The Embarrassing Food Blunders I’ve Made Along the Way

Two awesome examples of epic holiday fails: (1) my first Thanksgiving dinner when I cooked the turkey upside down and wondered why there wasn’t very much meat on that bird; and (2) my first Christmas dinner when my roast caused so much smoke in the house that the fire alarm went on and the fire truck beat my in-laws to my house.

My mother in law was in Brazil visiting us when I just had my kid. She’s a great cook she ate everything from Brazilian culinary that it was offered to her. She attempted to make dinner one day and my husband helped her to get groceries and such. She was amazed about all the tropical fresh fruits and veggies that she saw at groceries and she decided to buy okra. Fresh okra.

Okra is slimy and to “cut off” the slimy – y you need to wash it, dry it, and put in a fry pan without messing with it to much or the slimy will “grow”. I believe she thought it was like making zuchini. She could not tame that greenish monstrosity and she was so deflated. We did not try to eat it. It was not appealing at all.

On my first dinner date with my now husband, we went to a Thai restaurant. I ordered a stir fry and noticed it had almost whole Thai peppers in the dish so I just pushed them aside. My husband asked why I wasn’t eating them. I said a whole Thai pepper was like eating fire. He said “oh I love spicy food”. Proceeded to eat the whole pepper and then choked the rest of the night. He had them delivering pitchers of water and then needed to go directly out for a hot fudge sundae to even be able to speak. I laughed at him for hours! It was the most memorable first date!

I was trying a recipe for chipotle shrimp tacos. I’d never used chipotles before and couldn’t understand why the recipe said to use only 1-2 Tbsp of the sauce. Why buy a whole can to only use a tablespoon?! I used the whole can, and the shrimp were so spicy we couldn’t eat them. That’s the night my husband and I established a rule: if dinner is ever a total flop, we order pizza. I’ve only had to pull the emergency pizza card once or twice in the past ten years.

Back in the early 80’s living with my fiancée whose father was somewhat of a gourmand I attempted to make pesto from Joy of Cooking using dried Basil. 😂😂 I don’t remember exactly what he said when I asked him why it didn’t work but I hope he got a laugh from it. My grown daughters find this the most hilarious story as I’m a pretty accomplished cook at this point…and we all love homemade pesto with our fresh garden basil. It’s fun to walk the cooking experience path with them and the son-in-laws as they all learn their way.

My husband and I spent two weeks in a small French town on vacation. While at the grocery store we decided to have fish for dinner so picked up cod filets. What we didn’t realize, and what was lost in translation, was that the cod were salted for preservation and needed to be desalinated. We sat down for dinner and each took a bite. Both of us wondered if I had accidentally oversalted (OVER OVER) until we google searched our way to an answer! It was certainly an unforgettable meal.

I have always loved to bake, but eating all those baked goods is not the healthiest option. When I was in my first full time job out of college, I worked with a bunch of 20something male engineers. It was a perfect match for my baking…until the morning I brought in he most beautiful blueberry muffins. I got to the office, poured a cup of coffee and took a bite, only to spit it out — I had forgotten the sugar! So I promptly threw them all in the trash. Along comes one of the engineers who finds out the story…sees them in the trash and insists he will eat one even without sugar. I think he thought that the blueberries would be enough sweetness. It wasn’t and he probably threw it back into the trash! Still to this day I am amazed at how lovely they looked without any sugar in the baking process.

Your restaurant review stories made me remember one particularly embarassing incident from my early 20s as well. While eating out with my husband, I ordered Korean rice cakes. I had never heard of such a dish and I’m not really sure what I expected, but I guess I was trying to be adventurous (this was 2008 in Edmonton, Alberta. It wasn’t a Korean restaurant, and I’m honestly impressed they were on the menu). Anyway, the chewy texture turned me off and I ended up sending them back to the kitchen thinking there was something wrong with them *hangs head in shame*. I still feel bad when I think about it, but thankfully I have come a long way since then and can laugh (sort of?) about it now.

