10. Spaghetti boiled in red wine. This was from an episode of Michael Chiarello’s show. To be honest with you, it tasted fine, but just look at it: it looks like a flesh-eating tropical infestation. Also, if I find myself with 750ml of red wine, I prefer to drink it.
9. Freestyle cream of asparagus. When I was in high school, my partner in culinary crime was a girl named Lara. Heartened by our recent success with make-it-up-as-you-go-along minestrone (tomato paste, bouillon cube, chopped vegetables), we decided to tackle cream of asparagus. Unfortunately, we forgot that neither of us had any idea how to cook. Frustrated by our milk’s stubborn refusal to boil into creaminess, we added cornstarch. And then a little more cornstarch. Imagine the biggest bowl of cornstarch slurry you have ever seen, bobbing with green-grey sections of flaccid asparagus. Yeah.
8. Rice-stuffed peppers. Somehow, high school pal Lara is implicated again. I suppose we should have known better than to follow a recipe from a cookbook entitled Microwave Cookery For Vegetarians (what you might call a lose-lose situation), but the book is not entirely to blame. It was when I attempted to make the dish a second time, for my family, and left out such key components as vegetable stock, garlic and about ten minutes of cooking time, that I ended up with half-raw peppers crammed to bursting with crunchy rice.
7. The unbearable greyness of chicken. I was eighteen; I was in Italy; I was trying to impress a boy. (We swapped Kundera novels–so sophisticated.) Apparently, wild mushrooms with big black gills will take a sauce from creamy white to the exact color of wet cement. I don’t even know how it tasted, because I threw it straight in the trash.
6. Seabass en papillote. If you are going to hire a private chef for an evening (me), and she has already portioned eight pieces of seabass into eight parchment envelopes, each covered with three stripes of julienned aromatic vegetables, please do not tell her half an hour before dinner that you’ve just added two people to the guest list. It hurts you, it hurts her, it hurts the fish.
5. This.
4. Beef stew à la gulag. In my sophomore year of university, I decided to treat my colleagues from the university clinic to an end-of-session dinner party. (I had a job registering new students during freshman orientation week; it was great fun see if they’d checked the “I have been sexually active” box.) Sadly, this was before I’d figured out how to throw dinner parties. Imagine a dimly-lit and barely-heated Scottish apartment, and a line of people ladling watery beef stew from a dented stockpot.
3. Carrot pasta. I thought I’d be clever and work some pureed carrot into my pasta dough before cranking it through the pasta maker, but the carrots weren’t quite pureed. I imagined mimosa-hued tagliatelle; I got noodles with measles.
2. Fresh ricotta, faulty recipe. My culinary school somehow managed to get the quantities wrong, by several orders of magnitude, in our textbook recipe for ricotta. Twenty of us ended up with twenty batches of blood-curdling curds; we went ahead and made ravioli anyway. Do you know what too much citric acid tastes like? Dry heaves.
*drumroll*
1. Sweet beignets. This earns the top spot by virtue of being the most recent of all culinary disasters to befall me, taking place long after I should have known far, far better. It’s only been a week since I attempted to revolutionize the traditional Chinese dessert that encloses a nugget of sweet red bean paste in a fluffy pillow of meringue before launching itself into a bath of hot oil. “Eureka!” cried the culinary genius; “I’ll mash some bananas into the bean paste and fold the whole thing into the beaten egg whites!” Well, it turns out there’s a reason that the red bean paste is sheltered from the hot oil by an outer layer of unsweetened meringue, and it’s the same reason that donuts are sweetened only after they come out of the deep fryer: the burning point of sugar is, oh, IMMEDIATE. The only thing I revolutionized was the scent of my kitchen, which reeked of soot and tar for at least three hours.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever cooked?
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COMMENTS / 20 COMMENTS
Worst, being an absolute term, is a difficult one for me to apply to some of my culinary misadventures. I’ll settle for one of my more embarrassing:TJ added this comment on September 29 2008 at 5:04 pm
My friend S. told his girlfriend E. all about my pork chops and sauteed French beans–the sort of effusions that our debased culture now reduces to the initialism OMG. Obligingly, I made them again, but, due to an oversight on my part, I left them in the freezer when they should have been in the fridge at least. Nevertheless, I cooked them and served them. First they were raw in the middle. Then, after a trip through the microwave, they were no longer unsafe to eat–unfortunately, they were also no longer edible. LOLs.
I made a root vegetable cobbler a few years ago that I can still taste if I think about it long enough. The recipe called for too much cumin, which as we all know there’s a fine line between ‘just right’ & ’smells like man feet’.Katie B added this comment on September 29 2008 at 5:38 pm
On another occasion, I made a gremolata that had so much rosemary (my own error in judgment), I that I actually made myself wretch when I tasted it.
I’ll have to think on your question and get back to you. There are just simply too many dishes competing for the top spot.Aimee added this comment on September 29 2008 at 8:48 pm
I usually do things like buy a frozen chicken from the produkti and- in my post-vegetarian idiocy- undercook it and give myself food poisoning. I’ve also frequently underestimated bouillon cubes and over-fusioned. Hollandaise breakfast burritos with lime and cilantro seemed like a good idea…. but like most things I try, was badly executed due to multi-tasking.Adrianne added this comment on September 29 2008 at 10:36 pm
Japanese souffle cheesecake. It rose beautifully. It browned evenly. Then it started to burn. I took it out and let it cool and sneaked a bite. It was light, fluffy tart and delicious. Then I cut a slice and the middle was raw and runny.norajeans added this comment on September 29 2008 at 10:55 pm
TJ: presumably the three liters of chicken-ramen stew (about a liter of which was balsamic vinegar alone) were a close contender?Michele Humes added this comment on September 29 2008 at 11:28 pm
Katie: “man feet”! Hee.
