i made a packet-meal-base beef stroganoff.

it tastes fine but it cooked down to absolutely fuck all.

serves 4? serves 2 is probably stretching it.

Awhile ago, I was cooking one of my family's breakfast-for-dinner dinners; bacon, omelet, pancakes etc. for the evening meal. We were low on eggs, though, and I spaced out and used all six in the omelet. Crap, I needed two of those for the pancake batter, I thought. I'll have to make toast instead. Wait! Don't we have some frozen egg whites left over from Christmas cookie making? (Spritz only use yolks.) I rooted around in the freezer, found a baggie full of translucent, pale yellow frozen stuff and returned triumphantly to the kitchen. I thawed it and dumped it into the batter...noticed that the fluid was a lot less viscous than egg whites ought to be...and then the batter curdled. Turns out it was a baggie of frozen lemon juice.

I cooked the pancakes anyway, and offered the first few to my Mom. "No, they're interesting!" she cried in that bright false voice she uses to keep her children from feeling like complete fatheads. "Let's eat them anyway!" They were lousy, and fell apart when you tried to flip them. By god, we ate them anyway, though. There weren't even any left over.

I have to admit, though; with some alterations they could be good. Use eggs AND lemon juice, then add some savory spices like onion and garlic, then eat them with a stew of sorts? Like moo-shu pancakes. They were definitely not sweet or cloying, potentially tasty in a weird way.

>Spend over 3 hours making lemon meringue pie
>This is because I didn't have an electric mixer, had to beat meringue by hand
>Can only finish half the pie
>Next day, go into fridge for more pie
>Yellow soup EVERYWHERE

Protip: lemons + corn starch as thickener = liquid pie

>>4992
oh no bro

Cornstarch really just doesn't work with lemon, and even then it usually needs egg yolks in addition. For a good, no-bake pie filling you'll need about four whole eggs and six yolks to one cup of lemon juice, and a few tablespoons of butter as well. (some people will say twelve tablespoons for one cup of lemon juice, I say that's too much as you're using so much egg yolks and a few tablespoons here or there won't matter and just overload it with fat.) I don't usually bake the filling, just whisk it in a saucepan till it's thick enough and then strain it straight into the crust, and use the propane torch for the meringue, but the ten minutes it'll take to bake the meringue won't hurt it either.

Also what were you using to beat egg whites? It should only take a few minutes with a good whisk.

>>4992
>Protip: lemons + corn starch as thicke
I had to stop reading there for a few minutes because I was laughing too hard to continue.
just
the concept of making lemon curd with just lemon juice + cornstarch
I'm sorry man but it kills me. It kills me dead.

My dad was making homemade lemonade from lemons in our garden. I saw him boiling something so I figured he was boiling sugar water. Just tasted it today and realized he thought it'd be a good idea to use up those Burger King maple syrup things in the lemonade. It's wasn't that bad, but I don't like my lemonade tasting like it.

>bacon-wrapped hotdogs made with brown sugar and topped with cheese

It's one of those dishes where it's the most delicious thing in the world for the first two seconds it's in your mouth and by the time you swallow it you want to vomit. I think I either used too much brown sugar or should have cooked it more because the bacon wasn't crispy when I was done.

>>5005
>because the bacon wasn't crispy when I was done.
This is a huge problem with most bacon-wrapped things. They have a cooking time way below that of bacon. Try frying the bacon a bit before you wrap the dogs next time, not enough to crisp it up but enough to cook it a bit.

And brown sugar should be used minimally in that application.

>>5007
Noted.

I ended up chopping everything up and adding it to baked beans. On a positive note, it's the most delicious pork and beans I've ever had.

>Make ramen omelets all the time
>Mix in the chicken seasoning for an added bit of flavor
>Hmm, all we have is beef-flavored.
>Oh well, how different can it be?
>Omelet comes out brown
>Try it anyway
>Sadness.

>sick
>not at 100% brain capacity
>heating up some mini-pizzas that were made earlier in the day
>decide not to set an alarm cause it's late and people are sleeping
>note that I need to take them out of the oven at roughly 3:30
>note the clock at 3:29
>forget about them in less than 60 seconds
>leave them in the oven for an hour and 15 minutes at 350 degrees
>they now resemble hockey pucks in every aspect except for aroma
>pan they were on is fine
God bless cast-iron.

