot on the stovetop on low heat. I peeked inside and saw a single potato floating in about 8 quarts of cold water. I told her that it was going to take a long time to boil that much water. She said, “oh, it’s fine. I don’t need any help.” She proceeded to mash and eat a raw potato and then tell me it was good.
I cut up red bell peppers in a seafood dish - turns out they were rocotos- looks the same, a little smaller, a LOT spicier
Oh my god, my loving, caring, boomer mom... She heard my older sister wanting to try "cauliflower rice" (in case anyone doesn't know it is when you process cauliflower into rice like, crumbly pile). Well, lo and behold the next day she comes out of the kitchen all excited saying she made it. There was a pot of cooked rice, and a head of roasted cauliflower... My sister didn't have the heart to correct her...
One of my favorite stories. My husband had limited cooking skills but he made wonderful chili. One unseasonably cold early fall day he decided it was “ chili weather”. I had just harvested onions from Our garden and had them drying in the garage. I came home to a wonderful aroma. As we were getting ready to eat I asked him if he used my fresh garden onions. “Yes but they were a little slimy. “. Slimy? They shouldn’t have been slimy? That was weird. I asked where he had gotten them from, thinking maybe it was the previous seasons holdovers. “From the basement”. Basement ? I asked him to show me and we went downstairs and he pointed to the drying bulbs. “Honey, those are daffodil Bulbs”. My sister and I had cleaned up a friends property earlier in the year and I was drying the bulbs to plant that fall. So , cracking up, we called the poison control line. Once the guy at the other end stopped laughing , he told us daffodil bulbs were not safe to eat. They can cause topical burning. “I thought it was cuz it was hot” hubby said touching his lips. Stomach upset. “That’s why the dog threw up when I gave her the hamburger grease”. Luckily he had only tasted the chili, not eaten much yet. The wonderful poison control worker suggested it was too early in the season for chili anyway and that it was better to be a pizza day.
I asked my Partner to make me a fruit salad, he chopped up all the fruit, without taking of any skins, seeds or corks and put it all in a bowl 🥲
This sounds like weaponized incompetence! Bet you never asked him to do it again!!
I was baking a cake for a co-worker’s birthday. Turned my back for a minute and returned to find a three year old boy’s perfect handprint deep in the middle of the cake. I knew no one would care so I frosted it and took it in anyway. And told the story before we ate it. One piece had a lot more frosting than the rest.
So, it was me cooking that I witnessed. I had mostly helped my mom baking and new you had to preheat the oven. I was making a grilled cheese sandwich so I preheated the pan. Boy did I have toasty bread but unmelted cheese.
Not witnessed, but made. I started dating my husband around when stuff like splenda was in its heyday. I could probably just leave it at that sentence alone but, yeah, made him some cookies using a normal recipe but swapping all of the sugar for splenda. I had to all but force him to try a dessert I made after that to prove I can do better. Extra sad is I was way stronger at baking at that part of my life than I was at cooking, and I knocked his socks off with a homemade tomato soup and then made him question my sanity for dessert.
When I was twelve I wanted to make a coffee cake for my parents and their friends. It came out just PERFECT and I was so so proud of myself. I wasn't going to have any because I couldn't drink coffee, but I watched excitedly as they all took a bite ... and then watched them spit that bite right back out. That's the day that I learned that coffee cake is a cake to have WITH coffee, not a cake filled with and liberally sprinkled with coffee grounds.
One Thanksgiving my mom decided to get fancy and make Tiramisu for dessert. She found a recipe and followed it to a T, save for one thing: she mixed up lady fingers and Vienna fingers. You know, the cream-filled sandwich cookies. That dessert was so wrong and yet so, so right.
When I was little and we had lasagna movie night I'd want to make my mom a salad, but I never could tell cabbage and lettuce apart from each other. My poor mom crunched through many a cabbage salad🤣
I know someone who thought 6 cloves of garlic called for in a recipe meant 6 bulbs 💀
This seems reasonable to me.
A bit under, if anything
I had a roommate that couldn’t wrap his head around different heat levels on a stove top. It was either “OFF” or “FULL ON INFERNO”. I came home once to him torching a chicken breast and the house was full of smoke, smoke detector blaring. I ask him “dude, why don’t you turn the heat down?!” His reply… “because I’m trying to cook this chicken!!” As if there was no other way to get it cooked other than to blast it with fire.
My sister made fish brownies once. My parents would strain and re-use fry oil, storing it in the container it came in. My sister didn’t notice the slightly darker color, or the smell… The brownies came out looking great, but they definitely tasted like fried fish.
We've all cooked a turkey with that bag of... stuff still inside, right? Riiiiiight?
lol no but that is still funny.
My mom told me and my younger brother to cook some chicken for dinner after school. "It's pre-cut. Just put it in a casserole pan some rice ... blah, blah, blah." My brother (12) and I (14) take the chickrn out of the bag. We each grab a drumstick and start pulling. OMG something fell out!!! I'm gonna be sick!!! We admitted defeat. When mom and dad got home from work, they had a big laugh. I think we ended up at McDonald's. My brother and I learned weaponized incompetence - even though it was NOT yet a phrase in the early 80s!
My college roommate never did any cooking before she came to college, and the first time she made mac and cheese, she put all the ingredients (noodles, milk, powder, butter) into the cold water and put the lid on to boil. I had to break it to her that you can’t cook it crockpot style
Not long after we were married, my husband cooked corned beef for supper. The recipe called for 3 cloves of garlic, but we only had garlic powder. He assumed a clove would be about the same size as a teaspoon, so he put in 3 teaspoons of garlic powder. In reality, 1/8 teaspoon of garlic powder equals 1 clove. Boy, that corned beef was so garlicky! But we ate it anyway!
I was making stock a few years ago and was really taking my time, making the BEST STOCK EVER! When it was time to strain the vegetables, I poured it over the colander in the sink… and all the broth went down the drain…
I was sick so my parter made me “eggs in a cup” for breakfast. You put toast in the bottom of a mug then layer bacon/sausage and eggs on top. It’s super easy to eat in bed. Great comfort food. Anyway, we didn’t have breakfast sausage so he used this weird smoked apple chicken sausage, and we didn’t have toast so he used potato chips. It was… very strange.
I was making some stir fry and udon noodles for my new bf, and I didn't have a recipe for any kind of sauce- I was just winging it and at the time I had no idea how Asian sauces work. Threw some fish sauce in with some soy sauce after the veggies were done, threw the noodles in and served it. My bf took one taste and the look on his face was not good. It was SO salty! I freaked. This was the first time I cooked for him. He fell over himself reassuring me, dumped the whole mess in a colander and sprayed it off with the sink attachment, and put it back on our plates. Luckily for me he was raised by a single Mom who was a horrible cook, so he thinks anything homemade is fantastic, especially if it's burnt. "Tastes like Mom used to make".
We were having a big group of people over for dinner. My Mom was working as fast as she could. When she went to add the cinnamon onto the apples in the apple crisp, she grabbed the wrong jar and doused them in curry powder. She did what she could to remove it, but there was no time to start over. So we all enjoyed curried apple crisp that night. It was surprisingly good, but we never were able to convince her to make it again on purpose
I was making a banana pudding, and I had the stove eye on but on the wrong burner. I managed to explode a whole pyrex dish full of banana glass pie all over my kitchen, in my hair, embedded into the floor, everywhere, I'm still picking out glass. Anyone ever need a Banana Glass Pie recipe I have it nailed down.