Home Cooks Are Sharing "Silly" Cooking Mistakes That Left Them With Questionable (Or Straight-Up Dangerous) Results, And They're Weirdly Relatable
"I was making Kraft mac 'n' cheese for my kids, and I dumped the cheese packet into the boiling water. Long story short, it exploded everywhere..."
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We've all been there. You're in the kitchen whipping up a meal that looks as delicious as anything you've ever made...and you slip up. Sometimes, there are actual remedies, but other times, the only solution is to toss the meal out entirely — and that sucks.
Recently, u/BeauteousMaximus asked Redditors to share the "silliest 'brain fart' mistakes they've made while cooking," and TBH, I'm just glad to know I'm not the only one with this problem. That said, some of these mistakes are simply beyond comprehension...so buckle up, and get ready to feel WAY better about your own cooking.
1. "When making Rice Krispie treats, you always have to grease the pan (to keep the everything from sticking). I accidentally greased the pan with bug spray instead of cooking spray."
2. "I made Eggs Benedict on Christmas and put SO much effort into getting the Hollandaise sauce just right that I totally forgot to poach the eggs. I literally served English muffins with sauce."
3. "I took a package of chicken out of the fridge to bring it up to room temperature before I cooked it, since it's really the best way to avoid dry chicken. I wanted to take my dog to the park, so I put the entire package into the oven — I do this so my cats don't get too inquisitive...
"When I got back from the dog park, I turned on the oven to preheat it. A few minutes later: 'What's that smell...OH SHI–'"
4. "I used a colander to strain my linguine, but the holes were bigger than the pasta...so it all went through and fell into my sink. It took me a second to realize what was happening, but once I did, there wasn’t much I could do since it was so hot. Even worse? The sink wasn’t clean — so my pasta fell onto very, very dirty dishes."
5. "I was making Kraft mac 'n' cheese for my kids, and I dumped the cheese packet into the boiling water. Long story short, it exploded everywhere."
6. "One time, I tried washing rice in my colander. Half of it went straight down the drain before I realized that I took out my pasta colander instead of a fine mesh sieve."
7. "Ah, the great chili powder-cayenne mix-up of 2019...I made a pot of chili with, like, three tablespoons of 'chili powder' in it. My chili powder was labeled, so I don’t even have that excuse. I honestly think I just saw red powder and the letter 'C' and went with it without thinking. I wondered why I was literally crying as I stirred it, but it didn’t click until I took a taste right before I dished it out. It was completely inedible."
8. "My girlfriend wanted a hot chocolate and asked me if I could make her one (while I made my coffee). I accidentally took the bag with ground Chinese five spice and mixed it with milk. I do know that this bag contains five spice and not cocoa, because it's my only plastic bag on that shelf, and it's literally written on it, but my brain was like: 'Brown powder — must be cocoa!' Spoiler alert: She didn't like it."
9. "Soooo many times when I'm making a dish that's supposed to be served over rice, I forget to start the rice until I'm just about finished cooking. Then, I have to keep all the food warm while I wait for rice to cook — and it always seems to take forever. Face palm, every time."
10. "I tried to make a cup of pour-over coffee in an upside-down mug."
11. "One night, my dad was making soup. I'm not exactly sure if he didn't realize the difference between jalapeño and habanero pepper or if he just didn't know what habaneros were, but for some reason, he bought the latter instead of the former (when the recipe clearly called for jalapeños). He then proceeded to DOUBLE the amount of pepper while simultaneously cutting the rest of the recipe in HALF. I think the goal was to make it 'spicier,' but like, wow...did he unknowingly succeed. My poor dad — he was so mad at himself."
12. "I once tried making a homemade cinnamon-sugar pretzel. Instead, I made something altogether wrong...a cumin-sugar pretzel. Oddly enough, my brother said it was good."
13. "I used to work in food service. One time, I accidentally sprayed an English muffin with Lysol instead of cooking spray, before I toasted it. To this day, I still have no idea how Lysol ended up on my prep table instead of cooking spray..."
14. "I poured my rice into the rice cooker...without the pot inside."
15. "One morning, I was genuinely upset when I couldn't find my leftover bacon to eat for breakfast. I found it the next day...in the knife drawer."
