I wasnt quite thinking along the same "disaster lines" as you were.

When we moved in to my last house I wasnt quite familiar with the oven. I wound up meeting all my neighbors for the first time when I burned the chicken dinner, the fire alarm in the house went off with no way to turn it off. (We just moved in, had no code)fire trucks, police cars, volunteers and about 50 neighbors all met at my house. HELLO EVERY ONE, NICE TO MEET YOU! HAHAHA.

Mother never taught me to cook.

One year my sister was home from college for the weekend, with her roommate.

I decided to cook breakfast: bacon and eggs.

My first attempt at both, but never got to egg cooking.

Cause bacon grease got hot, caught on fire, went to kitchen sink, turned on the water, to put blaze out, caught the curtains on fire.

Mother quickly came from somewhere to the rescue.

End of that.

I was making some yeast bread in the food processor and had all my ingredients ready to go......I got everything done, the dough was forming a ball like it was supposed to and all of a sudden, I saw the yeast/water mixture.
I decided I would add it and see what happened.
Luckily, it worked and my loaf of bread turned out to be very tasty.

My mother didn't teach us to cook either, but I sort of learned by osmosis. I was 15 when my oldest sister went off to college and mother went to IU for mother-daughter weekend. I was left in charge of cooking Sunday lunch/dinner. I made the ususal fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans (home canned), and even made a cherry cheesecake, which was popular at the time, for dessert.

I did fine until it came to the gravy. The pan probably had an inch or more of melted lard in it and I just added flour like I'd seen mother do. I stirred and stirred and added more and more flour and then poured in about a half gallon of milk. But by that time, there was so much flour in the pan it just looked awful. I finally got it looking decent but I don't think I added any salt or pepper. I guess I missed the part where mother poured half the grease out!!

Most of the meal was good, but that gravy was a disaster. Daddy didn't say anything but I heard him tell mother later to "teach that girl how to make gravy". I was crushed, but by golly, I can sure make gravy now!!

When I was younger there weren't many kitchen disasters because (I'm hanging my head) we ate mostly prepared foods. Blue box mac and cheese was my best friend :-(

Have had many over the years, too many to remember...but I remember the first one.

As a winter evening treat, my mother used to make a recipe for hot chocolate from her 1940's Betty Crocker Cookbook (which have now). It was her bible, since she had never had to cook until she got married.
It was Martha Washington's Hot Chocolate, and if I remember, it involved beaten eggs whites blended into a hot chocolate mix.
One evening, when I was maybe around 10, I begged to make it all by myself. Mother said yes and walked out of the room.
It didn't work out right, was a lumpy disaster, and I was so ashamed(and it was before garbage disposals), I drank all of the evidence, and got deathly sick to my stomach.

I make bread about once a week. Last week instead of grabbing the bread flour bin, I grabbed the self-rising flour.

I could tell it wasn't acting right, took about twice as long to rise. That bread was so salty I had to throw it out. Took me a while to figure out what I did.

Not mine, but the ole' salt for sugar. My husband always said I had 2 cooking temps on the stove..."high and off"

Newlywed, new to cooking, had bridge club luncheon.

Was preparing apricot nectar cake for dessert, no oil

Used bacon grease!

No one knew until "S" me told em!

DS had his 3 best friends come over to visit in high school
when he broke his ankle. I cooked a frozen pizza for him
and the three girls. I misread the time to cook. It
came out hard as a rock, and our dog, who would usually eat
anything wouldn't even eat it! lol The girls took it
outside and played FRISBEE with it! lol One of them
STILL reminds me of that every time I see her! lol

Emangineer, that's what my DH says too! lol

I made two of my famous puineapple cheesecakes. They had finished baking but were molten hot and liquid. As I was removing them from the oven, one spilled ,part in the oven, part down the front and into the storage drawer below. Smelled nice but horrible to clean!
Luckily I was much more careful with the second cheesecake, as they were for Thanksgiving, a special request by my SIL.

