Cooking Disasters I Lived to Tell About

No decent cook in her right mind sets out to create a trail of disasters. Who would intentionally add a tablespoon of salt (oops) instead of sugar to a recipe...or flip a banana cream pie while removing it from the oven...or accidentally substitute red-hot jalapeno peppers for green chilies in her favorite chicken enchiladas recipe?

Who would spread horseradish instead of Dijon mustard, or boil eggs until they explode like firecrackers? I have been cooking for decades, literally. I began in my mom's kitchen as a girl, and can't ever remember a time when I didn't enjoy trying something new or whipping up an old family favorite.

But I am not Julia Child. I don't know all the right cooking terms and my chopping skills are atrocious. Stick around and you will hear me bare my soul. It ain't pretty, folks, but I think you'll enjoy the culinary fallout. Besides, isn't it fun hearing about someone else's kitchen meltdowns? Kind of makes your own disaster feel less...well, disastrous.

You're living overseas, trying to settle in and get acquainted with your new surroundings. A neighbor invites you to dinner one Friday evening. She's prepared Cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice, a delicious salad, and homemade rolls. The house smells wonderful when you walk in, and by the time you sit down to eat, your stomach is growling, Feed me!

Everything is great, except for one thing. You cannot slice that cute little hen. In fact, its skin is so hard, you can't even prick it with your fork to hold it so you can try to slice it from a different angle.

You glance at your hostess. She smiles back at you. You can't help but think, Is this a joke? Have I been given a rubber chicken instead of the real deal? Polite conversation fills the awkward silence, and you notice that your hosts are eating their hens just fine. What could possibly be wrong with yours?

Ten minutes later, you've eaten all around that poor little bird. Nibbled at the rice stuffing. Finished the salad and roll. So you try again. Maybe a cold Cornish game hen is easier to cut. More relaxed, perhaps.

No luck.

Uh-oh. She's clearing the table for dessert. You drop your napkin casually over the hen, thinking the woman won't notice. Only now it looks more like a draped animal act from a magician's show. You expect someone to jerk the napkin away with a hearty Ta-da!.

I barely remember dessert. And to this day, I wonder how anyone could have roasted a hen to that rubbery state.

Remember This: Nobody's exempt from cooking disasters. It could be your turn next.

So there I was, trying to beat a publishing deadline. I had decided to make potato salad, so I brought a pan of six eggs to a rolling boil, then turned the temp down to Low for a few minutes. I'd work on my manuscript while the eggs hard-boiled.

My mistake was in trusting my brain to split itself between computer and kitchen. I should have set the timer, but nope. Didn't happen.

About forty minutes later, I heard gunfire. My gosh! Somebody's in the house! You have to remember, I was working on a key chapter in a book of historical fiction for middle-graders. Tension was mounting as a boy unraveled his friend's closely-guarded secret. Gunfire in my house only added to the tension.
Pop-Pop! Pop-pop! Pop-pop! I thought the shooting would never end.
In a rush of bravado, I raced down the hall to the kitchen, and found that the pot had boiled dry. The buildup of heat had then popped those eggshells, and rocketed four of the eggs across the room like cannon fire.

Remember This: A busy brain is not as efficient as an egg timer.

My daughter's fourth birthday cake will be forever stuck in the walls of my memory bank. That's the day her cake caught fire.

We were at my parents' house that week, and it was long before the days when parents began ordering birthday cakes for their child's big event at their local bakery. I baked a chocolate cake from a favorite family recipe.

If you read every cooking disaster on this lens, you're going to wonder if I've ever cooked anything right. The answer is YES. I am actually a pretty good cook, but I seem to have my share of quirky "off" days, too. Each has a perfectly reasonable explanation, of course. On this particular day, it was the oven's fault. Seriously. I could not make these things up if I tried. (Wait'll you read about my Thanksgiving fiasco.)

The cake was doing fine. I received updates every five minutes from my son and daughter, who had asked me to turn the oven light on so they could "watch the cake grow." It was standing tall and birthday-worthy, filling the house with chocolaty goodness.

