Meals that went utterly pete tong!

[Jewelledslice]

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!

I was 'helping' my godmother make a date and orange loaf and while she was zesting and juicing the oranges I used salt instead of castor sugar for the mixture.

DH made an apple crumble for DCs and his nieces using salt instead of sugar too.

Mum made a banana loaf that turned purple.

Also tried making fishcakes with tinned pilchards in tomato sauce. Tip: don't try this at home.

My late MIL made a dish that will live long in the memory (and not in a good way). We were going over on Boxing Day, and she was due to make Christmas dinner. When we got there, the Christmas dinner had been postponed to the next day, so she had made a shepherd’s pie….well, it was a shepherd’s pie, Jim, but not as we know it. She had used the (cooked, leftover) veg from the day before, so as it was a bit tasteless, she’s added a tin of tomatoes and goodness knows what assortment of herbs. She’s then tried to put the potato on the top, and it had started to sink, so she just stirred it all in. The resultant unappealingly pink slurry was….interesting. My DH refused point blank to eat any of it; I, being fairly newly married and wanting to please, had some and then felt utterly sick the entire afternoon - I think it was the herbs, which made it taste not unlike some sort of herbal tea. It really was unbelievable. My MIL was never much of a cook, bless her - as I was raised in a family where cooking was as natural as breathing, it came as a bit of a shock to the system that there were people who really, really couldn’t cook.

Haha I don’t need to know more… just that one word is brilliant!

When Covid madness was in full swing I only had a ‘Pasta N Sauce’ in for my lunch but had no milk.

In fear of breaching arbitrary rules I decided I couldn’t possibly go out to the shop again that day so made it with watered down Coffee Mate.

Horrible

I got involved in the J@ck M0nr0e 'slopalong' recipe tryout a few years ago. What I ended up making was so disgusting even the dog wouldnt eat it and he will eat anything

However my worst culinary disaster to date has to be when I substituted chillies in a recipe for my family when I was about 16. The recipe said big chillies. I couldn't find those in the shop but they did have tiny small chillies. So I figured that 4 small chillies would be the same. That was the day I realised that the smaller the chilli, the hotter they are. Anything containing 16 birds eye chillies is going to indescribably hot.

I made a cheesecake and forgot to put any cheese in it. So it was sugar, cream and chocolate on a biscuit base. The worst part was that I worked in the local pub kitchen and this was being served to customers.

I realised and asked if anyone had had any, they had and no-one complained. Tasted it and it wasn’t bad just a bit small 🤣🤣

Also at a different job, I sieved the gravy down the sink and kept the lumps. I work with horses now 🤣

I think that sounds infinitely sensible!

DH has had 2 major disasters that stick in my mind.

He asked me to stir the gnocci he’d made from scratch.
Me: (confused) Where is it?
DH: In the pan, you’re looking at it.
Me: Erm…no it’s not.

It had completely disintegrated, leaving a large pan of floury water.

Then there was the time he made a Heston Blumenthal consommé that took hours and hours, and many bagfuls of cauliflower (I’m not exaggerating). He forgot to take the muslin to filter it when he transported it to his parents’ house. Ended up filtering it through a (clean) popsock. It tasted like washing powder. He was crushed.

Made tomato and chorizo pasta with a ‘hint’ of chilli. Ds was about 6 and told me it was too spicy, I didn’t agree with him and he did eat it… then was immediately sick over kitchen floor… and then told me ‘I told you it was too spicy’ .. every single time I make pasta it is referred to and it was at least 15 years ago..

Fucking hell, this is so funny. What an idiot!

DH was not blessed with the culinary gene. He made a pasta sauce once that needed to be liquidised with a stick blender, but somehow managed to drop a plastic item into the pan. We're not sure exactly what the item was, but we spent the entire meal picking little bits of plastic out of our teeth.

I'm fine in the kitchen, as long as I stay away from baking. I made a very elaborate multi-layered cake, sandwiched with lemon cream/icing, but I must have made the icing wrong, because it was the colour and texture of baby-sick. As I turned away from the finished cake all the layers slowly slid apart in an unappetising yellow pool of icing, and all but the bottom layer ended up on the floor. The DCs actually took photos to show their friends how bad a baker I am.

That sounds quite nice actually, even if it isn't cheesecake.

When I was 19, I cooked a garlic fish dish for my new boyfriend, trying to impress him. The recipe called for three cloves of garlic. I used three whole bulbs.
bless him, he tried to eat it before we gave it up as a bad job and went to the chippy.

I can make some nice dinners on any given weeknight when I haven’t really got half
the stuff or decided what I’m making til ten minutes after I start. But give me the chance to plan and I will turn my signature carbonara into spaghetti scramble, cremate the steaks, my stew ends up
watery. It’s become a joke in our house, whenever we have guests, I will serve up some specimen
of disaster. I can only assume it’s stress or self-sabotage or something. Worst one ever was a luxurious melting cheese-board macaroni for which I had specially purchased an array of deli delights. Sauce entirely disappeared into the pasta on cooking and it came out looking like a brain in a jar, and tasting of the square root of bugger-all. Even the dog seemed to only be eating it out of politeness.