I'm making an oven-stuffer roaster (no stuffing) at the moment. It takes about 2 hours at 350 (the package says 2 1/2 - liars). It reminded me of the time I made one of these 7 pounders and after baking it for 2 hours discovered I had never placed it in the oven. I just ran an empty oven for 2 hours. LOL and . ended up with take-out chinese.

What was your biggest kitchen mistake?

Rob
310/234.5/180

Me, a skeptic? I trust you have proof.

This just happened about a month ago...
I was at BF's and he was going to make ham. He was outside finishing up yard work, so I thought I'd be nice and get the ham started for him. All was well, till he went to baste it...

...and discovered I had left the shrink wrap on the ham!!!

We stood there, giggling, peeling off the plastic as best we could, while his teenager tried to figure out what the heck we were doing.

p.s. that was the best and juiciest (and I am sure, most carcinogenic) ham I've had in a long time


"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."
- Yoda ('The Empire Strikes Back')
Start Atkins 9.1.03
225/198/130ish
Valentine's Day Goal: 180

I can't bake worth beans - cooking on the other hand - now I am really good at that. One time, pre-LC, I made a chocolate cake for my husband's birthday party. I was supposed to bring it to my in-law's house for dessert (all of his sisters can bake like you wouldn't believe). Anyway, I forgot to grease the cake pans, so the stupid layers fell into pieces when I flipped them over to remove them from the pans. DH comes home to find me cursing baking and the gods as I am trying to paste the stupid layers together with really sticky icing and toothpicks. The last time I tried to bake - cupcakes from a box - they never rose and were about the size and density of hockey pucks. Never again!

Jen
175/129/120

Jen,

lol.... Dont give up. I could never bake. Cooking I am good at. The baking thing does have a science to it. Just be patient and keep trying. The best bakers have failed several times before they got it right.

Kimberly
October 2003 WOL
262/243/175

I think my worst kitchen disaster was with homemade salsa - I made a HUGE batch with homegrown tomatoes, fresh cilantro, onions, jalapenos - all lovingly hand-chopped to exacting dice - and then promptly dropped the plastic container on the kitchen floor - it practically EXPLODED all over the kitchen, as high as the ceiling! And I said a string of words I don't think I knew that I knew....LOL! Boy was I PI$$ED off! Hours of work to make, not to mention the buckets of beautiful garden-fresh tomatoes, and more hours to clean up!

LOL over the ham! I bet it WAS juicy!!

Char

Don't squat with yer spurs on!

A long time ago I was watching my niece at my sister's and had brought along my chocolate chip cookie recipe so that I could bake them a batch. My sister has the exact same set of canisters that I have so I used what I thought was flour from the same canister that I kept mine in. Not only did they turn out really weird shape-wise, but they tasted really putrid. It turned out that she had Bisquick in that particular canister and the flour was in the next size down.

Sigh... I made the best chocolate chip cookies and really miss them sometimes.

Esther

Funny stories!

One time I made a big batch of chicken stock. I roasted soem bones and cut up lots of veggies adn simmered it all for hours. Then wen to strain the bones and veggies out. I put the strainer in the sink and dumped the stock pot contents in, only I forgot to put a bowl underneath. LOL. It all went down the drain.
can you say senior moment.

Rob
310/234.5/180

Me, a skeptic? I trust you have proof.

Well, if you're talking culinary horrors, we're talking smelt casserole. (Don't even ask. There were martinis involved. We had pizza. It was way prior to lc and remains a family legend.)

If you're talking about just big mistakes, mine was a lot like Chars. I used to run a huge garden when the boys were growing up and one of my favorite crops were fresh soybeans (edame). You've got to pick them while they're still green, then blanch them in the pod, then cool them and squeeze the two beans or so out of each pod. THEN, you get to bag them up in freezer bags and store them.

Well, I had worked all day on my soybean crop and finally had a huge bowl - I mean a big stainless steel bowl of commercial size, about two and a half feet across the top - full of liberated soy beans. Of course, being me, I had turned the kitchen into the worst kind of mess with stuff all over the place. (I tend to work in frenzy mode when I have an enormous task to do.) So I'm carrying this haul of beans to the last empty spot in the kitchen, so I can clean up the mess and get down to baggin them.

I slipped on one of the numerous pods on the kitchen floor. I tend to become dedicated to a task. I must have, unconsciously decided that I wasn't going to lose my whole crop and a days worth of work.

Well, I didn't lose but a couple of beans as I crashed to the floor, but I DID break my coccyx and had to carry a rubber donut to school for the whole semester. Duh!

