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Original poster

Meals that went utterly pete tong!

115 replies

Jewelledslice · 28/09/2025 17:57

After a disastrous dinner tonight, i thought Id ask for your dinner cock ups to make me feel better!

Today instead of a roast, I got some salmon and decided to do it in pastry with pesto. I thought it would be a nice alternative!

The problem is - I'm gluten free and dairy free. I've been perfecting GF short crust pastry over the last year and can produce a passable pie, so I used the same recipe. I made the pastry yesterday and put in the fridge overnight as per usual.

When I got the pastry out it basically crumbled like the driest play dough 😔

However the salmon was defrosted so I tried, desperately, to form a ball. No luck!

What I made was salmon on a bed of GF breadcrumbs with a topping of pesto and GF breadcrumbs.

Oh my goodness it was foul 😂 Basically fish in dust. DH took one bite and then got up and started doing other stuff. He kindly said I could have the rest!

So help me feel better! Tell me your cooking disasters!

OP posts:
Fizhy · 28/09/2025 18:03

After I’d had my second baby my husband decided he would helpfully take over all cooking duties for a few weeks. He’s not a front runner for master chef but if he finds a recipe he can copy he’s fine. He decided to do a stroganoff. Only we’d ran out of creme fraiche/plain yoghurt like the recipe said so he used the only alternative we had in the fridge…. Raspberry yoghurt 😂. Can’t say it was edible but the thought and effort was appreciated.

ohyesido · 28/09/2025 18:04

I decided to make my own meatballs, I did not realise they need seasoning to be so delicious. They tasted like socks.

I tried to make a steak and pasta dish I saw on TikTok, the sauce reduced down to nothing and I served my DH a plate of plain spaghetti with some steak interspersed through it. It took me an hour to create something a monkey could do

TheNightingalesStarling · 28/09/2025 18:11

I dropped it all over the kitchen floor halfway through cooking.

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General food
Comedycook · 28/09/2025 18:13

Making chicken stir fried noodles for DH.. .grabbed the soy sauce out of the cupboard and poured it in....it was actually balsamic vinegar. DH ate it without complaint 😂

Whoopsmahoot · 28/09/2025 18:17

Made a toffee sauce for a dessert for a dinner party. It went gritty so I thought I’d heat it more. Boiled it to buggery. Poured it into China serving jug and it immediately solidified into tablet. Set like a brick. 🤣

Arlanymor · 28/09/2025 18:20

I once made a beef wellington that looked like an elephant leg. Totally overestimated the amount of everything I would need for the size of the dinner party. And another time I had to push back a dinner party by two hours because I ordered an organic goose… and when I picked it up it was still very much an intact goose. Plucking was the least of the grim things I had to do, at least it was actually dead!

Andthatrightsoon · 28/09/2025 18:23

My mother used to put bags of leftovers into the freezer without labels. She once made a delicious potato crumble with custard.

Antimimisti · 28/09/2025 18:24

I once made a carrot cake and miscalculated how much it would rise. I opened the oven to check if it was done, and there were lakes of burnt carrot cake all over the oven where it had overflowed the tin. The cake itself was OK but I don't think the oven was ever the same again.

Antimimisti · 28/09/2025 18:25

Andthatrightsoon · 28/09/2025 18:23

My mother used to put bags of leftovers into the freezer without labels. She once made a delicious potato crumble with custard.

Oh for the laugh reaction! 😂

verycloakanddaggers · 28/09/2025 18:26

I grilled a cake instead of baking it, burnt on top and raw underneath.

AmandaHoldensLips · 28/09/2025 18:29

Roast duck with all the trimmings. Accidentally got horribly pissed with friend who was supposedly "helping" in the kitchen. Burned my hands getting the roasting pan out of the oven with a wet dishcloth. Dropped the pan filled with duck fat. Duck shot across the floor in a skid-pan of fat, wedged in the gap between the washing machine and the fridge. Friend fell over on the skid-pan floor. Duck covered in dust bunnies, pet hair, general filth and christ only knows what else.

We ran it under the tap and served it.

AmandaHoldensLips · 28/09/2025 18:30

^^ in my defence this was in the 80's before I'd learned how to clean a kitchen.