Back in 2009/10 I was living in Seattle with my Italian boyfriend (now husband). We had been dating for ~3 years and I knew he was the one…and I wanted him to propose. I’m not that great of a cook and I was pretty timid when it came to cooking meat or main dishes. His mom is a classic Italian cook and all her meals are fantastic.

Well, I think it was here, on COJ, where I heard about this “Engagement Chicken” – I thought I’d give it a go. I went to the store, bought a whole chicken, and all the other ingredients necessary for this chicken and potato dish that was sure to let your boyfriend know you were the one.

I bought some lemons, but I must have purchased the wrong ones – they were huge. I followed the recipe and everything turned out, it was cooked to perfection, but the whole thing was SOUR. The dish was ruined. My poor boyfriend tried to make me feel better, but then I just broke down and was like, “No, you don’t understand! This is supposed to be Engagement Chicken! It’s supposed to be a fool-proof way to get you to propose!” He laughed and I was able to appreciate the irony…eventually.

I was too naïve to believe that anything I could make could measure up to his mom’s food back home…hell, ANY food made in Italy! Thankfully he didn’t need my cooking to convince him to marry me. We’ll be married 10 years this September!

My sister is a talented home cook, and she loves to make fancy meals for holidays like Christmas. However, she tends to go really big with it, which has resulted in some pretty epic day-of mishaps. There was the Easter when all of us had to spend hours hand-shelling the fresh fava beans she insisted on having, and the Christmas where her Yorkshire puddings set the oven aflame in the middle of the meal…now in our family it doesn’t really feel like a holiday if there isn’t at least one big cooking disaster! While she has refused to scale back the meals (my mom insists this is her love language), she now spends several weeks prototyping and testing the dishes so that she (usually) doesn’t have to use the fire extinguisher.

I am from the Netherlands and we have a dish that is similar to Colcannon in Ireland for instance. It is basically shredded kale mashed with potatoes, served with sausage usually. A real winter dish. At 18 I started uni and moved into student housing. We would take turns cooking about one night a week for the whole house, about 6 people. It was my turn and I volunteered to make the dish, which I had seen my mother make but had never attempted myself before. Peeling potatoes for six people was a bit too much of a hassle so I decided to go for instant mash instead. I didn’t think the kale needed any cooking because my mother just put the kale on top of the cooked potatoes, so I thought. Turns out you have to cook the kale with the potatoes and then mash it. After the first bite my roommate Philip said: “it tastes like grass”.

I don’t have a blunder that has stood out over time (family never made a big deal of them, always treated it as a learning experience) but did learn something interesting recently. As an FYI I live in Europe but my mother is American. I was making a blueberry pie at my parents’ last summer using a Smitten Kitchen recipe, and the pastry dough was unexpectedly difficult to work with. While complaining to my mother, she explained that French butter has a higher fat content than US butter, meaning the ratios of flour to fat in the recipe no longer worked. Pie was still delicious if rustic looking, and I came away with useful tips when baking with US recipes.

When my boyfriend and I were young and living in NYC, we went for brunch at Le Pain Quotidian (this was back when they had maybe 3-4 locations only). One of the dishes came with a soft-boiled egg and it was served in a little egg cup with the top of the egg just slightly smashed. Now I know that you’re meant to eat it with a spoon out of the egg like the shell is it’s little cup, but at the time I’d never seen anything like that before. I told my boyfriend to peel the shell off and of course he couldn’t get the shell off and made a huge mess, barely eating any of the actual egg. The server came by and saw us struggling; I cringe when I think about telling the server that something must be wrong with the egg because we couldn’t get the egg shell peeled nor could we eat it easily. The server replied “well the fresher the egg, the harder it is to peel” and just walked off. My boyfriend (now husband) and I just looked at each other like “what the hell?” not realizing we were the uneducated fools here. Now, about 15 years later, anytime we’re at home and making boiled eggs for something one of us will say to the other in a snotty voice *ahem* “you know…the fresher the egg, the harder to peel…” We still crack up (pun intended) thinking about how naive we were about anything food related.