16. "in my early days of cooking, I learned what a 'clove' of garlic is the hard way. I wanted to make rigatoni alla vodka for my girlfriend. The recipe called for four cloves of garlic, but since I was 19, I didn't know WTF a 'clove' was. I figured it was the unit that loose garlic is sold in, so I chopped up four heads of garlic — probably around 65 cloves — and started the sauce...
"As soon as I started sautéing it, the apartment started to fill with a tear-inducing gas that literally scorched the inside of our nostrils. We both had to go outside to get some air, and it took six weeks for the smell in my girlfriend's apartment to go away."
17. "I deep-fried a pot holder once. I quite literally don't even know what was going on in my brain when I did that one."
18. "OK, so one time, I was boiling eggs in the morning. One of them cracked while it was in the pan, so I scooped that one out. Then I added another egg in and thought, 'I'll just leave that one in for a little bit longer...' As if I was gonna be able to tell the IDENTICAL EGGS APART."
19. "I accidentally poured vanilla extract into a salad dressing instead of vinegar. I realized pretty quickly and only put the TINIEST bit in, but after tasting it out of curiosity, I have to say that the flavor was certainly...memorable. Turns out vanilla can taste amazingly horrible in some dishes!"
20. "I was making homemade stock in a pressure cooker at 2 a.m. (don't ask why) and accidentally dumped a couple of cinnamon sticks into it for unfathomable reasons. It was god awful. It smelled like Santa had died at a chicken restaurant."
21. "I thought I was being sooooo smart weighing my flour for homemade pasta...but I used the weight for an entire recipe instead of the quartered amount I was hoping to end up with. I had four times as much flour as I needed. For something that literally boils in water until it's done, that pasta was drier than a desert."
22. "When I was pregnant, I really wanted fried zucchini. I got all the stuff to cook it, and I ended up making some really tasty fried zucchini. I sat down to eat it, and my husband goes into our kitchen for something. I hear shouts of 'FIRE!' followed by the distinctive sound of a cookie sheet being slapped down on a pan...
"I forgot to turn the burner off for the little pot I was using to deep fry my food. Y'all, pregnancy brain is real. I've done other things like that when pregnant, but nothing else was as bad as almost burning my house down."
23. "I made this absolutely gorgeous vegetable stock from scratch using kitchen scraps I'd been collecting and freezing for weeks, and lots of beautiful fresh herbs. I poured it into a colander and, yep, straight down the damn drain. All of it. My brain forgot it was the liquid I was supposed to be saving, not the scraps that were left in the colander. I immediately sat down on the kitchen floor and contemplated my life choices for a while."
24. "I tried making homemade banana bread once, and it turned out to be a soupy mess. Seriously, no amount of baking would hold it together. Eventually, I realized that I completely forgot to put the flour in."
25. "So, I love to make blender oat pancakes — just scoops of oats in a blender, eggs, milk, a banana, and blend until it becomes a batter. I store my oats in bulk in a large glass jar in the pantry, so I pulled them out, added some to the blender container, then cracked in my eggs. I dropped the shells into the trash, and when I turned back around to the blender jar, I realized I'd cracked the eggs straight into the bulk jar of oats. I'd just refilled the jar with two pounds of oats, because of course I did, and I had to dump out everything after it was slathered in raw egg."
26. "I didn't have a whole lot of space in my college apartment, so while juggling a bunch of dishes, I ended up setting a plastic bowl down on top of a still-hot coil burner. It only took me 30 seconds to realize what I'd done, since the entire bottom of the bowl was mangled, and the smoke was absolutely horrible."
27. "One time, I grabbed the wrong clear plastic jug from under the sink to pour into a jar of vegetables I was trying to pickle. Turns out ammonia is not an acceptable substitute for vinegar — and I did it a little bit too quickly to notice the difference in smell."
28. "I spent more time than I'd care to admit making filet mignon, with an herb and Cabernet gravy that I made out of the leftover fat in the pan. In the last few seconds of thickening the gravy, I added powdered sugar instead of flour."
29. "I once tried to make the house smell good by baking a capful of vanilla extract for 30 minutes. I was 14 and misread the tip as a cup of vanilla for 30 minutes. Our house smelled like it belonged to the Pillsbury dough boy for weeks."
