The dumbest cooking-related mistake you ever made?

[Holliemorrisonx]

I would say cooking a chicken wrap for twice as long as I needed to and it burnt

One of my earliest attempts at cooking, I tried to make fried potatoes, but didn't know you'd want to boil them first... They were still completely raw and I had to throw them away!

More recently, making chocolate oat bars, I added some vanilla without reading the bottle - it was actually lemon essence. They were really unpleasant!

There are a whole load of "what's the worst.... you've ever..." going around today. Is this a journalist thing? Or just a theme for today?

Mum’s friend had a great chocolate cake so I asked my mother to get the recipe. So mixing it and think it’s quite thick but who knows? No cooking instructions but figure it’s like any other sponge. Pour it into pans stick in oven and take it out 25 min later. It’s a hard mess! Check with the woman and she reveals that she gave me the recipe for the icing not the cake! I was about 14 so didn’t really notice there wasn’t any flour...
My mother, who was an amazing cook, said before she got married she lived in a bedsit with just a hot plate so didn’t know how to cook then. After marrying my Dad (this is late 50s) she decided to cook a chicken for dinner. She put a frozen chicken straight in the oven! She did learn how to cook after that (thanks mainly to Julia Child and Constance Rosemary).

For context, I came from a home where if my mother lost the tin opener we'd have starved, so I perhaps wasn't the best person to make a rice pudding for my new husband back in '79

The thing with rice puddings, as I learned too late, is that the ratio of uncooked rice to milk really doesn't look much at all - miserly in fact - which is how I came to add almost the whole packet

The scene when I opened the oven door looked like a disaster movie involving Vesuvius

Cutting chicken up on a plastic chopping boards, sprinkling marinade over it and popping it straight in the oven.

It smelt awful, the cooker was a right off. And i was banned from using the new cooker.

I have also baked a tea towel and set fire to my coat poaching an egg

Spent hours making proper chicken stock with a chicken carcass, loads of veg and seasoning etc. Then drained the stock straight down the sink, leaving me with a pan of soggy veg and bones.

Cooking chicken with the giblets inside in the plastic bag. Cooking a pizza with the Styrofoam "plate" still attached. I also put a gammon in a pan of coke and forgot to take the plastic sleeve off, noticed after 30 mins, just took it off and ate the meat seemed ok...

Roasted the chicken with the big knife alongside it in the roasting pan. Nice smell of burnt plastic.

What's more I've done that TWICE!

You can see why my daughters had to learn to cook.

During a school cookery class we were making sponge cakes and I managed to use icing sugar instead of flour in mine.

The result was, er, interesting.

Not a mistake as such, but every time I aim to make an omelette I end up with scrambled egg. Just can’t seem to get it right!

Home made bread is also a disaster for me.

Making poached eggs for my (much older) brother when I was about 10, and forgetting to put water in the poaching pan, in my efforts to impress.

Having no idea how long a turkey takes to defrost, having to immerse it in boiling water and cooking it with the plastic bag of giblets inside it. A rather less than happy Christmas.

Not mine exactly, but a friend was coming in to do dinners for my aged Dad whilst I was away for a week. I'd left a list of things he liked to eat, but she decided to go off-piste and cook bolognese from scratch, using stuff she'd found in the fridge and freezer. I got a phone call asking me what was wrong with the frozen tomato juice. 'What tomato juice?' I asked. 'It was in a ziplock bag in the freezer' she said. 'Ah, that would be the watermelon and Midori sorbet then', says I (pretentious, much? There were reasons).

Dad apparently enjoyed dinner after she told him it was an exotic 'Caribbean stew'. I'm glad I didn't get to taste it!

I forgot to mix the egg into a cake mix. It was the last ingredient to blend before pouring it into the lined cake tins. I had to remove from the oven (luckily it had only been in 2 minutes), pour the mix back into the mixer bowl and re-line the tins.

Mine, probably frankfurter hotdogs. Where I live now they come with a fine plastic wrap you’re supposed to remove immediately before cooking. In the country where I grew up, nada. Almost made me and DH choke .

Back in his early twenties a good male friend of mine was left home alone while his parents did a tour of Asia. He decided on night two to cook himself dinner including mashed potatoes. He tried boiling the spuds in milk and burnt everything. He lived on takeout for almost a month, which is about when the lingering smell finally disappeared

I drained some just-cooked rice into the colander while standing in the middle of the kitchen, nowhere near the sink.

It was one of my finest moments.

@Tadpoletofrog do you put milk in? My friend had the same problem and it wasn't until I saw her making it and adding milk that we worked it out!

Not realising that a garlic bulb is entirely different to a garlic clove.

Set myself on fire boiling an egg 🙈

But I've also done the stock thing someone mentioned upthread, made a lovely stock from scratch and poured it down the sink. I was gutted!

I once mistook 100g of chicken livers for 1kg in a pasta sauce.

I basically made pate bolognese and the house stank of liver for a week.

Last week I went to make buttercream for topping a carrot cake, but used bicarb instead of icing sugar - that'll teach me to label containers.

@Puzzledandpissedoff that reminds me of something my best friend at school did once. Her mother was out and had asked her to make a rice pudding. The recipe asked for 1.5 ozs rice. Friend put it in, thought 'that's not much', and assumed it was a misprint, so put in 1.5 lbs instead.

I remember my dad and sister once making fudge, and accidentally using salt instead of sugar!

Tablespoon instead of teaspoon... when dealing with salt. Inedible.

Where to start

Most people have cut themselves preparing food but I literally almost took my finger off with a bread knife cutting crusty bread. The kitchen was like a scene from DIY SOS when the room is completely transformed- the lovely crimson colour didn’t suit my kitchen.

I also went to pre-heat the oven once but forgot there was a leftover pizza box in there. Never seen so much smoke in my life.