>>5011
You can try to take solace in the fact that mini-pizzas probably weren't the best thing to eat when sick anyway.

>obtain black licorice bites from local convenience store
>"what the hell man this licorice is stale"
>"I'll microwave this shit and remold it! It will then taste fresh. I am so smart."
>"WHAT COULD GO WRONG?"
>pour bag of licorice bites into dish
>add water
>stick in microwave for 5 minutes
>return later
>SOLID BLOCKS OF CHARRED LICORICE
>PERMANENTLY STAINED MICROWAVE
>SMOKE THAT SMELLED LIKE DEAD THINGS AND TAR

WHY WOULD THIS EVER BE A GOOD IDEA?

>>5017
I love when people treat the microwave as some kind of wonderful miracle make-things-right kitchen magic machine, when all it does is make stuff either soft and soggy, solid like a brick or explode. There is a reason why good restaurants don't have one in their kitchen.

I made my usually curry this week but substituted light coconut milk for regular without adjusting the spices.

My tongue is on fire. Help.

>>5017
LOL

1. Decide to make mac & cheese
2. Refuse to go to the grocery store, limiting the ingredients
3. Find simple recipe online
4. Realize you don't have enough elbow macaroni.
5. Find box of Parmesan cheese filled tortellini.
6. Notice that tortellini has been in cupboard for over a year... but no expiration date is printed on the box.
7. Use the tortellini anyway.
8. Realize you have no "processed cheese product" (ew)
9. Decide to use package of shredded cheddar.
10. Decide to also throw in some freshly shredded colby. Your block of colby cheese says it should have been used 2 months ago. But you think the colby tastes OK.
11. Throw a squirt of mustard in.. because a lot of recipes include mustard. But yours didn't.
12. Add a splash of milk in... because a lot of recipes include milk. But yours didn't.
13. Decide you need even more cheese. You put too much milk in....

14. Take one bite. You decide to order pizza for supper and have that instead.

I did that last August. I still haven't been brave enough to try home style mac again. Yes I realize I fail at cooking hush you.

>>5022
It's a shame to throw out unused food, but in cases like that it just has to be done. Don't be like my sister, who hangs on to giant Costco jars of peanut butter that went rancid three years ago.

i found out that evapourated milk =\= condensed milk

scrambled eggs are not supposed to be sweet

>>5027
My mother thinks the freezer is some kind of magical stasis device. The food is twelve months over its expiration date? It's okay, it was in the freezer! Can anybody remember when this was bought? Nope? Let's cook it up! Why do I feel sick?

And no matter how many times I try to explain that freezers do not work that way she just keeps doing it.

>>5045
This was my grandma all day erryday.

>Be about 8
>Really want fruit roll-ups
>Sister ate the last one god dammit
>Fruit gummies are kind of like fruit roll-ups... OH I KNOW
>Plan to melt them down into a beautiful liquid fruity mess and then freeze it back into fruit roll-up-esque thing
>Stick gummies in microwave in a bowl
>Watch eagerly
>Gummies get really large
>Then really small
>Then they turn black and start to smoke

I spent the remaining hour or so panicking and fanning smoke out of the kitchen thinking my parents would think I had ruined everything forever.

>>5050
Haha, I did the same damn thing when I was seven or eight or so.

Today I learned that if you take the leafy bits off a stalk of cilantro, it ends up looking identical to a thin green onion.

Cilantro butter is not a tasty spread.

>>5045

Are you me?

>>5018
It's good for making porridge in the morning though.

http://cinemassacre.com/2011/05/10/tmnt-tuesday-pizza-tasting/

Whenever my mother makes a cake. She's kind of forgotten that you need sugar for it to work properly.

Tastes bad, man.

Once, my Aunt tried to make peanut butter curry.
She didn't have a good third of the ingredients, so she improvised replacements.
I guess you can imagine how that turned out.

Trying to make sushi.

Just...trying to make sushi...

