I ask because I attempted a recipe for vegan "meatballs" today. The base was uncooked red lentils, which raised an eyebrow. Shocker, they tasted like raw red lentils (spices and sauce notwithstanding). The recipe also called for baking soda, so they exploded a little in the tomato sauce due to the acidity. 2/10 looking for a different recipe.
I wouldn't say it's my worst, though. One time I tried to hard boil an egg in the microwave. With the shell still on.
What's a culinary project that didn't go your way?
My personal worst was when I heard you could add yogurt to curry to bring the spice level down and since my mother had issues with the base levels of curry spice I figured I'd add a bit and make it more palatable. I hadn't realized that there was such a thing as plain yogurt so I assumed plain meant vanilla. So I add a whole package of vanilla yogurt to the curry. It was the most disgusting food I had ever made, the sweet vanilla flavor clashed so hardcore with the curry flavor that I just wanted to puke. Ruined an entire pot of curry in the process.
When i was in college, living in the dorm, i decided to bake a frozen pizza. Threw the oven on 400, put the pizza in, then left it because there was too many people. I forgot to set a timer. I realized an hour later that it was still in the oven. Thankfully, somebody turned the oven off, but the pizza was just a carbon disc. Me and my roomates went outside and played frisbee with it.
Oh my God making homemade pizza for the first time. Had a pizza stone and a peel and everything prepped, but somehow everything was sticking together so getting the pizza on and off the stone was a nightmare and turned the nice circles into wild shapes. In the end the dough burned to the stone but wasn't even cooked all the way through so it was completely ruined. Ended up eating cold pepperoni and shredded mozarella from the bag so like 4/10.
Oof, working with high hydration dough can be a challenge. Did the second time end up going better?
We haven't tried again since then lol, my partner was so negatively impacted from the experience that I'm going to try again without them.
This was ~10 years ago, before I was :im-vegan:, and I was living in Japan doing a study abroad thing, and it was Thanksgiving. Obviously, Japan doesn't do Thanksgiving, and it's hard to find a lot of Thanksgiving classics, and Japanese food tends not to leave you feeling stuffed. So I figured, I can either have a boring sad day feeling homesick... or I can make it memorable.
One of the stranger things they sold at the local grocery was squid, like whole squid, and I'd never had it before. I decided to try it, because Thanksgiving squid would be memorable, and it was. A Japanese cookbook I had recommended making it with radishes, so I did.
Unfortunately, I had no idea how to prepare squid or which parts are edible, and I threw away more than I had to, and I also sort of... ruptured some ink sacs. The ink soaked into everything but especially the radishes, and for some reason I was like, "This is fine" up to when I actually tried eating it. The squid itself was semi-ok but the ink-soaked radishes were definitely not.
I ended up having a PB&J for dinner. At least I got a story out of it I guess.
Was cooking a chicken. Got drunk passed out. 9 hours later everything smelled of cooked chicken and I had what I assume was a chicken carcass with zero water. Was not edible, no matter how broke I was
One time I burned cup noodles because I forgot to add water.
I do not understand this? You put the hot water in to cook them, how'd they burn?
The problem was that I forgot to add the water in, and put the paper bowl full of dry stuff in the microwave.
I tried putting cinnamon in hamburger patties and it was WAY too much :bern-disgust:
The first time I tried to make pollo picadillo, an Oaxacan dish similar to ropa vieja de pollo, I left it cooking down for like a half hour and when I came back the chicken and sauce were just charred to the bottom of the pan. Awful.
I hope (unburned) ropa vieja de pollo tastes better than the name makes it sound :P
One time I cooked some kinda sausage to put on a bun like a hot dog and that wasn't a problem but I thought I'd make a sauce so I deglazed the pan with some red wine and so I had this gross bright purple mushroom slop on top of my sausage and it wasn't good I tell you hwut
The first time I tried to make crepes I was about 13, and doing it alone because I wanted to surprise my sister while she was doing exams. I followed a recipe online which told me to use olive oil in the pan, and I put in way too much so all I got were wet, oily tasting, mushy disasters. There was probably about as much oil as batter. I ended up calling my dad in tears about not being able to make pancakes and he taught me how to do it properly
Burnt toffee before I was vegan. Looked salvageable enough that you'd taste it and get an initial sweet hit before a horrible burnt aftertaste that wouldn't go away. Impossible to dislodge from the pot, had to dissolve over several days.
when I was a kid me & my mum tried making peanut brittle. it burned, we had to throw the pan in the outdoor bin, leave the windows open, and leave the house for a few hours
This is something I probably should have put in the OP, but I was candying oranges recently and forgot to turn the burner off. Dislodging the resulting carbonized orange disc from the pan was a process.
Not mine but my sister's ex tried making garlic chicken once and it called for like 6 garlic cloves and he thought it meant entire bulbs. Their house reeked of garlic for months whenever the oven was turned on.
It was red lentils so the lectin content is relatively low, and I did pre-soak the lentils and cook the meatballs by pan frying per the recipe (so the ended up being something like falafels), but they did still have a little raw-lentil flavor to them, which is another reason why I'm disinclined to reattempt the recipe.
