Cooking Horror Stories

Good thing he can appreciate some help nowadays!

woodywoodduck wrote: This wasnt me that did it, it was my 1 Nephew.....   2 years ago he wanted to do the Thanksgiving Turkey...he is 32 and he and his GF were planning on getting married this New Years (They got married at 12:01 am) and he wanted to be able to understand How to cook a Thanksgiving Turkey..   So my Sister said she would help him...he says "No No No Mom, I'm going to look it all up on the internet, cross referance it with the recipes on the Food Channel website and other sites and make the turkey...   So my Sister told him it was ok...She told our other Sister about it and our other sister decided "Just In Case" she was going to make a Turkey and have it on Stand By!   Well, Brian got Busy at midnight Thanksgiving Day and started cooking Stuffing and got the Turkey ready to be stuffed with it after the stuffing cooled..he made Oyster Stuffing, something We NEVER Had in any of our Family Turkeys but since he wanted to make it, he was going to make a "Traditional Stuffing"   He got the stuffing cooked and stuffed the turkey, set the oven at 425 and put the Turkey in at 4 am Thanksgiving Morning... Now we all were not to be to my sister's house till around 3 pm...My Sister never looked to see what Temp he had the oven set at! Brian would open the oven every half hour and baste the turkey and let it go for another half hour, he kept this up till around noon and decided it just didn't look right so he cranked the oven up to 475 and let it go at 475 till 2 pm...   The Turkey came out all nice and Brown, he was Proud of Himself for making it look like the pictures he found on the websites! Well when everyone got there and he went to Carve the Turkey he found 2 things out..   1 was that even if you baste a turkey every half hour and are cooking it at 425 then at 475, it comes out DRY, Shoe Leather Dry and 2 was, you take the dang gone Plastic bag that holds the Giblets OUT of the Turkey BEFORE Stuffing it!   He was proud of that Turkey till he started to carve it and found out the meat was pretty much Fused to the Bones and all Dried up and that while he was trying to carve it, he then noticed a smell of plastic and then was when he asked why he smelled plastic to which we all said "Did you take the Plastic Giblet bag out"   He was a Wreck, thought he had messed up the family Thanksgiving Dinner till His Aunt went and got the Turkey she had cooked out of her car...she let it there in a cooler till she found out if it was needed or not!   He cooked Thanksgiving Dinner for just his GF and Her Mom and Dad this Pass Thanksgving and made sure to take the plastic Giblet bag out and to cook it at no temp higher then 375 and for the required amount of time on the lable with the turkey...   I felt sorry for him but he learned.,...he wanted to do it himself all the way thru and never asked about certain things...We asked him if he learned anything from it and he said "Yeah, when Mom says she will help me, I should LET Her help me since She has been cooking for many years and I'm just learning!"

Woody,

That's a great story.  It reminds me of the Christmas dinner scene in the movie "Christmas Vacation" when Clark goes to slice the turkey and it turns out like your nephew's bird and Catherine, who cooked it, starts to cry and Clark says something like  "It's alright Catherine, it's just a little dry".

 I wish I could come up with a cooking horror story, but I got nuthin recent and detailed enough to make for good entertainment.

DIYASUB wrote:  I wish I could come up with a cooking horror story, but I got nuthin recent and detailed enough to make for good entertainment.  Even reaching back in the depths of time only brings forth vague memories of a bunch of teenaged boys in a homemade cabin in the woods, a verticle barrel stove constructed in shop class, a roaring fire, and a very large unopened can of beans.  I believe some alcohol might also have been involved.  Anyway, y'all get the picture.

LOL...KaBOOM!!!!!!!!

Seems every story I read of Bill's in emails or on the Hunting Site Involve Alcohol at some point...ONLY Story I know of that was told to me in an email, on the phone and on the Hunting Site that did not involve Alcohol was the New York Mountain Lion and the 30 point Buck...that there involved a wrecked Bobsled, a Bowie knife, a dead 30 point buck and 1 Hungry New York State Mountain Lion!

Oh.

