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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:
Bladderpool · 28/09/2025 23:09

Followed a Jamie Oliver recipe for puttanesca that told me to use all the anchovy oil to fry the garlic and chillies, loads of capers and olives in brine. It was completely inedible due to the level of salt from these ingredients, I might as well have boiled the pasta in the Dead Sea. I remade it with no anchovy oil, no capers and regular olives and it was delicious. JO must have the arteries of a 300 year old.

PandoraSocks · 28/09/2025 23:13

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.

🤣🤣🤣

BarbaraVineFan · 28/09/2025 23:20

Bladderpool · 28/09/2025 23:09

Followed a Jamie Oliver recipe for puttanesca that told me to use all the anchovy oil to fry the garlic and chillies, loads of capers and olives in brine. It was completely inedible due to the level of salt from these ingredients, I might as well have boiled the pasta in the Dead Sea. I remade it with no anchovy oil, no capers and regular olives and it was delicious. JO must have the arteries of a 300 year old.

‘I might as well have boiled the pasta in the Dead Sea’ has really tickled me! 😂😂😂

Mine was when I was a student and used to make a lovely lentil soup with onion, carrots, some spices. All my friends loved it.

Home for the holidays, my dad asked if I’d make it for him. At which point, I have no idea why, but I decided to blend it instead of leaving it with all the lovely vegetable chunks in. it ended up like a hot, tasteless, thin hummus. Neither my dad nor I could eat it.

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General food
StElwicksNeighbourhoodAssociation · 28/09/2025 23:49

verycloakanddaggers · 28/09/2025 18:26

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

Yeah I did this - only it wasn't cake it was the Christmas turkey. We ate very late that year. But the skin was nice and crispy!

snurtifier · 28/09/2025 23:52

My mum once decided to make an olive cake. Which was a weird idea to start with, but she also made it with plain flour instead of self-raising. It was like eating a brick made of dark green chamois leather.

StElwicksNeighbourhoodAssociation · 29/09/2025 00:01

He made us egg fried rice, but didn't realise that you should boil the rice first.

This reminds me of an argument I had with an ex. He'd bought a bag of new potatoes. The cooking suggestion said that you could serve them hot or cold. He was going to serve them straight out of the bag. I told him they needed to be cooked first. He insisted that they could be served cold and didn't need cooking because that would make them hot! I went home and left him to his raw potatoes for dinner.

Ellmau · 29/09/2025 00:02

My first Home economics class at school we made a chocolate custard, presumably intended to be idiot proof and to give us confidence. Mine set so hard you literally could not get a spoon in it.

Things did not improve appreciably. By the time I was able to give up HE, I could make precisely two dishes reliably, one of which was fruit salad.

I did subsequently learn to follow a recipe more or less, but I never became a natural cook. The first time I made pancakes I thought the amount in the recipe was for a single pancake.

I once wondered why it was taking SO LONG for the soup to boil, only to realise I hadn't turned on the hob.

Most recent disaster was heating up some veg from the Cook shop (some sort of purple cabbage dish) in the microwave. I didn't want to do all of it, and misjudged the time adjustment. It ended up like pot pourri. It was eaten, but not by me.

One Christmas my DM bought a fancy Christmas pudding from the butcher. It was supposed to be steamed, but she decided it would be fine to boil it. It really wasn't. It was so solid and sodden, we gave it to the birds. Three weeks later we had to scrape it off the bird table as the birds had spurned it.

ThreePears · 29/09/2025 00:14

Oh my , home economics at school. I used icing sugar instead of self-raising flour in my sponge cake and accidentally invented the frisbee.

pontivex · 29/09/2025 02:12

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. 🤣

Arf. I’ve done something similar. The instructions said to bubble it until it ‘coated the back of a spoon’. It just seemed to run off not coat it so it bubbled for more and more time.
I poured it on top of the sponge and then put it under the grill as instructed. When it emerged it was sponge in a very thick layer of rock hard impenetrable toffee. You could have built a house out of the brick it created so it went uneaten lest everyone lose their fillings or just their teeth in general.
It was a blessing in disguise becuase as I was clearing away I realised that at some point the toffee spoon and the spoon I’d used to dish out the dogs dinner had somehow got mixed up so the toffee sauce would have contained bits of raw beef. 🫤

IJWMM · 29/09/2025 02:27

As a teen, I really had t taken any interest in cooking or recipes. Basically clueless.

Decided to do garlic potato wedges for flatmates. The difference between two cloves and two bulbs was interesting.

Iamasentientoctopus · 29/09/2025 02:29

When I made my infamous ‘yogurt cake’ for our new next door neighbours I was trying to impress. My husband stopped me from taking it round as he said it could be mistaken for a hate crime. I’m actually a good cook but I’m a terrible baker - probably because you have to actually follow a recipe! It managed to be an ungodly combination of undercooked, burnt, sour and horribly unattractive 😆

Dogaredabomb · 29/09/2025 02:34

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.

I admire you for this 🤣 and have got pissed by accident many times.