WonderingWanda · 28/09/2025 18:31

I made pulled pork the other day put the wrong oven on. By the time I realised had to whack the heat up and got a boiled chewy mess that did not pull apart.

Sunloungerhogger · 28/09/2025 18:32

We once decided to make a ‘fancy’ dinner of pan fried scallops with black pudding, kohlrabi rosti and steamed samphire. No idea why on earth we decided on this dish / where we found the recipe. I don’t even like kohlrabi in any case but the rosti I made were like floury gluey disgusting things which were completely raw in the middle, and in contrast my DH burnt the black pudding to cinder (he didn’t notice it was getting burned black on account of it being black pudding…). The samphire was woody. The scallops were teeny tiny but the only edible element of the dish.

Pianoaholic · 28/09/2025 18:35

Our kids have always been keen on those choc chip brioches, and the plain ones.
I used to shove a good few in the oven for a quick breakfast or after school snack.
Sometimes one would inadvertently fall down the back of the oven and turn to charcoal as it was recooked along with other meals before being discovered.
I still say the speciality of the house is 'burnt brioche'!

Original poster
Jewelledslice · 28/09/2025 18:35

Fizhy · 28/09/2025 18:03

After I’d had my second baby my husband decided he would helpfully take over all cooking duties for a few weeks. He’s not a front runner for master chef but if he finds a recipe he can copy he’s fine. He decided to do a stroganoff. Only we’d ran out of creme fraiche/plain yoghurt like the recipe said so he used the only alternative we had in the fridge…. Raspberry yoghurt 😂. Can’t say it was edible but the thought and effort was appreciated.

Oh that's brilliant! 😂

OP posts:
Original poster
Jewelledslice · 28/09/2025 18:36

ohyesido · 28/09/2025 18:04

I decided to make my own meatballs, I did not realise they need seasoning to be so delicious. They tasted like socks.

I tried to make a steak and pasta dish I saw on TikTok, the sauce reduced down to nothing and I served my DH a plate of plain spaghetti with some steak interspersed through it. It took me an hour to create something a monkey could do

Plain spaghetti and steak sounds dire! 😂

OP posts:
Original poster
Jewelledslice · 28/09/2025 18:38

Antimimisti · 28/09/2025 18:24

I once made a carrot cake and miscalculated how much it would rise. I opened the oven to check if it was done, and there were lakes of burnt carrot cake all over the oven where it had overflowed the tin. The cake itself was OK but I don't think the oven was ever the same again.

Sounds like something I'd do!

OP posts:
Original poster
Jewelledslice · 28/09/2025 18:39

Ah these have cheered me up! Thank you!

OP posts:
Baital · 28/09/2025 18:41

I am laughing out loud and getting odd looks from DD and DDog 😂 one of my best efforts was homemade strawberry jam that was over cooked and turned into strawberry flavoured rubber... such a waste of lovely strawberries!

TrimayrAcademy · 28/09/2025 18:44

verycloakanddaggers · 28/09/2025 18:26

I grilled a cake instead of baking it, burnt on top and raw underneath.

I have also done this!

TrimayrAcademy · 28/09/2025 18:49

Feeling adventurous my sister and I decided to make cinder toffee, no idea what we did wrong but we just got a floppy sticky rubber disk!

My DH uses much more salt than I do when cooking. I was making a breaded fish dish and the receipe said to season the egg, flour, the breadcrumbs and the fish. So I tried to season it the way DH does.

It was so salty it actually burn the back of my nose. I don’t know how, but it did. Absolutely inedible!

Septictanking · 28/09/2025 18:51

Mine are usually out of impatience and impulsivity rather than ignorance, I blame the audhd,
I put liver and onions in the pressure cooker once, I can't stand it anyway but husband likes it, half an hour later, a gritty leathery mess came out bleurgh.

Campbellcarrotsoup · 28/09/2025 18:56

When I was about 8, I was making cookies, all very independent insisting I would do it alone without any help. As I was getting ginger out of the cupboard above me an open packet of herbs de provance fell into my cake mix spreading herbs everywhere. I decided to style it out and not mention it. Needless to say the results were pretty grim

MyDeftHedgehog · 28/09/2025 18:59

I made a Christmas cake and neglected to add the eggs. Worse still it was for a church Christmas market 😆
The local bird population were very happy to take it off my hands 😀