Dumplings always disintegrate, no matter how I do them. And I love chicken and dumplings. :(

I have new ovens. Lots of testing, usually over-done in a flash. Or under-done as in the oven is not even on, lol.

Burnt in a flash as the new broiler has two settings. fast to kick in like seconds. 100 times faster than my old one. Fortunately it is a wall oven at eye level and big glass door with a good light. I still burnt the first batch of homemade tortilla strips last night. On low broil.

The steam oven is wonderful but shuts off if the door is opened and need to hit start again. We had artichokes for dessert as they were not even on...

DH burnt popcorn a couple weeks ago. All the way to ashes. With the Whirly-pop. The one you spin by hand over a burner. The one that is done in just a few minutes perfectly. He walked away for a second, took the pups out, checked the mailbox and probably started reading something in the driveway...

Mostly just operator error and forgetfulness.

well if you don't mind a historic fail..like back in 1968 my first tuna noodle casserole I made after I got married I left out the tuna!! Sure didn't have much taste and was all dry and my brand new husband threw it in the kitchen sink! I was heartbroken.

Well, eating out it was an extremely bad dim sum experience, which I will never live down. Recently, mustard greens and a recipe called "Caribbean stew." Our last meatloaf was not well mixed together too, and the potatoes cooked unevenly. I also seem to have lost my muffin mojo, the last two batches were uninspired, although edible. And my "organic margarine" experiment was a fail too. Back to the drawing board on that one.

One of them was when I was making teriyaki chicken. For some dumb, odd reason I put the chicken on TOP of a cooling rack in a baking sheet and then poured the sauce over it. Dumb, yes? The sauce burnt and the chicken was flavorless. There goes my cookie sheet.

One Christmas, decades ago, my parents roasted a large turkey in the oven overnight using the delayed start and timer feature. We would all be getting together for dinner the next day (Christmas) at the home of one of my siblings. My parents were both good cooks.

I was home from college and was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom. I woke up at around 3 AM to the smell of roasting turkey -- the smell of burned roasted turkey, to be precise. The house was slowly filling with a thin smoke. I went down to the first floor and saw that my father had also awoken to the turkey fumes. He turned off the oven, opened the door and removed the roaster. Things were not smelling good. He removed the top of the roasting pan. Instead of the Norman Rockwell roast turkey twin, there rested before our eyes a shrunken, hard black carcass that looked more like a seagull that had gotten caught in a bonfire.

My father admitted that the oven range was a new purchase and this was the first time he'd tried out the delayed bake feature.

We opened the windows to the fresh cold morning air and thought about how we might fix things. My mother was up by then. She offered that there was another fresh-frozen turkey in the large chest freezer.

Over the next few hours the two of them somehow managed to roast that "backup" turkey. They might have even stuffed it.

But my teasing father wasn't happy enough with that. He came up with yet another genius award scheme. We would take both turkeys to the family dinner at my sibling's an hour away.

When we arrived for the festive dinner, my father set the large roasting pan on the counter and opened the cover to proudly reveal the blackened charred first turkey -- with a festive red holiday bow on it. My sister broke into tears.

My father soon let her in on his mean joke and brought forth the perfectly roasted "rescue" turkey.

Of course, he took photos of both roasted turkeys and somewhere in the family photos is the photo he took of #1 turkey.

Part of my family is appreciative of dark humor -- but not all.

turkey photo from Internet. "Carrie Underwood's turkey."

(There are a LOT of burned turkey photos. Search that, then opt for images.)

Petalique, wow! Great story. ;-)

petalique, I would definitely like your father. :)

Many years ago I invited friends for a sauerbraten w/ noodles, German potato salad, red cabbage, etc., all homemade, including the noodles. I was running late and didn't carefully hang or lay the cut noodles out for drying... just quickly laid them out on towels and started the water boiling. It came out more like sauerbraten & wad of noodle. :)

I LOVE that burnt turkey anecdote! And the photo is hilarious, I can just imagine the big red bow on it.

Having been a recipe collector for some 50-odd years, I've found that many newer recipes don't come out the way I think they will/should. The Barefoot Contessa's recipe for baked shrimp with panko, for example. Fortunately I read the Comments section, almost all of whom said they drastically cut down the amount of butter because it was way over the top. It tasted good, but I thought it was too greasy even with cutting down the butter by 50%.

The most recent was a recipe for crab noodles from Charlie Phan, owner of The Slanted Door in San Francisco. Perhaps not so much of a fail, as it didn't taste the way it does at the restaurant. I wanted to make seafood long noodles for Chinese New Year potluck, so I changed the sauce proportions and added an extra step to make sure the noodles came out with the correct texture this time.

My variant came out the way I wanted so it all ended well. I don't always "try out" new recipes beforehand, but I've learned the hard way it's just too risky for potlucks unless the recipe comes from a source I've found reliable.

It's one thing to experiment on my DH, but another thing to experiment upon the entire extended family, LOL!

I had a close call this last Sunday. I explained in the WFD thread that my family was coming over for lunch. My two oldest granddaughters have a very restricted diet, so I decided to make hamburger gravy with baked potatoes. I bought a bag of potatoes two days earlier but didn't check them. Big mistake! 1-1/2 hours before everyone was supposed to arrive, I finally opened the bag to get the potatoes ready for baking.