One Thanksgiving my mother put every guest in charge of a different dish. I was given green bean casserole. I procrastinated buying ingredients and went shopping the day before the meal. The super market shelves were picked clean of the regular ingredients but still had “low sodium” equivalents. So I grabbed low sodium beans and soup thinking it wouldn’t be a big deal. Readers: it was a big deal. The casserole had zero flavor. I ruined Thanksgiving. Ten years later, my brother still hassles me about that dish.

When I was 6, I decided to make pancakes for the family. In our family, it was tradition to announce the first pancake as the “test pancake” and whoever was fast enough, got to try it. I finished my first pancake and proudly asked my mom to try the “test pancake.” She took a bite and spit it out with horror, “How much salt did you put in?!?” My 6 year old self assuredly replied, “A half cup.” The recipe card was a half teaspoon. Never made that mistake again!

When our kids were small, my husband sometimes got up with them on weekends and made them breakfast while I slept in. I heard vague comments about dad’s “rubbery pancakes” that only tasted good if you drowned them in syrup. I didn’t think much of it – he’s a terrible cook – we all know this. One morning, I got up in time and had a taste of one of these pancakes – it was inedible. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I gently asked what recipe he was using. He said no recipe, he just added water to the pancake mix in the refrigerator. Well, that was not pancake mix – it was whole wheat flour and nothing else.

I loved Chex muddy buddies as a kid (still do!) and was thrilled when I pulled up to babysit my cousins and saw that my aunt had all the necessary ingredients on hand, including an entire bowl of powdered sugar sitting in her fridge. After she left, I immediately got to work. As I attempted the final step of coating the peanut butter-chocolate-cereal deliciousness in two cups of powdered sugar, I noticed that something was wrong. The sugar wasn’t dusting the mixture, it was caking onto it and dissolving, making everything stick together like cakey fudge. I tasted it and puked into the sink. My muddy buddies were somehow salty and sour at the same time, tasting nothing like what I’d dreamed of. Overwhelmed with panic, I took the inedible mixture outside and dumped it in my aunt’s planter, praying she’d never find it. I went home hungry, embarrassed, and baffled. Only years later did I learn that the white powder stored openly in my aunts fridge was not, in fact, powdered sugar – it was baking soda.

I was…. solidly middle-aged when my cooking mistake happened, so I cannot blame youth. I was scrambling to prepare several dishes and desserts to take to a family Christmas dinner. It was my baby cousin’s first time hosting. What can I say? she and her sister are size zero and I have had to pretend to love spaghetti squash when all I wanted was a plate full of carbs with a side of garlicky crusty carbs. To say that chubby arrogance wouldn’t let me arrive empty-handed was an understatement. I purchased my ingredients at a fancy market here in Houston (for all the H-Town’ers out there, you know the one). I bought sugar and salt in bulk and put them into identical square-shaped plastic containers that the store provides. I whipped up my Famous Mile-High Apple Pie (w homemade pie crust) at the same time that I rolled out PERFECT sugar cut-out cookies. When I took the pie out of the oven, I immediately could tell something wasn’t quite right but it looked AMAZING, so my cognitive dissonance wouldn’t let me recognize the error just yet. The cookies were piped, flooded, and hand-decorated. Gorg. We get to the dinner and I cut into the pie… huh. there was a huuuuuge gap of air between the crust and the filling (more so than normal) but I still wasn’t ready to listen to the alarm bells. I artfully served each slice with a dollop of homemade whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon only to hear my least favorite uncle shouting from the dining room. STOP!!! DON’T EAT THIS!! Yes, Dear Readers, as you may have surmised many minutes ago, I mixed up the sugar and the salt. I was like a souffle defleated by cold air. My shoulders drooped and all I could think of was those “behind the scenes” articles that show how food editors REALLY achieve those photos that come with the endless recipes that we magazine-readers and blog-readers see. Where was Food and Wine when I needed them? to document the scene of perfect but completely inedible desserts?? Pride Goeth Before the Plastic Box.