I grew up on a dairy farm and that was operated in the same manner as the Amish do today. Grandmother had an 8ft long coal stove in the kitchen and our idea of running water was whenever one of us boys entered the kitchen Grandma would hand us a 5gal pail and say, "Run out to the spring and get me some water." The next boy in the room got handed the coal bucket to fill, and the next boy had to take a couple 5gal buckets of vegetable timmings out to the hog lot and more often than not during the canning season one of the younger boys got detailed to stay at the house and assist Grandma in the kitchen. As a consequence I began learning how to cook when I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I don't regret a minute of that time.

Dissassters? Wow, I could write a book about dissassters I have made in the kitchen but one will always stick out in my mind.

At about 13yrs old my cousin & I got the silly idea to make some home made rootbeer. (In those days you could buy Hires Rootbeer Syrup in a tube like a huge toothpaste tube in the spice section of any grocery store for about $1).

My cousin and I spent about 3 weeks rounding up empty soda bottles & washing them out, all the while saving our allowance money to get the rootbeer syrup. We finally had enough bottles washed out, got the syrup, set up the bottle capper and commenced to mixing our brew in a huge 5gal crock. First you add the water, then the syrup, then sugar and finally a cube of flieshmans yeast, mix it all up and let it set about 24 hours then you bottle it and let it age 14 days to make the fizz.

When it was all done my cousin and I each took a bottle from the basment up to the kitchen to get a bottle opener. I snapped the opener on the bottle cap, started to lift it and WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM, the lid flew off and the rootbeer spurted up out of that bottle so high it hit the ceiling. Talk about a mess...LOL...My cousin tried opening his with exactly the same result.

What went wrong we wondered? Then we got to recounting our mixing procedures. It seems that my cousin had not seen me put the yeast in, so without saying a word, he put another cake of yeast in.

But as is true of teenagers everywhere, we weren't gonna let a little thing like atomic fizz prevent us from drinking our rootbeer. We just put a dishpan in the sink, then one of us would carefully open the bottle while the other one held a pot upside down over the bottle to catch the spray and let it go into the dishpan, which we then poured in our glasses and enjoyed out rootbeer, even though it did have a rather strong yeasty taste..LOL

Let's see. I exploded a duck in the oven, made turkey jerky on the rotisserie, and one time boiled eggs so long the water evaporated and they exploded. POP POP POP! Egg on the ceiling, my friends.

I melted a pound of stick margarine in the microwave instead of softening it, and it ran off the dish and out the door and down the cupboard like a waterfall. I guess I shouldn't have sit it and left the kitchen LOL.

Making stock while on the phone, I dumped the contents of the pot into the strainer set in the sink....letting the good broth go right down the drain. Forgot to put a bowl underneath it.

DH once made shortbread cookies using unsalted butter instead of regular, but did not add salt to the recipe because "it wasn't called for". The cookies didn't have NO flavour. They had NEGATIVE flavour ROFL. I used a few to make crumb crusts for cheesecake bars, but most went into the garbage.

Then there was the time when I put tilapia filets in the basket for the Ronco Rotisserie, set it, and went to do laundry. Came back to find the fish had shrunk and wasn't being held in place tightly....it got bashed to bits and was now a lumpy puree on the bottom of the oven. Gross!

I know there was one recently, because I was laughing hysterically and telling DH and DD they didn't have to eat it. But they ate it, making faces and looking at me oddly the whole time. I was mortified, and had such a laughing fit I nearly passed out. But I can't remember what it was that I made!

Dances.

One time when I was in high school when I got home from school I found my aunt had stopped by and she and mother where sitting in the dining room chatting.

Mother told me to put 2lbs of macaroni on to boil for supper, which I did. About 30 or 40 minutes later when the macaroni was done I asked Mother what she wanted to do with it? She says "put it in a glass baking dish, then cover with milk & velveta cheese" (thinking it would be macaroni & cheese no doubt) but at the same time my aunt said brown up some hamburger in little pieces then add the hamburger and a quart of home canned stewed tomatoes (thinking along the lines of American Chow suey or chilli mac).

