Recipes NOT to be repeated!!

fletch3163

Mine isn't a recipe as such but............

I'd just moved into a flat with my (now) husband. One night I decided to cook this new invention. It was a pizza and you put it into a cold oven, turned it on, and the pizza rose, all gorgeous-like as it cooked, giving it that authentic I'm-from-a-pizzeria feel.

So, time up, I opened the oven to find my pizza had melted through the bars of the shelf onto the grotty floor of the oven. Not a single bit was salvageable. Didn't occur to me that the dough of the base would thaw and I really should have used a tray.:o

kunekune

The root vegetable crumble from the 2007 BBC Vegetarian Christmas magazine ... I made it tonight. OK, so I didn't have scales to weigh the flour and butter, but I've made enough sweet crumbles to know what it looks like when it has enough butter. This looked like it had enough. The vegetables I simplified down to five: potato, parsnip, carrot, butter nut squash and leek. Oh, and then there was the tomato. It was a disgusting pink colour once the milk was added, and just too many flavours. The result: reasonable vege stuff on the bottom but overcooked despite following the instructions, dry as dust crumble topping.

I believe it was Ainsley Harriott's fault. Well, he should be ashamed of himself. Mind, the pizza base from the same issue worked out well, and if any one is thinking of trying the oven-baked biriani, do, it is brilliant (it has appeared in various other publications over the years, including the latest Easy Cook).

DH would like me to add he expected it to be awful. When we were students living in hall many years ago we were given a savoury crumble. The topping was, well, crumble. And underneath was mince and heart valve. Honest. So he knew it would be awful whatever.

CFC

Jamie's Christmas fresh turkey, hand stuffed under the skin. What an expensive waste of time. Dry and no, it didnt taste of the stuffing.

Going to go back to my usual next year!

stef240377

I frequently use BBC Good Food Magazine cookbooks mainly because they are one of the few books i have looked through to find we would eat a lot of the things inside however in one book there is a recipe for lamb and rice - OK its fairly straight forward but was totally disgusting. The lamb from Tesco was more bone and gristle than meat and the overall taste of it was vile. Was fuming when kids tried telling me it was inedible making them chomp their way through it until DS2 pulled out a huge piece of bone then it all went in the bin and OH raced to the chip shop.

mudgekin

I only tend to use 2 coolbooks now, one by Mary Berry and another that I aquired from my 83 year old mother that her mother gave her when she got married. I now prefer many of the recipes here on MSE than are in the miles of cookbooks that line my bookshelves

I did try a Nigella recipe for humous which was absolutely disgusting and went back to my own recipe that I got from an arabic chef while working in the middle east..delish and never fails

LameWolf

The only not-terribly-good result I can call to mind was some potted cheese with walnuts.

I can't remember the details, but it was a lot of messing about, and wasn't at all tasty (although we did eat it up, liberally enhanced with pickle).

The cookery book I got the recipe from was an Australian publication (nothing against Australians, btw, in case AussieLass reads this), and was lots of things to do with tinned produce as well as one or two potted cheese recipes. I don't remember the title - it went to the RSPCA shop during a clearout.

I use Linda McCartney's books quite a bit, and also an ancient copy of The Cookery Year, and, fingers crossed, don't seem to have too many failures.

Primrose

Putting porage oats in too shallow a bowl in the microwave and cooking it with full cream milk while I went out to scrape the frost of the car windscreen. Came back to find all the contents had boiled over, spilled over the sides of the turntable and churned into a horrid mess underneath.

Cooking chestnuts in the microwave without slitting them first was another disaster. There was such an explosion I thought a plane had gone through our roof. And trying to clean it up afterwards wasn't much fun either.

Primrose

As a newlywed I tried to impress my husband with fried rice. Didn't have a recipe so put it in the frying pan, hard and uncooked just as it came out of the packet and tried frying it for ten minutes. You can imagine what the end result was like.:rotfl:

tarya_arienne

When I was 16 I tried to be all posh and have some friends over for a dinner party, but not too fancy, a beef casserole and a sticky toffee pudding. Easy right? Well no, my parents were away and mum left me out all the stuff I'd need, but I used the earthenware dish that she'd left out for the pudding to start making the casserole in. All was going fine until I realised I'd not added enough oil so put some more in. But cold oil + hot dish = explosion :eek: , and the front half shot out, hit me in the sternum and left me very winded, beef all over the floor and no dish for pudding.

Luckily the beef had been on BOGOF so there was another pack, so I dutifully tried again, but the timing was toooo long and it was all burnt onto the bottom of the big saucepan so that was a goner.

I ended up in tears and begging a friends mum for some mince and potatoes and making a (rather bland) shepherds pie. Needless to say, my mum didn't let me cook for quite some time after that.... I did, however, find another dish for the pudding and that was pretty good, which I think my by-this-time very hungry friends were REALLY thankful for!!:rolleyes:

T-A xx

Rage_in_Eden

a version of tiramasu from a slimming magazine that used creme fraiche instead of the cream - absolutely disgusting and still talked about by Mr Rage to this day.....