Then we smelled smoke.

Mommy, my cake's ON FIRE! shrieked my daughter.

Apparently the new heating element in the oven wasn't communicating very well with the thermostat. My poor cake was flamin', folks. Never saw a cake do that, and I'm sure Martha hasn't, either.

To this day, I can't look at my favorite chocolate cake recipe without remembering the birthday cake I torched. Oh, but the story is far from over. Stay with me.

The timer buzzed just about the time the flames died down. I set the two round cake pans on cooling racks while my kiddos whispered things like, What's she DOING? and I'm not eatin' that cake! It's burned up!

In typical Mom-to-the-rescue style, I took a sharp knife to the cooled layers, trimming away the singed rim. I commented on how good it smelled, how soft and chocolaty the layers were. And I frosted that baby faster than you can say Happy Birthday.

My four-year-old thought I'd performed a miraculous surgery and besides--aren't family legends made of fiery incidents like that?

At the time, it didn't seem that funny. I was twenty-something, and had baked what looked like a perfect banana cream pie. Mountain-high meringue. Creamy filling. Perfect crust from my grandmother's no-fail recipe.

I'd planned to take it to a church potluck, where almost everybody who brought anything was twice my age and had reputations to uphold. One was the cake queen; another, a casserole inventor extraordinaire. I'd never seen such competition, except for on the Pillsbury Bake-Off shows on tv.

So I set out to bake the perfect pie, and was feeling pretty smug about it. My oven timer buzzed, and there I was, leaning over the open oven when the planet must have tipped momentarily.

My grip relaxed on the pie plate, and like a slow-mo movie, I watched My Perfect Pie somersault through space and drop with a crash. Half of it flew backwards into the hot oven, and the other half flew across the kitchen floor. As a final insult, a chunk of crust plopped across my new shoe.

Remember this: Pride goes before a pie-fall.

One Thanksgiving when our kids were young, we decided to invite two families over to our home for dinner. I'd planned a traditional Thanksgiving feast (Sorry, Tom!) with turkey and all the trimmings. Six hours later, the turkey was still pink.

The guys were in the living room and we women were peeling potatoes, making fruit salad, and chatting while our kids played nearby. Every time I checked the oven, the turkey looked the same--sad, pink, and nowhere near edible. I tried increasing the temp for half an hour, but it was still too pink to declare done.

I knew I was in Big Trouble when all the kids organized a line and marched through the kitchen singing, "Take me out to the ballgame..." They reached the part where they crooned, "Buy me some popcorn and cracker jacks," and added their own twist by ending the chorus with, "When, O When will the turkey be done?"

Long story short: My cooking disaster ended in a turkeyless Thanksgiving feast, with a promise of turkey sandwiches if everyone stayed until evening. We ate green beans, sweet potatoes, fruit salad, rolls, and pumpkin pie...but the star of the show was missing.

Here's to forgiving friends who helped me laugh and didn't seem to care about the missing bird.

Remember This: Don't try roasting a turkey with a faulty oven thermostat.

Various sites online offer 911 for those who are tempted to toss out their cooking messups. Try re-creating your original idea.

It begins with a tip from Caroline, who writes: "If you've added too much salt to a recipe, put a peeled raw potato into the soup or casserole and continue to cook, so the potato can absorb some of the salt. Whip it out before serving and your guests will be none the wiser! "

Hayley writes: "If you've found you've added too much chilli powder to your cooking, cut a lemon in half and add it to the pot to simmer. I don't know why it works, but it takes some of the fire out. "

At BusyCooks.com comes this idea for cooks whose cake or cookies ended up in crumbs: "Turn your disaster into a trifle or parfait. Just layer the pieces with sweetened whipped cream and some fresh fruit in a glass bowl or individual glasses and chill until serving time."

If you're melting chocolate and it "seizes"--turns hard and grainy--don't give up! Smooth it out by adding a teaspoon of vegetable oil and heat gently while continuing to stir.