So I did exactly what they told me to do, I put the macaroni in a baking dish, poured a quart of home canned stewed tomatoes in, then enough milk to cover, covered the top with Velveta and sprinkled the hamburger over the top of than. A little salt, black pepper and a bit of Oregano for good measure, covered it with aluminum foil and put in a 350 deg oven for about 30 minutes. In the mean time my sister had set the table so when it was all done I carried the dish in to the table and sat it down. Mother lifted the foil and went balistic, "you didn't put milk & tomatoes in it?" she shouted.

Dad looked at it and said, "I don't care, it looks good and I am hungry so just dish me up some till I try it".

Next thing I now, dad was chowing down like it was Thanksgiving or his birthday or something, and everybody else tried it, but no one complained. I finally got some and I have to say, it was good.

In fact, after that incident about once a week Dad would holler at me, "Richard, how about you go make your screwup caserol again".

A couple of disasters come to mind. One time my KitchenAid broke and would only mix on high speed. I didn't know that when I had ingredients in there for icing, and icing sugar went ALL OVER the kitchen and me too. It was in every nook and cranny.

The other time I was making an apple pie. I had the filling made, and I was adding to to the bottom crust. I was doing this on the counter, and for some inexplicable reason, the florescent light over the sink exploded. There were glass shards everywhere and I had to throw it all out.

I just remembered a third one. Now when I make apple filling, I mix up the ingredients and cook it a bit in the microwave and then chill it. But I used to just slice the apples into the crust, and one time when I was doing this, I was using a new knife DH had bought me. I sliced off the side of my finger (it still has a little point!) and the piece went into the pie! Into the garbage it went, and I eventually had to go to hospital because it would not stop bleeding!

I actually did a doozie this weekend. I bought some corn tortillas at the supermarket, was going to make chips out of them. So, I cut them into triangles, sprayed them with a little canola oil and put them under the broiler.
Browned one side, turned them over, put them back in and...

THEY CAUGHT FIRE. I had a huge fire inside my oven.

Scared the pants off of me. I didn't know what to do. I decided to just leave the door shut and the fire eventually burned itself out.

Turns out you don't broil them, you bake them at 350 degrees. Lesson learned :) Five days later the kitchen still smells of burnt corn.

One afternoon in winter, mom put a pot of navy beans on the wood burning cook stove. She used a pressure cooker to speed up the process to have the beans ready for supper. She had thought that the pressure regulator was in working order and was free to 'jiggle'. When she went in to check on progress and to add wood to the stove, the pressure plug blew. Half of the beans in the pot were blasted to the ceiling. We kids were outside and heard the noise and mom yell. We ran to the kitchen to find it filled with steam with beans dripping from the ceiling. We thought it was funny; She did not. The blessing: no one got hurt.

I think my DH had a kitchen disaster when I went to visit my friend in Arkansas quite a few years ago.
But I just found out about it recently.
I just couldn't get my beans to get tender so I got out the pressure cooker.
DH told me it wasn't a very good idea and then went on to tell me he tried to cook beans in the pressure cooker but didn't remember letting the pressure reduce gradually or to use cold water and he took off the little rocker top.
He said it was really difficult to clean off the beans from our pop corn type ceiling.

I got another one.

It was during our first years of marriage. This particular Thanksgiving, we were alone and wife decided to roast a turkey. It was a lot of work and it turned out swell. But we had a problem: there was a lot of turkey for just the two of us and a lot of hot broth. The problem was how were we to bag the very hot remains for storage. My bright idea: You hold the bag and I'll handle the hot roaster pan and pour it right in. It was a problem not to get burned but we managed. When the 1/2 quart of hot broth went in, the bag held for 2 seconds and then melted dumping the entire mess on the floor.

RUBBER ROAST! That is what it was! I had cut up a roast and cooked it in the pressure cooker with broth to make gravy. I should have let it release pressure naturally, but I used the quick release method and my roast pieces turned into little pieces of rubber.

Good tasting pieces of rubber, but still almost impossible to chew. And to make it worse, DD had a friend over. Who politely ate everything in her plate ROFLMAO!

Dances.

Now I know I'll never buy a pressure cooker, after reading your stories!

I don't have anything to share, except that I have a habit of unscrewing the top of the spice bottle, instead of flipping the lid open. It's a disaster waiting to happen.