They were all either too small for adult appetites or nicely green. Suddenly I was forced to make a quick trip to the store to pick up some new potatoes. This time I picked them out of the loose potato bin and checked each one carefully. No more bags of potatoes for me.

I rushed home and baked them at 450, hoping they'd get done before everyone arrived. It worked out O, but I sure didn't need to make that last minute dash to the store.

I've had problems with some of the dried mushrooms I've been buying at the restaurant supply store and also at the Japanese markets. Some of them are just way too chewy, and I have to mince them after soaking them in order to use them. I'm thinking that I may grind some of them into a powder, but in the future, I may stick to just buying dried porcini mushrooms and skip the shiitake, although the ones I've bought that were sliced and did not have stems were not bad. The worst are the Kikurage mushrooms, which look like elephants' ears when rehydrated and have a texture to match. I had been buying mushroom medleys at Surfas and Trader Joe's, and they always manage to include some sort of chewy mushrooms in their medleys.

Anyway, I will be avoiding black fungus, wood-ear, and kikurage mushrooms in the future. I think I need to be more careful with removing ENTIRE stems from shiitake mushrooms when I buy them fresh and only buy the sliced dried ones, as they have no stems at all and are quite tender when rehydrated.

Our Hanukkah family dinner was moved to my parents' house due to rain. I'd never used one of their ovens, and there's a lot of newer equipment in different places since I last cooked there. I scrapped my whole menu, other than the dessert, which I made at home and brought, because I knew it wasn't going to work. So I figured chicken marbella. I've made it several times (or, that is, I've made the recipe I have which is based on marbella). It's always fantastic, and I figured I could just marinate it in bags and cook the chicken there. I also had a bunch of vegetables for warm roasted salad.

The first fail was that the store only had giant chickens, and being that it was the day before Christmas Eve, they weren't getting any smaller ones. The "good" butcher wasn't there and I didn't want to risk them breaking them down in the way I don't like, so I took them home whole. Big mistake. They weren't just big, they were old!!!! Tough to cut! I couldn't manage with the poultry sheers and even with my butcher's knife, I had to whack at it. The breasts could have come off a turkey and had to be cut in half to still be big.

I should have had a clue then and gone back to the store for a brisket, and cooked the chicken for the freezer, but I figured the marination would make everything fine. So then I was keeping a watchful eye on the clock, because I knew instinct wouldn't cut it. Sadly, neither did the clock. The chicken was over brown (though not very overcooked--not dry or gummy or anything), and by the time I got the warm salad together the vegetables had gone limp.

As a fail, I guess it doesn't match the funny stories. As a festive meal, however, it was kind of sad, if edible. There were (sincere) compliments on the salad--it tasted good and was different. None of the ummm-yumms that the chicken usually gets though. The chicken, itself, overpowered the marinade, I think, and the prunes may have been too dry because they melted instead of swelling, and didn't add much to the flavor, so it just tasted like slightly overcooked, somewhat garlicky chicken. :( I think failing spectacularly would have been less embarrassing than just not succeeding, like I did. Sigh.

New Year's Eve 1980. We decided to serve Philly cheese steaks so I bought a large box of Sizzle-lean (sp?). Having never cooked this stuff before, I simply laid out the thin slices of meat on a cookie sheet and slid it under the broiler. It took less than a minute for the greasy meat to catch fire and in moments, the oven was full of flames. I never used the packaged meat again.

Oh dear, there are so many I can't even count them, from burned cookies to collapsed bread from over proofing to scorched green beans (something I do regularly for some reason). I've overbaked cakes into terminal dryness and my latest new recipe was a fail for me, a ground chicken and rice noodle asian kind of thing. It tasted like.....well......like nothing. It happens.

Annie

Yep, a couple of weekends ago I tried doing a vegie and noodle stir fry using rice noodles. The rice noodles ended up all stuck together and gluggy, and sucked up most of the sauce so it was kind of dry as well. Not inedible, but not stellar either.

I have forgotten about potatoes boiling away on the stove quite a few times, left a curry to simmer a couple of months ago but didn't actually turn the heat down :-( and set fire to the croutons for a French onion soup. First roast turkey looked like the victim of a particularly gruesome axe murder by the time I was done wrestling it around in the pan :-) I can scrub out a burnt pot as well as the next person and possibly better than many ;-)

Probably the worst was when I was about 14, Mom was under the weather so I decided to fry chicken. For some reason I thought I was supposed to make a batter out of flour, egg and milk. What we wound up with was chicken that looked like corn-dogs. I remember my Dad looking at it real funny but he didn't say anything and ate it anyway.

Exploding pressure cooker. Filled with black beans. Had to paint the ceiling to get rid of the nasty blue-black stains.

Until i got the dedicated rice cooker, I couldn't make rice for beans. (The expression, not necessarily FOR beans...) Rice would anneal permanently and burnt-ly to pan bottoms.

Then there was the exploding eggs. I let the pot go dry when I got distracted on the computer. 3 very hard boiled eggs blew up and went projectile into the ceiling fan which spread them everywhere. The stuff didn't come off the flat ceiling paint. Sounded like gunshots.

Recently, I made a dish for a potluck containing turnips among other things. Those turnips never softened!

Once got distracted and burned an entire pot of wild rice. Luckily, I had more wild rice, but it was an expensive mistake.