My worst cooking-disaster story was made far worse by errors in the recipe.
Last year at Christmas, my wife gave me a cookbook with a recipe for steamed fried Chinese pork buns, much like (we thought) those at our favorite dumpling house. We'd never made them before, but we're both good cooks, so we planned to make them a few days after Christmas, while we were still visiting my parents.
The day before we planned to make them, I came down with a nasty stomach bug that barred me from the kitchen.
My wife is a vegetarian, and not used to cooking with meat (we were planning to make two fillings, one vegetarian).
We'd never made the recipe before.
This would have disaster written all over it even WITHOUT the critical error in the recipe that had you steam the buns before frying rather than vice versa, very effectively gluing them to the (cast-iron) frying pans we were using. It took 20 minutes between each batch of buns for my dad to chisel the remnants out of the pan before starting another.
Supposedly they tasted all right, but it was a three-hour ordeal.
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Last year at Christmas, my wife gave me a cookbook with a recipe for steamed fried Chinese pork buns, much like (we thought) those at our favorite dumpling house. We'd never made them before, but we're both good cooks, so we planned to make them a few days after Christmas, while we were still visiting my parents.
The day before we planned to make them, I came down with a nasty stomach bug that barred me from the kitchen.
My wife is a vegetarian, and not used to cooking with meat (we were planning to make two fillings, one vegetarian).
We'd never made the recipe before.
This would have disaster written all over it even WITHOUT the critical error in the recipe that had you steam the buns before frying rather than vice versa, very effectively gluing them to the (cast-iron) frying pans we were using. It took 20 minutes between each batch of buns for my dad to chisel the remnants out of the pan before starting another.
Supposedly they tasted all right, but it was a three-hour ordeal.