Cooking flops... good ideas gone bad!
 

I have had numerous cooking experiences that occured with good intentions but with disasterous results. I will share four of my most famous flops:

1. I tried to make roasted garlic because i really like it. I roasted about 10 heads and you could smell it from blocks away. The odor of garlic was so strong in the house that it burned your eyes. We had to stay away from the house for a few hours to let it air out. The roasted garlic didn't end up tasting very good either.

2. I tried to make balsamic vinegrette dressing for a salad. I could have done a simple vinegar, oil mixture... nothing fancy - I've done that numerous times. However, this time, something possessed me to add some herbs. The combination I choose was absolutely awful and ended up looking like a bunch of twigs floating around in black liquid.

3. With the aforementioned roasted garlic, I decided to make garlic mashed potatoes. Instead of the amount recommended by the recipe, I added about an entire head of garlic. I put the potatoes in the refridgerator to heat up later and the ended up tasting like 100% mashed garlic. Worst mashed potatoes ever.

4. TODAY, I decided that I wanted coffee ice cream, so I put about a tablespoon of instant coffee granuales on my chocolate and vanilla ice cream. NOT A GOOD IDEA! The coffee granuales were way too strong and ended up over powering the ice cream. Not at all a subtle flavor. And it was bitter. I may try this concoction again, just not as much coffee. It was really gross.

Please share your cooking flops!

This is why I bought a griddle surface for my outdoor grill, so that I can experiment outdoors.

I have been thinking about departing from grilled foods for Plastic Forks and doing cheesesteaks, stir fry, or some other food that takes advantage of the propane burner on my Red Devil.

One experiment I want to try on my large propane or the Red Devil is getting a cheap refrigerated pizza from the supermarket and using some wood chips for a 'brick oven' pizza. I have a shaker bottle of hardwood wood chips designed for propane grills. I put them in an Altoids tin near the flame and they build up a nice amount of smoke.

It's not a flop but...

When I was on the boat we had a soft-serve machine. We would use equal amounts of brewed coffee in the place of water and it ended up as something special.

One year during the bitter days of winter, I convinced my brother to help me (read: do it himself) make homemade french onion soup. Done properly, the onions must be stewed and stewed and stewed; even after an hour of stewing, the onions still had a particularly crunchy texture, and the soup was nowhere near ready. All said and done, the house - and ourselves - smelled like onions for a good week or so. We couldn't even open the windows very wide because it was so cold outside.

GROSS. Um, would coffee grounds ever taste good by themselves? Yer supposed to brew the coffee and add slowly, like a tiramisu. Like, duh. :blunt:

It turns out that you can't just fry leftover mashed potatoes into some sort of potatoey-pancake thing. They absorb the frying oil and become a big inedible pile of crap.

It seems like I re-learn this lesson every five years. And I'm 100% certain I have been taught some good, tasty way of doing this, and forgot it.

The Internet is your friend - Recipe from cooks.com

Since instant coffee grounds aren't really coffee grounds, I thought it would be like putting nestle quick on top of ice cream... which is really good. This was not.

A teaspoon of instant coffee grandules to your hot chocolate makes a delicious mocha.

Also, 2 teaspoons of instant coffee added to your chocolate chip cookie dough also adds some nice flavor.

I've done lovely things with instant coffee, this ice cream concoction just didn't turn out like I thought it would.

Wheat-free sugar cookies.

It shouldn't have beel all <i>that</I> difficult. . . use a little extra of the flour mixture, even out the texture a little bit, and make sure to refrigerate for a looong time so that it's nice and firm for cookie-cutting. . .

Oh. My. God. What a mess. The dough didn't hold at all, and they all turned out like amorphous blobs and the edges all burnt - quickly. :greenface

Except my Kokopelli. I used up all the rest of the dough for that, and made a reeeeeally big, reeeeeally skinny Kokopelli. Of course, I couldn't get him off the pan in one piece, but I took a picture for posterity. I'll post it when I'm online at home. you can be amused by it.

Three words.

Tofu Eggplant stir-fry.

Things that make you go *shudders* ugh...

melidasaur, meet your twin:

Every! single! stinkin'! time! I stray from the letter of the recipe or try to "improvise," you can pretty much see my kids and wife running down the street waving their arms above their heads screaming to any and all who would listen.

And clean up after butchering a meal is a bitch.

Shortly after I was married, I wanted to add a little garlic flavor to my spaghetti sauce. I thought I grabbed garlic powder, but I actually grabbed the garlic salt out of the cupboard. It was like a bad sitcom when we sat down for what smelled like really good spaghetti. Ugh. It took 2 years for my husband to let me add anything to the sauce again...

Over the rainy weekend, I decided to satisfy my sweet tooth with a yummy, warm tortilla with melted butter and a sprinkling of sugar and cinnamon. LabRat and I MUST start reading our spices more closely because CUMIN is NO GOOD with sugar and butter on a warm tortilla. Caca.

Before I mastered the art of fried rice, I had many disasters. The most embarrassing was when I invited some friends over for dinner and made it. You know how fried rice is supposed to have little bits of egg in it? Well, I cracked an egg in the rice and it basically became a gigantic rice ball. Apparently, you're supposed to scramble the egg first. Who knew?

