Worst mistake you ever made while cooking

[Sony]

Welcome PBHokie! I'm glad you can now find humor in the situation, because I was halfway between laughing and gasping in horror.....I hope the lady appreciated dinner given the circumstances and effort! I might have just called for takeout at that point.

[JMT]

I was going to cook spaghetti, boiled up water and completely forgot about it. Had the water in a Ikea cookpot and noticed the smell, lifted it off without burning myself and notice that the bottom plate and the middle layer of aluminium is still on the stove, the aluminium disc ( or might have been some aluminium alloy with a lower melting temp) had melted. Luckily I didn't start a fire, but I did burn myself removing the lid, it hurt so bad it took hours to get to sleep that night.

Learned to never leave things on the stove unsupervised if doing something I might get engrossed in. Got myself a waterpoiler that turns itself off.

[paulraphael]

When I was a senior in college I led a student trip into the Rocky Mountain National Park ... a group of about a dozen freshmen who for the most part had never been backpacking or climbing before. On our first night out the menu was pasta. You might wonder if it's a good idea to make pasta at 11,000 feet elevation, where water boils at the temperature of a mild bubble bath. But pasta was the only thing I knew how to make at any altitude. And the price was right.

So as we gathered around my sputtering MSR stove, bundled against the fall air in our fleece and poofy jackets, I took the opportunity to teach a masterclass on both cooking and energy conservation. God knows what I tried to teach them about cooking, but the energy conservation part involved my first culinary innovation: reuse the pasta cooking water to cook the second batch.On paper it seemed like a great idea, especially since the pasta took over 20 minutes to cook (maybe "cook" isn't the right word. "Start to disintegrate" is more like it).

Anyway, the kids who got the first batch were not too impressed by the tomato covered mush I ladled out to them.

But no one was prepared for the second batch. It seems that at those long, lukewarm cooking times, the water leaches a lot of starch out of the pasta. The second batch contributed enough starch to turn all the contents of the pot into glue. By the end you could just barely make out the shapes of individual noodles. We were all stunned by the pale, amorphous globs that I had to cut with a spoon and slide into people's bowls.

Worse, this was not a situation where we could laugh about it and call domino's. This was dinner. And these kids were hungry. I made a lot of enemies that day.