Dinner Disasters: Megan

Enjoy this dinner disaster from my friend Megan. What's YOUR best dinner disaster???

Hm... let me go through the archives of my dinner disasters... and let me tell you, there are a LOT. One time I made a Mediterranean pasta salad. It called for sliced olives. I don't think I'd ever bought olives before. (This must've been when we were first married, cuz I've bought many olives since then.)

Anyways, I saw chopped olives and thought, "Oh, those must be it. I definitely don't want whole olives cuz then I'll just have to cut them up." So I bought those. They were not the right olives. Sliced and chopped are very different.

I used them anyways. The olives took over the ENTIRE pasta. There were just so many little pieces of lives, that's all we could taste. Yup, metallic-y tasting olives. It was gross. I never made it again. Bad memories... :(

Dinner Disasters: Holly

Holly, you crack me up!  Enjoy this dinner disaster:


My first experience broiling brought fire alarms and our concerned neighbors with an offer to take us to dinner. It was graduation day, so I served some humble pie with the chicken.

Becoming a Cook: Dinner Disasters

Like all great dinner disaster stories, this one begins with "When we were first married..."

When we were first married, I found a tator tot casserole recipe.  It was in the easy section of the cookbook, so I thought I was safe.  I put everything together and knew enough to brown the beef.  What I didn't know was that I had bought the fatty beef that needs to be strained.  I just added all the beef (Including the nasty fatty goop) into the tator tot casserole.  We dug in, and it was NAS to the TY.  Seriously, I don't think either of us could handle more than one bite.  I had never had tator tot casserole before, so I thought it was just the recipe!  It was months later when Landon Paul was cooking with me that I saw him strain the beef.  Suddenly I realized why it hadn't been quite so delicious.  Epic fail.  I've never tried that recipe again and have no desire to.

Becoming a Cook: Dinner Disasters

(One of) My best dinner disasters:

We were newly married.  I had no idea how to cook.  I got a can of cream of chicken soup and found a recipe on the back that looked tasty enough to try.  It was a chicken casserole.  (Sounds easy enough, right?)  I put the mixture all together.  Then it said to "Add chicken."  How was I supposed to know I should season, cook, and then shred the chicken???  So I put the mixture in an 8.5x11 pan and dropped the frozen chicken breast (Defrosted at least) on top and put it in the oven.  I couldn't figure out why it wasn't cooked after the 30 minutes it asked for.  So I left it in for way longer until it finally wasn't pink.  Then we dug in, and I couldn't understand why it tasted so awful.  I figured I had bought the wrong chicken.  (The kind everyone else always ate had breading on it.  Was there a special breading frozen chicken I was supposed to get?)  Yup, awful.  What's your best dinner disaster?

Becoming a Cook: Dinner Disasters

Okay, these dinner disasters are HILARIOUS!  Here's one from my friend Sara! 

"Poor Tari! I messed up the very first meal I cooked for Ben and I as a married couple! The sad thing is that I screwed up spaghetti! I was trying to complete a homework assignment and I got distracted while the noodles were cooking. My water boiled so long that most of it evaporated and my noodles were so overcooked they fell apart! It was really nasty but Ben ate away with a smile on his face. I also tried to cook Cornish game hens in a crock pot! First of all mini frozen birds are gross! When they were done cooking I was taking them out of the crock pot and I found a bobby pin that fell out of my hair while putting them in! Good thing I wasn't cooking for other people! We ordered pizza that night as well!"

Who else has a good one? 

Becoming a Cook: Dinner Disasters

A while back I had quite the dinner disaster and asked you to share some of yours to make me feel better.  Tari is a domestic diva, and I'm so glad she shared, cause this is a good one! 

"I have a couple dinner disasters, but I'll go with the most recent because it seems the most traumatic at the moment. This last Wednesday, I found out that we were going to be leaving on a last minute trip to Arizona the next day for my husband's grad school interview so I spent the day making preparations and packing. But it was also my turn to cook (I live at my in-laws right now, so I take turns cooking with my mother-in-law) so I decided to grill hamburgers outside. Well, I turned the grill on to get hot while I got everything else ready inside. Then I went outside to put the burgers on the grill, and when I opened the lid to the grill, I heard a huge pop. I didn't know what it was, so I finished and went inside. A couple of minutes later I went back outside to flip the burgers and noticed that the window that was by the grill had a huge crack running down it. Suddenly I knew what I had heard earlier. The grill was too close to the house and the heat made the window break! So I flipped the patties and ran inside to confess to my in-laws. I was only gone for a couple of minutes, and when I came back outside to get the burgers, they were completely on fire and had shrunk so that when I removed them from the grill, very few looked edible. I mean, we're talking hard, thick, pucks of burned hamburger. I was so humiliated and just wanted to cry. Thankfully, there were enough "good" ones that everyone had enough to eat. Talk about a stressful day that didn't end well!"

Can anyone top that?  What's your best dinner disaster?

And happy royal wedding day!  I didn't stay up to watch it, but I'm going to watch the reruns tonight!!!

Becoming a Cook: Gluten-Free Pizza

So I got a mix of gluten-free crust.  I followed the directions, and, as you can see, it was NASTY.  I know the picture looks bad, but it tasted even worse (And I'm not picky)!  

Landon Paul immediately got on the phone and ordered a gluten-free pizza for me and a normal one for him from Pier 49, and it was DELICIOUS. 

What is your BEST (worst/funniest/most memorable) dinner disaster?  I'll post the best one!  (Basically I have too many epic fails to count and want to know I'm not alone)! :)