My Worst Cooking Disaster
My 3-year-old, Evan, was bugging me to make red Kool-Aid. I had the powder out when the doorbell rang. As I stood talking to my neighbor, Evan yelled to me that he would make it. I kept yelling back, “Wait for me!” When I went back into the kitchen, I saw that he had poured several cups of the red powder into the pitcher, but there was powder all over the counter and floor. I perched Evan on the counter and put my baby on the rug. As I started to mop the floor, the red powder smeared all over the floor. Then, I slipped on the wet floor, hitting my elbow on the bucket and sending two gallons of red water all over the kitchen. I started yelling, Evan started crying, and the baby crawled into the kitchen and slid into the red water, soaking his clothes red. After about an hour of cleaning up the mess, the baby, and the tears, I went downstairs to retrieve the whites I had just laundered. The red water had dripped through the floor onto my clean white laundry, turning it all pink. Needless to say, Kool-Aid is forbidden in our home to this day.
–Julie Dobry, Hollywood, Maryland
In 1980, 15 people were seated around our dining room table in celebration of our daughter’s First Communion. I had brought the steaming food to the table, and, after saying grace, we passed the dishes. My mother had a strange look on
her face as she brought me the large bowl of mashed potatoes and whispered in my ear that there was something not quite right about the potatoes. She had noticed some unusual stringy material when she dished up her portion. I took the bowl of mashed potatoes into the kitchen and went through it. To my horror, I realized that the potatoes were mixed with cotton balls! My daughter had had her ears pierced earlier that week, and I had kept a bottle of peroxide and a supply of cotton balls on the counter on top of the canister set in order to help heal her ears. Somehow, the cotton balls had fallen into the pot as I was mashing the potatoes, and I had incorporated them into the mix. The incident brought a lot of laughter to the table, and I have never forgotten my embarrassment.
–Anita Voiles, Hammond, Wisconsin
A friend had given me her recipe for refrigerated yeast rolls, and I was excited to fix them. I followed her directions to the letter. When I took them out of the oven, they had shrunk in size and were rock hard. Not wanting my husband and family to see them, I took them out and tossed them over the fence into our back pasture. Several days later, as I was going through my husband’s clothes to wash them, I found one of the rolls. I asked my husband where he had found it, and he said, “As I was feeding the horses the other day, I saw that
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