Aimee and Turtle: I expect better from you. Tsk.
Adrianne: hollandaise breakfast burritos with lime and cilantro? Holy cow that is a lot of stuff. Was this before or after the Peace Corps?
Norajeans: there is a scene in the movie Henry and June (starring the incomparably beautiful Maria de Medeiros) where Henry Miller cuts the top right off a souffle and plops it on his plate, scandalizing the other guests. Sounds like one possible solution. What goes in a Japanese souffle cheesecake anyway? I like them, but I never understand where the cheese comes into it.
Ooh, I was going to try a red wine spaghetti from Gourmet since it looked intriguing, but maybe I’ll pass.Diana added this comment on September 29 2008 at 11:50 pm
I recently made dumplings with 1) homemade dough that turned out too thick and 2) an improvised filling of brown rice and wood ear because I had absolutely no pork or anything dumpling-worthy in my house. Needless to say they were both ugly and tasteless.
The recipe for chop suey called for two cups of chicken broth, & me ? i added two cups of powdered chicken broth. Egads !Kath added this comment on September 30 2008 at 7:20 am
Thanks for sharing
10. Gummy brains!Calum Proctor added this comment on September 30 2008 at 10:49 am
I have never cooked anything that was not a work of sublime genius. Of course, you could end that sentence after word five, but it wouldn’t sound so good.
as always, your post is such divine reading for me after a long hellacious day. thank you.Lan added this comment on September 30 2008 at 4:47 pm
the worst thing i ever made was never tasted. i had it in my head to make lasagna one day but didn’t realize that we had no proper cheese: ricotta or mozzarella. i had cheddar cheese and mexican mix cheese. i used those instead. let’s just say that my boyfriend looked at it and absolutely refused to eat it. it proceeded to throw it into the trash.
Well there was the time I wanted to make a blueberry creme brûlée against your forewarning that the acidity would make the cream curdle. Yeah… curdled cream with exploded pockets of berries… not exactly what I was going for.Marisa added this comment on September 30 2008 at 11:34 pm
That would have to be a Mexican lasagna that I attempted out of a woman’s magazine back in the early 90’s. It was tortillas with a strange cream sauce. Disastrous! I haven’t picked up an issue of that magazine since.Michele added this comment on October 01 2008 at 5:54 am
MicheleMC added this comment on October 01 2008 at 8:53 am
Funny comment on Zin pasta…fyi one of our most downloaded and postively commented recipes on our website.
Different strokes….
mc
Diana: your dumplings do sound a little grim…and brown, predominantly brown.Michele Humes added this comment on October 01 2008 at 9:33 am
Kath: that sounds like the sort of thing that sparks kidney failure.
Calum: you were showing off about your poached egg skills on another post. Try be consistent in your culinary claims!
Lan: that really doesn’t sound so bad at all. I’m sure I made lasagne-like pasta bakes in university with cheap cheddar. Did you taste it? Were there other problems with it?
Marisa: I have to say, I remember eating this chicken liver pate at your house a few years ago that was most definitely a Thai-French fusion pate. It’s not that it was BAD (it wasn’t, at all), it’s just that it was so spicy that I think I had to go hide in the bathroom while I rinsed off my tongue and cried.
Michele: anything labelled Mexican lasagne seems to be bad news. This genre of dish–I’ve seen a few around at potlucks–seems to involve taking everything Tex-Mex there is and baking it into a giant brick.
MC: well, I said it tasted good.
When I was first married my husband told me that his favorite dish was chicken with a yogurt sauce that his grandma used to make. I could not find a recipe that sounded like what he described so I made it up. I did not know (but soon found out) that white wine makes yogurt curdle and made this nasty curdled mess that no one could eat.Joanna added this comment on October 01 2008 at 2:52 pm
I attempted a pureed cauliflower soup that ended up being a stinky pot of bland, grainy white slop. YUCK.Katie added this comment on October 02 2008 at 10:10 pm
An aside: I distinctly recall watching Michael Chiarello cook pasta in wine and yelling at the TV screen, “why are you wasting good wine?!” Strange and wormlike, indeed.
Joanna: I sympathize. I did something like that the other week. For me, there was no wine involved, I just put the yoghurt in far, far too early and it seized up as it boiled. I did save it, though, by straining the sauce and returning the meat and vegetables to the pan with a totally different sauce. There were some white flecks left over but I don’t think my boyfriend noticed.Michele Humes added this comment on October 03 2008 at 3:59 pm
Katie: thanks for the moral support. I’d been feeling kind of bad about picking on Michael Chiarello’s recipe; one forgets that people are, well, actual people, doesn’t one? Re: cauliflower soup, yeah, I’m not really one for soups that consist solely of a single pureed vegetable. They’re a little austere and far too much like baby food. Bring on the rich consommes!
in response to:Lan added this comment on October 08 2008 at 8:36 am
Lan: that really doesn’t sound so bad at all. I’m sure I made lasagne-like pasta bakes in university with cheap cheddar. Did you taste it? Were there other problems with it?
i did not taste it. i was so embarassed and mortified by the expression on my boyfriend’s face when i told him what cheeses i had used. i masked said humiliation with anger, and therefore the furious strength i used to throw away the lasagna is now legendary.
Wow, can your boyfriend cook or was he just lording it over you without justification? You need to make this recipe again, and try it. Just so you know.Michele Humes added this comment on October 08 2008 at 8:59 am
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