Home alone after school and not supposed to use the oven. Thought I would make a chocolate cake from the recipe on the back of the mayo jar. Burned the cake. Panicked. Buried it in the back yard. When my mother came home, the house reeked of burned cake. I broke down under the questioning. She made me exhume the cake and chisel the burnt cake bits out of the bunt pan.

About 25 years ago, out for dinner with the family, the waitress asked my mom if she’d like “soup or salad” with her meal, to which mom enthusiastically replied “Sure! whatever that is” thinking the waitress had said Super Salad. I still silently order Super Salad in my head every time I hear that question.

In high school I worked at an ice cream shop. It was a pretty easy gig most of the time but I was very intimidated by the banana split. Ours were served with 3 scoops of ice cream, and customers would often order 3 different flavors with specific toppings on each flavor (vanilla with raspberry sauce, chocolate with caramel sauce, etc.). Two women came in and I took their order for two banana splits. I double checked my work carefully after writing everything down and was proud to bring them out exactly as ordered in a fairly reasonable amount of time. I came back to their table a while later to them scraping their spoons around and laughing hysterically. I had forgotten the banana in both of their splits. They didn’t mind one bit and thought it was hilarious!

I was in South Korea on my own when I discovered there was *the* famous place for bibimbap very close to where I was staying in Jeonju. I had never had it before so I was really happy to have the chance to eat it there. Only I had no idea that you are supposed to mix everything and eat it with a spoon… after a few minutes of watching me eat it piece by piece with chopsticks, a waiter came to me and gestured to explain how to eat it correctly. When I didn’t understand what he meant, he even took my spoon and mixed it for me. I still feel embarrassed thinking about that, but the waiter was so nice about it and I hope the staff had a good laugh. :D

I set the bar for myself very low at an early age when it comes to cooking.

I once tried to deep fry french fries…in water.
We never deep fried anything at my house…and we had a babysitter
(please don’t ask why we had a babysitter when I was like 16…that’s a whole different story)
who deep fried our fries and I was astounded.

Cut to a Saturday afternoon while my dad was outside and my mom out…
I decide to do the fries that way too. Except I thought she put them in water
which, spoiler alert, she did not.

I boiled those fries for like 2 hours. It was like…fry-soup.
My best friend was 3 years younger and kept saying “I don’t think that’s how you do it’,
I was superior in my “shut up I’m older than you, I should know” response.

When, in fact, I most definitely DID NOT KNOW.

The plus side to this is no one asks me to cook to this day. Pot luck? I get assigned chips.
Heh. Which is just the way I like it. :)

Friends. One of my first jobs was waiting tables at a hip restaurant that served lots of wine, but I was underage and from a family that didn’t drink — basically horribly suited for this job. Anyhow I was asked to serve a glass of red to a gentleman at one of the tables, so I grabbed a wine glass and FILLED IT TO THE TOP. Because that’s how you serve every other beverage in the world, like water, juice, or coffee.

Thankfully one of the senior waitstaff grabbed me by the arm before I could take it out and made me pour out half the glass. She was very kind. She said “that glass of wine would have made him very happy but that is not how we serve it : )”

While studying abroad in Beijing, a couple of friends and I took a weekend trip to a small village where we were the only foreigners. When we ordered breakfast, we were brought steamed buns, shredded potatoes, hard boiled eggs, and … red squares. We were all apprehensive about the very bright red squares, but, not wanting to be rude, we choked down all of the squares. When the restaurant owner came back she seemed shocked that we’d eaten all the squares, and we realized that they’d been intended for flavoring. Hopefully, we just seemed really enthusiastic about condiments?

If anyone’s curious, I realized later that the ‘squares’ were red fermented bean curd, which is definitely not typically eaten in bulk.