:lol: :thumb:

Yet another flop...

I was reminded today about a time I tried to make peach cobbler. I don't know what i was thinking... I don't think I was thinking at all. It has been described as gross, watery peaches covered in wet oatmeal. it was pretty sick, even I wouldn't eat it. I just need to follow a recipe... it's okay to follow the recipe, learn how to make it well, then improvise :).

The other day someone gave me some very dry chicken salad. so I thought would spice it up some w/mayo & ground Chipotle pepper. The pepper is in a unlabled shaker and damnit so's the cinnamon.:smack: I caught it before I mixed it & got most out

One of the restaurants I really like in Chapel Hill puts cinnamon in their chicken salad... it actually isn't that bad.

I don't cook that much , i make WAY to much of a mess .
One thing i DID learn the hard way , when makeing beggers chicken , do it in a clay pot and don't use modeling clay , or else you end up with this basketball sized lump , it tasted SUPER but was a BITCH to deal with , especialy when it started raining and i had to transfer it from the pile of hard wood coals to the stove !!!!!
When my sister was young , her and a friend desided to make a cake from scratch , some how corn meal got used insted of flour , and colored M&M's got mixed in to the batter , so it turned out to be this greenis blue gelatinous lump .
My step sone was just figuering out how to cook , he made chillie one nite , it was about the consistancy of spackel , SALTY spackel !!!!! He does MUCH better now , for Xmas every year he bakes me a chocklet chess pie , can you say YUMMMMMMMY !!!!!

Peach cobbler, made properly, isn't a watery gooey mess at all ... with the right amount of sugar in the oatmeal, it gets nicely crunchy.

Oh boy. Now I need peach cobbler. I wonder if I can make do with some cottage cheese ...

It's Fair time, so flops are inevitable right now
 

I enter food every year in the state fair. While i should just stick with what I'm good at (cookies, bars, muffins, biscuits), I decided that I would have a go at angel food cake. I followed the recipe and ended up with the most disgusting concoction in life... it was basically a chocolate sogfest on a plate. We threw it away immediately.

I'm going to try another one this week - using a different recipe - in hopes that this will be the recipe I use for the fair. If I flop again, i will forever stick to store-bought angel food cake.

My late mom cooked cakes and cookies for my sister & I for years, But she said no way on the angel food. I think It was because of all the egg whites. Mom didn't waste awything. Also no fudge. was too much trouble. No ac in those days, no running or jumping in house while cake was in oven, might fall.

Escargot and peanut butter. :vomit:

I think that combo is more of a :repuke:...

What possessed you into trying that combo?????? :greenface:

What's this nonsense about angel food cakes having chocolate in them? The only angel food cakes I've ever seen have been white...

Once, during my poor starving student days, the dinnertime foraging in the kitchen of the apartment my roommate and I shared revealed a nearly bare cupboard. Bare save top ramen noodles (I misremember the flavor) and a can of spinach. When combined produced a dinner meal consisting of two parts. The good news and the bad news.

The good news is that it is easy and inexpensive meal to eat.

The bad news is that it tastes revolting, and comes back up as easy and quickly as it went down.

You just add a 1/3 cup of cocoa powder and there you have a chocolate angel food cake. I tried to get fancy with the addition of cocoa and instant espresso powder for a mocha angel food cake.

We kill our own Sheep for eating here on the farm, and we often have 3 or more legs of lamb in the freezer. last week i got 1/2 a day off and decided to do a nice roast leg of lamb for us as a special surprise dinner.

I didnt have time to thaw the leg, so i roasted it from frozen ( i thought it would be ok if i did so for like 4 hours), apparently you cant do this to home slaughter, becuase it hasnt been bled for so many hours as they do at the butcher.

Sit down to nice candle lit dinner, only potato as acompanyment as i figure just the two of us will eat a lot of the meat.

As my SO starts carving away blood starts dripping down the sides of the roast, it was like we hit an artery! by the time a few slices were carved there was blood all flooding out over the sides of the dish and onto the table, all in our plates and on our hands. It was actually quite horrific. Turned off legs for a long time!!

The cats enjoyed a roast though, and we had a LARGE bowl of iced cream to soothe the hunger!

Unless you were working from a tested recipe, that's probably what caused your angel food cake to fall. The density of the cocoa powder and espresso powder combined was just too much for the egg whites and they lost their loft.

Also, were you using an actual angel food pan, or just a tube pan? Also, that bit about cooling it by sticking the pan upside down over a beer bottle is actually important.

I've made a number of angel food cakes, although not in the last couple years.

Is a home-made angel cake really so much better than a store-bought one? I mean, I can buy an angel food cake for 99 cents at Kroger!

I was using an angel food cake pan and the recipe was from a cookbook... they reduced the amount of flour to make up for the addition of the cocoa. I think it was just a crappy recipe. I don't think it had enough sugar.

No question.

There's this place in Washington, Indiana called the Black Buggy - it's an Amish buffet type place. Anyway - they have the BEST homemade angel food cake - in chocolate, regular and I think orange. MMM MMM Good!