Rural City Girl

That's funny. Never was that excited about cooking. I guess I was never that domesticated. But I certainly gave it a try for many years. I now don't try very often. When my husband retired 2 years before me, he did all the cooking. After I retired, I told him he does such a great job, why spoil it. :thumbup:
He continues to do a wonderful job !!!!!

Rural City Girl

Labfairy: That is a funny story. I'm still laughing!

MadQuilter

First cake I made with my new stand mixer exploded in the oven. It was like a vulcano errupted. I had no idea that HIGH on the stand mixer meant "OMG let's whip this sucker to kingdom come!" So first we had to deal with the smell of burnt cake AND of course, the cake needed to be tossed. Then I used the automatic clean function on the oven and had to deal with that smell. Happy Easter indeed! lol

Rhonda

Oh where do I start? I did not learn to cook at home. Perfectionist mother who had to do everything herself. So when I went to college I didn't know how to do much beyond open cans.I loved hard boiled eggs but I would forget to time them and they usually ran dry and exploded!

so I lived in the YWCA when I went to college and they only had a huge commercial kitchen for us to cook in. Then they built a brand new kitchen on our floor and we didn't have to go down 3 floors to the kitchen any more.
I decided to make hard boiled eggs. I set the pan on the stove in this homey new kitchen and went back to my room down a couple of hallways. I remembered the eggs an hour later. When I went down to the kitchen there was egg dripping off the ceiling and the upper cabinets and all over the kitchen!! and the smell was awful!!!
Unfortunately I never learn I have boiled things dry many time since then too! LOL
"
But I did learn to cook from my MIL and I raised my kids with pretty good food. Tho in my early years of marriage my BILs would bring Kentucky fried chicken with them in self defense! LOL

Lisanne

I'm another one who wasn't taught much about cooking and had to learn on my own.

Eggs have to be cooked for you to eat them, riiiight?

When I made my first-ever chocolate layer cake, in a house I shared during college, I used a recipe from the Betty Crocker Cookbook to do it. I figured that was a reputable cookbook, so I should have no trouble. I was in tears over what I thought was a major flaw in the recipe - it didn't tell me how to cook the eggs before putting them in the cake batter!

My housemates had to work hard to convince me that I was to put the eggs in raw - RAW!! - and they'd cook along with the rest of the cake ingredients.

The cake turned out just fine, I'm happy to say. :oops: :-D

lab fairy

I always laugh because despite my bad cooking experiences even I know better than to cook Jello on the stove. My roommate in college thought the package told her to boil it for 3 minutes. What a mess. It never did set and she couldn't figure out WHY.

Rhonda

I decided to make gravy for my soon to be DH and his brother and his sister. Glenda was 17 and I was 18. I did not know how to cook. Glenda had helped her mom cook alot and was convinced she knew how to cook! So we made gravy! It was so thick you could stand a knife up in it for real. That meal did not come out good!! My soon to be BIL went out and brought back Kentucky Fried! I did learn to make gravy from my MIL later on. She always fed about 18 to 25 every weekend so she had this huge black iron skillet. It was 18" wide no joke. I learned to make gravy in that with her helping me. I wanted that skillet so bad when they moved off the farm but I think someone threw it away. Noone could find it. My sister inlaw learned to cook for large groups of people at home as there were 9 kids and their spouses and kids and all the folks's inlaws would show up on the weekends. so Mom always prepared alot of food. My SIL went on to cook in restaurants and my one BIL and his wife owned a restaurant. Mom was a good downhome cook on most things. I learned alot of techniques from her that I still use to this day.

amandasgramma

At our house, we ALWAYS leave something in the fridge or the oven when we have guests over....it's our nature!!!

My funny - and I can't believe I'll tell you this. We ALWAYS have cornbread dressing for the holidays. One year, my family wasn't coming, but my husband's brother and his family, a woman I worked with and her folks were coming to dinner. I saw a recipe that was called "cornbread sausage stuffing". i thought - wow, that sounds good. Course, me being me, I didn't READ how to do it! I bought bulk sausage and added it to my cornbread dressing -- UNCOOKED! My SIL wanted the dressing in the turkey -- a first for me. When we were dishing up....I picked up the turkey, SIL standing next to me, the turkey tipped a little and a yellow, grainy YUCK came out of the turkey -- the dressing was saturated in fat!!!!!! My nephew was having trouble with diarreah at that time...SIL said "that looks familiar".....I about died, then we started laughing. Thankfully, we had a pan of dressing on the side, too. The guests brought pumpkin pies -- they weren't done in the center!!!! It was one of the unforgettable holidays!!!!

Boston1954

I was a teenager. I had not read the small print on the box. I was making an angel food cake and was standing there with the mixer for nearly 45 minutes and could not figure why it would not beat up. Finally saw on the box, "Do not beat in a plastic bowl". I am surprised I still have any strength in my arms.

ShowMama

My two WORST blunders......
(1) I made sugar cookies one time and forgot the sugar. Actually they tasted like little flat biscuits.
(2) As a very young newlywed, I discovered that two large fresh jalapeno peppers are not a good substitute for 1/2 cup green pepper in spaghetti sauce. Even though we're from Texas and eat a lot of hot spicy food, neither one of us could eat that spaghetti!