>>5300
I have got to hear more.

>>5300
>>5311
I second this; tell us how you tried to make sushi.
I am super curious.

Teeellll uuuuussss!

I made a calzone tonight. Well, it started out as a pizza, but it got a little stuck when I was putting toppings on, so it ended up as a calzone.

There was just something... off about it. Maybe I put too much sugar in it, maybe it was because I used self-raising flour (hey, I was out of yeast, okay?) but the dough wasn't right somehow.

I tried making kaiserschmarrn last night. I am never trusting a recipe that calls for five eggs ever again.

Mixed in a Jalapeno and Green Olive relish type thing with some Broccoli Cheese soup (with added block Cheese to give it some body) While I personally thing it was pretty good the group opinion was..to keep me away from soups.

So two friends and I do this a lot with... varying results.

Once we made some basic brownies, powder in a box shit. It needed vegetable oil or something. We didn't have that, but fuck going out to buy some. Suffice to say corn oil is not an adequate substitute...

Another time we were making bread, and I got the great idea to toss some cherry Kool-Aid mix into it. The powder didn't really do much other than sit in the bread and make it soggy, so the result was sort of like biting into a handful of Pixie Stix. 2/10 would not bite again

>>5439
>Image related

>>5439
Yeah, I tried the kool-aid thing with boxed cake mix once, and it was awful. Soggy, sour, and ugly.

>>5439
Re: brownies, when I was about twelves I decided to bake a cake from a packet mix that had been sitting in the cupboard for a while. The packet told me I needed vegetable oil. All I could find was extra-virgin olive oil.
"Olive is a vegetable," I thought to myself as I stirred the precious green fluid into the shitty packet cake mix.
That was one goddamn weird tasting chocolate cake.

>Oh these pretzels look delicious
>Not too different than my normal recipe
>"Boil in 3/4 cup baking soda"
>Huh, might be easier than just dunking the dough in like usual
>Try it
Jesus Christ it tastes like eating chunks of baking soda, it's terrible. I think it was too much. I'll stick to my usual thing next time...

>>5529
Sure you added enough acid to the dough itself?

>>5532
What do you mean by acid? I like cooking but I don't know anything about it. All my pretzel recipes are yeast/sugar/water/flour/salt. This one used unsalted butter though too

I think what I did wrong was use too much baking soda in too little water. It calls for 12 cups water to boil with and I only used half of my pot which is ~6.

>>5533
>half-water
...That would do it.

>>5533
Okay, so the lesson you need to take away from this is that what is important in recipes is not so much the quantity of ingredients, but the ratio. For example, if you were using approximately one quarter of the water the recipe called for, you should also have used one quarter of the quantity of baking soda (i.e. nine teaspoons, assuming US units).

The corollary of this, of course, is that even if you have the ratios of ingredients right, the change in bulk quantity will mean that the cooking characteristics will change. For example, let's say that you were making a frittata where the recipe calls for eight eggs and half a cup of water (I'm just making this up, BTW). You decide to make a smaller frittata with four eggs and a quarter of a cup of water, thus preserving the ratio of ingredients. However, this will change the cooking characteristics. The four egg version will heat through faster than the eight egg version. The mixture will solidify faster. It will be able to absorb less heat before things start to go bad. Etc. Etc.

Come home from High school. I see a pot of Cream of Mushroom soup my father had made. It was still warm so I decided to try some... BAD IDEA.
It seems that my father decided that Egg Nog would make a good substitute for milk.

>>5553
That is horrifying; I am so sorry you had to taste that.

you sure he wasn't drunk and just vomited his eggnog in the can?

>>5553
>>5562
I'm really not sure which is worse.

I was making a delicious jambalaya a few months back and the recipe called for oysters. I had never used oysters in any sort of recipe before and the recipe I had didn't call for any specific type so I just grabbed a jar of frozen ones that I'd de-thaw

Holy shit they were so horrible and HUGE and slimy and tough and fhjsd
The made the entire dish just taste of fish and ocean

Never again

>Try to make bread
>"Can't be that hard, right?"
>End up with a huge ass biscuit
It was the most delicious mistake I've ever made