Another great Near-Disaster Story from the good folks at Weber….”THINGS GOT OUT OF HAM”

 

(From Weber’s Big Book Of Grilling, by J. Purviance & S. McRae, Chronicle Books, copyright 2001)

 

Back in the 1970’s American banks enticed folks to open accounts by offering free toasters, transistor radios, eight-track tapes and other irresistible treasures. Weber was a small company back then and I thought if we could convince banks to give away our grills, we could grow our business fast. My first lead was a bank in St. Charles, Illinois, then a small, bucolic town along the Fox River. Today, it’s a western Chicago suburb regularly choked with traffic.

 

I managed to wrangle an appointment with none other than the president of the St. Charles National Bank, Mr. De Forest. Now, Mr. D was a rather intimidating pinstriped fellow- you know, the type who might glance over your loan application and negative net worth and, with an icy gaze over his half-glasses, unleash a resounding “No”. Fortunately, I wasn’t asking for a loan. I had almost made the sale when he asked, “And how do you plan to deliver customers, cash in hand, to the doorstep to my bank?”

 

To this day, I do not know why I said, “We’ll offer a free barbecued ham sandwich to anyone who comes in to meet the friendly staff.” Mr. D loved the idea! We decided that Weber would do the grilling and the bank’s executives would serve the sandwiches.

 

I had three weeks to wonder what had possessed me to make such a crazy offer and to come up with a plan. Meanwhile, newspaper ads broke and suddenly all the local media wanted to cover the event. I began to get nervous. If there was too little ham, we would have a mad mob. Too much ham and the bank’s employees would be eating leftovers for weeks- not the best PR for Weber.

 

Well, on Sandwich Day, I hauled eight of our 36-inch Ranch kettles (which can cook five whole hams at one time), fifty 18-pound hams, and 500 pounds of charcoal to the bank. A local bakery, though they thought I was nuts, agreed to deliver a half-truckload of freshly baked rye bread.

 

I fired up they grills at 7:00 AM and showed the bank executives, decked out in aprons and chef hats, how to make sandwiches while pitching the services of the bank with a smile. The first sandwiches were to be served at 11:00 AM.

 

I suspected we were in trouble when we had to call the St. Charles police for traffic control just after 9:00 AM. We started furiously carving ham at 10:30 AM. As I pulled a ham off the grill, I put another one in its place and loaded more charcoal into the grill. We carved as fast as we could. Bank tellers formed a conga line of platter bearers, and the bank executives became covered in mustard.

 

By noon the police were getting nervous. Parking was full for a mile radius around the town and they had never even witnessed, let alone handled, gridlock. I was nervous too. A half-truck of rye and 900 pounds of ham were going fast!

 

But Mr. D was having a ball talking to customers, cutting up with the local disc jockey, and handing out account applications. By 1:00 PM (closing time back then) they had opened more than 300 accounts. Mr. D decided the bank would remain open until everyone received a sandwich. At my urging, he also sent some tellers to buy up every ham they could find in St. Charles. We called the bakery for more rye bread. Reinforcements from the Weber factory showed up with more charcoal, sharp knives and new cutting boards. For the first time that day I believed there wouldn’t be a riot.

 

The tellers came back with whole hams, rolled hams, split hams, and armloads of mustard jars, leaving empty grocery store shelves in their wake. The second bread delivery made it through the police line just in time, and I kept stoking the kettles. By 3:00 PM the line was down to mere hundreds and the bank had opened 500 accounts. We kept carving and the exhausted, mustard-covered bankers kept dispensing sandwiches.

 

Shortly after 5:00 PM our team of shell-shocked grillers and servers gave away the last free sandwich, broke out some beer and started tallying the day’s outcome. Some 1,900 pounds of ham, 950 pounds of charcoal, one truckload of rye, and God knows how much mustard later, the bank had more than 650 new customers. I had hoped to sell 40 or 50 grills to the St. Charles National Bank, but the order came to more than three truckloads.

 

If you are ever a bank executive and need some tips on pleasing customers, it’s been my experience that people take more kindly to mustard-speckled aprons and a smile than an icy, pin-striped gaze over half-glasses. A free lunch doesn’t hurt, either.

Ugh! Anyone who has ever made beer even once, at home, knows how impossibly STICKY that malt syrup is. You all were mopping for some time, weren't you?