TheDevilFindsWorkForIdleMums · 29/09/2025 02:34

The first time I made liver I didn't fry it off first.....just shoved it in the oven raw with water, onions and a beef oxo ......it came out like a huge liver blancmange 🤢

Safxxx · 29/09/2025 02:39

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.

Did you say delicious 😂😂

Dogaredabomb · 29/09/2025 02:40

MsRinky · 28/09/2025 19:36

I made marmalade which turned into a massive lump of toffee with shreds in. I smashed it with a hammer and dissolved it in gin which made the most delicious orange liqueur ever but I fear it is not replicable.

This reminds me of 'wrong cake'. My mum made the most delicious everything in the cupboard cake and it was much denser on the bottom. It was the best cake ever and we asked for more wrong cake, alas it was unique.

Dogaredabomb · 29/09/2025 02:42

Timeforatincture · 28/09/2025 19:39

Made bread pudding with "off" suet. Vile. Son ate it anyway. He was a dustbin at that age.

No matter how many delicious meals I've made over the years, the rancid bread pudding always gets a mention. It'll come out in my eulogy.

They have such long and ungrateful memories. The carrots that made ds cry are still mentioned 30 years later

McSpoot · 29/09/2025 03:04

Baking, not cooking, but I once made a chocolate cake that bounced...

Momtotwokids · 29/09/2025 03:34

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 😂

When I mess up a meal my husband says it is food and no one died.

Realisation14 · 29/09/2025 04:37

When I was 18 I tried to make mash potatoes for the first time, had no idea I was supposed to drain the water off the potatoes after boiling them as the recipe didn't say so - proceeded to add milk and butter to the pot and mash anyway, curious as to why the potatoes weren't "absorbing the water" as I mashed them. In my defence, my mother died when I was younger, my dad was nowhere to be found and my sister who was only 5yrs older had been raring me so I blame my upbringing 🤣🤣

Beenwhereyouareagain · 29/09/2025 04:41

Lollypop701 · 28/09/2025 21:07

Decided to be all Christmasy with mulled wine and chestnuts… didn’t know you had to pierce the chestnuts… which exploded in oven- which I heard and opened oven and my entire kitchen was a mess of exploded chestnuts. Honestly inwas dancing round kitchen avoiding the next chestnut missile

thankfully the mulled wine was ok (M&S bottle in a pan) so I drank that whilst cleaning

Edited

😆😆😆😆

ChocolateCinderToffee · 29/09/2025 04:42

I decided to make a lemon drizzle cake but the only flour I had in was 00 pasta flour.

Protip: don’t use 00 pasta flour for a cake. When I tipped it out of the tin, it crumbled into bits.

SiameseBlueEyes · 29/09/2025 05:26

As teenagers living on their own for the first time, one of my friends actually made a rhubarb crumble using soap powder instead of flour. Somebody had bulk bought a huge sack of washing powder which she mistook for flour. Thankfully nobody tried to persist in eating it.

champignonsavage · 29/09/2025 06:21

I lived in a student house share back in the 80s. Some of my housemates returned late at night extremely drunk and extremely hungry. There was no actual food in the house so they improvised with the only things they could find which were a tin of cat food and a jar of curry powder. Some 50 years later I can still remember the smell of cat food curry.

Antimimisti · 29/09/2025 07:33

Ellmau · 29/09/2025 00:02

My first Home economics class at school we made a chocolate custard, presumably intended to be idiot proof and to give us confidence. Mine set so hard you literally could not get a spoon in it.

Things did not improve appreciably. By the time I was able to give up HE, I could make precisely two dishes reliably, one of which was fruit salad.

I did subsequently learn to follow a recipe more or less, but I never became a natural cook. The first time I made pancakes I thought the amount in the recipe was for a single pancake.

I once wondered why it was taking SO LONG for the soup to boil, only to realise I hadn't turned on the hob.

Most recent disaster was heating up some veg from the Cook shop (some sort of purple cabbage dish) in the microwave. I didn't want to do all of it, and misjudged the time adjustment. It ended up like pot pourri. It was eaten, but not by me.

One Christmas my DM bought a fancy Christmas pudding from the butcher. It was supposed to be steamed, but she decided it would be fine to boil it. It really wasn't. It was so solid and sodden, we gave it to the birds. Three weeks later we had to scrape it off the bird table as the birds had spurned it.

I remember having to make banana custard in Home Economics. I have always hated bananas and custard separately, so I was never going to want to eat them together, even if it had been cooked to perfection by a Michelin starred chef. But something went wrong and it came out like a lump of rubber - you could lift it out of the bowl in one 😆.
I took it home anyway and my dad, who loved custard, had it for his pudding without complaint.

Ohwhatfuckeryitistoride · 29/09/2025 07:52

DH did a dinner party from an Antony Worrall-Thompson cookbook. Except he got the proportions wrong. He diligently sourced roquefort cheese, pears of the correct firmness and calves liver. We ended up with an ice cream box of roquefort mousse, a jug of insanely rich blue cheese sauce and so so much calves liver in an orange marinade. The calves liver was disgusting. And even the cat wouldn't eat it.