Still like fresh soybeans. But now I can buy them already frozen ... and I do!

Maggie
5'1" ~~ Atkins since '98 (160+)
Maintaining nicely (110 +/-)
~~ Redhead until further notice!

I can't say if this is my worst or not -- when you cook as much and as experimentally as I do, there are some doozies! -- but it certainly is the most recent:

My dh is a salmon fisherman. Our favorite thing to do with them is to smoke them. (This is actually a story about HIS disaster as much as it is mine! )

Dh cleaned a huge fish and promptly put it into a Rubbermaid container and we left for something terribly important.

It was many days before I was able to get to that fish.

When I finally did, it was covered with slime and ooze.

He had forgotten to salt the fish before putting it into the refrigerator

BUT

As an act of love, I continued with the process, dutifully scrubbing the tarnation out of that fish to get the ooze off. I seasoned it and put it into the smoker.

THEN

The smoker would not come up to heat. I finally ended up making "Easy Beef and Green Beans" (a recipe for the new book I'm doing) and put the fish into the oven to continue to cook.

It just didn't look right. It was still oozing! The smell, once we got it into the house and it had baked a while, was putrid!

Out that fishy went! That was the last fish of the season, too, and I had given away a bunch counting on that one for the winter

Blessings!
Sharron
Author of "Low Carb Cooking at Sharron's Place," and "Extreme Lo-Carb Cuisine," available where ever books are sold.

www.thelowcarbcook.com

"My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart." Colossians 2:2

LOL!! This is my favorite thread so far!

When I was 17 years old, my boyfriend at the time wanted me to come to his house and make dinner for him. (and his parents, but I didn't know that at the time) I am a southern girl so I was gonna make fried chicken and all the sides. All the sides were fine but here is a hint (not that we can have fried chicken now)
If you heat your oil too hot, then the coating will get beautifully golden brown in a hurry, but your boyfriend's parents you sorely want to impress will bite into raw bleeding chicken!

I was so embaressed!! I can make wonderful fried chicken now. I did it over and over until it was perfect every time! (I miss it now )

Jen

Atkins since 11/11/03

5'3" 140/131/115

I really should get a better signature...

Who says we can't have fried chicken

Send me a mail, girly!

Blessings!
Sharron
Author of "Low Carb Cooking at Sharron's Place," and "Extreme Lo-Carb Cuisine," available where ever books are sold.

www.thelowcarbcook.com

"My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart." Colossians 2:2

Sent!

Atkins since 11/11/03

5'3" 140/131/115

I really should get a better signature...

Oy, where do I begin?
Some of my kitchen katastrophies have already become LCE legends.

There was the time I tried to cook pinto beans in a pressure cooker and ended up with mashed beans on every surface in the kitchen and the jiggler embedded so deeply in the ceiling that we had to plaster over it.

Or the time I blew the door off the toaster oven. I don't really remember how I did that one, but the door missed my son by inches.

My latest was crushing a huge light weight plastic bowl full of pork rinds to fry some chicken and reached up to get a glass out of the cupboard just above the bowl -right when the dog decided to lick my foot. I dropped the glass. It hit the edge of the bowl, flipping it into the air and sending crushed pork rinds everywhere. Including into the window blinds, the cobwebs in the corners, up my nose, into all the dishes in the cupboard -every where but on the chicken!

I've had so many kitchen fires that my smart aleck daughter, to this day, yells "dinner's ready!" whenever she hear's a smoke detector go off.

In spite of it all, I'm a very good cook.



Really.



Always eat your veggies first!
LCE member since March 2002

Brighty.....toooooo funny!!!!!
Well, I've NEVER had a kitchen katastrophe!!...I'm perfect.......baaaaahhhaaaa.....I don't even know where I would begin.....TNTC (to numerous to count), so I'll just let it go at that

Shelley

sg
*LC WOLF*

Being the cook that I am, I hate to cook and, I have had several bloopers in the kitchen. The most recent one was when I tried to make the recipe (can't remember the name of it)where you use cream cheese and liquid jello. The recipe said to beat it together. Well I had strawberry mess all over the kitchen. I did let what was left in the bowl jell and it was very good. Maybe a blender would work better than a mixer on this one .

Another one which was not too bad, was on Christmas Eve. I made BBQ cocktail weiners in the crock pot. I never bother them as they are simmering, so hours later whenI went to get them out I was really surprised when they were still cold. Lesson learned~~~even though the crock pot is plugged in you still have to turn it on. They became nuked weiners!

Susan ( AKA Northwest)
207/170/160/
size 16/12/8
LC since 4/03