15 Home Chefs Who Turned Simple Meals Into Total Mayhem

It is a staple for people to cook at their homes and serve meals that can quench the hunger of your family, friends, and yourself. But making a simple meal can never be easy for everyone. Cooking at home is not boring; in fact, it can be chaotic as these people share their funny cooking fails.

• Around the time when I was just learning to cook: I was making a spicy chicken dish. I'm Indian, so as it is the normal spice amount is pretty high. Anyway, I confused teaspoon with tablespoon and put in 3x as much chili powder as asked. My family was basically eating fire that night. © PhreedomPhighter / Reddit
• Tried to fry an egg one day when I was in high school. After a few minutes, it's still not fried, but the oil was bubbling. Turns out, my mom stored the oil under the sink next to the dish detergent. At least it was easy to wash the pan. © silk35 / Reddit
• When I was much younger & not as experienced, I heard someone say that soy sauce was a great marinade for steak. I misunderstood that it was just an ingredient in the marinade. I marinated 2 nice NY strip steaks overnight in pure soy sauce. It was an inedible horror. I was so upset about the 2 steaks I wasted, I didn’t want to make steak again for years. © Madea_onFire / Reddit
• A long time ago but still funny. When I was very young, I cooked a lot with my mom. One of our favorite dishes was spinach pie, really tasty spinach and cheese in a crust. Pretty foolproof. Well, we were also both big into arts and crafts and kept various craft things around the house out in the open.
  Cooking the pie goes as expected, once it's out of the oven we both take a slice. Looks great! We proceed to bite down and... CRUUUNCH. It felt like I was eating entirely sand! It was awful! Both of us recoil in shock and confusion and try to figure out what the heck we just put in our mouths.
  Turns out, there was glitter in a salt shaker (for applying to crafts) and my mom confused the glitter for salt. To this day I have no idea how she didn't see it sparkle. It was a lot of glitter.. © ItsProbablyMars / Reddit

"Pan-not quite-caked" © Anarchy-deem / Reddit

• When I was trying to make fudge brownies, I tried following a video tutorial of making it in a pan. I don't know what has gotten to me because I followed the pacing of the video and got flustered on my own instead of pausing it. I suddenly added brown sugar, forgetting to adjust the heat. I mixed it and noticed that it doesn't look like that on the video, so I added chocolate to somehow save it.
  The sugar formed, the chocolate didn't help, my fudge brownies turned into a lump of rock. My Dad noticed the sweet smell coming from our kitchen and asked what I'm cooking. I embarrassingly showed what I have done. He laughed so hard and told me, "I didn't know you can make rock!"
• Not the first one to do it and definitely won’t be the last, but straining 5 hours worth of stock straight down the sink wasn’t a high point at the time. Funny looking back, though.
  My MIL (who admittedly is not a cook) once tried to make a Gorgonzola sauce but (believing that any blue cheese is poisonous) just tried to melt an entire block of imitation cheddar. Served it up as well. I don’t like to critique anyone who’s gone out of their way to make me dinner, but that was a tough meal. © Feisty_Wolverine9474 / Reddit
• I went all out preparing meals for my in-laws' visit. My father-in-law and husband couldn’t stop raving about how delicious everything was, but my mother-in-law didn’t say a word. She just sat there, poking at her food with a weird expression.
  When we finished eating, my mother-in-law suddenly clutched her stomach and gasped. My husband jumped up, panicking. “Mom? Are you okay?” But she just groaned louder.
  We rushed her to the ER, worried sick. After hours of tests, the doctor came back and said, “Looks like a bad case of… gas.” My mother-in-law’s face turned beet red, while my father-in-law burst out laughing.

• I suggested helping my mother-in-law cook dinner. She clearly didn’t want me there and said, “Fine. But just chop these carrots and stay out of the way.” It was frustrating. She hovered over every pot like a guard dog, not letting me near the stove.
  When she left the kitchen, I saw my chance. I ran over to the soup pot and—don’t ask me why—added a spoonful of honey. I’d read somewhere it could balance out flavors, and I was desperate to leave some kind of mark.
  When we sat down for dinner, my husband took one spoonful of the soup and said, “Wow, Mom! This is amazing. Did you add something new?” My father-in-law nodded, “It’s sweeter than usual, but in a good way.” My mother-in-law looked like she’d swallowed a lemon. She gave me a side-eye but didn’t say a word.
• My first married TGiving... we had my in-laws over for dinner. I made turkey, mashed potatoes, etc. I don't remember now, but the "gravy" was probably just water thickened with cornstarch. It was a VERY pale off-white color.
  I didn't have any Kitchen Bouquet that my mom used all the time, but I did have food coloring. I knew from painting that red and green made brown, so I added red and green food coloring. Yes, we did have green gravy for TGiving that year. © JipceeLee / Reddit
• When we went to go visit my mother-in-law, she made this awesome chili. She gave me the recipe and I went to try it. Everything was fine, until I mixed up the chili and cayenne pepper...
  I tried everything to cool down this now 5 alarm chili, but nothing took. Me, my husband and my roommates all had one bowl just to say we didn't waste it before we threw the rest out. The fire...oh the fire... © AzraelArkana / Reddit
• Wondering why my Thanksgiving duck wasn't reaching food safe internal temp after the suggested baking time, and still not after double the time, almost triple, thinking maybe the oven wasn't working right-only then to realize actually somehow my thermometer got switched to read in Celsius and not Fahrenheit. The duck was rubbery and inedible. © theindiekitten / Reddit

• I don't actually cook that often, or that much of a variety of things. My wife does most of the cooking, but the few things I do make, she swears I'm a "master" at making. One of my specialties is my scratch made sausage gravy and biscuits.
  Got up one morning and made a fresh batch for the family to enjoy, but I grabbed the wrong canister from the pantry.... I thought I grabbed flour, but it was powdered sugar. I guess my coffee hadn't quite kicked in when I started the process.
  I thought something was amiss when the pan smelled sweet instead of savory. Upon tasting, I knew I've done goofed. We all had a laugh and went to Waffle House... © VulgarDesigns / Reddit
• I was making a court bouillon to poach some fish. My wife tried to "help" by straining the veggies and pouring the broth down the drain. © HalfaYooper / Reddit
• The cooking incident my family will not let me forget. I was given a family recipe for cheesy shrimp and rice casserole. But I ran out of time and thought, if I didn't shell the (headless) shrimp, how bad could it be?
  After unexpected crunching, exclamations of disgust, and a lot of derisive laughter, I found out. It tasted fine, but having to shell shrimp covered with rice and cheese was messy and tedious. And of course my kids told the entire extended family. © gwaydms / Reddit
• Making homemade Mac and cheese with my best friend. She was cooking the noodles, and I was cooking the sauce. The recipe called for a certain amount of teaspoons or tablespoons of flour.... well.... somehow, in someway, I read it as cups.
  So I put in I think at least 3 cups of flours in a sauce pan, and I was thinking, “This is so much, that’s not stirring right, this is going to be so much sauce” long story short, read recipes carefully. © Smoore01 / Reddit

These fails left people laughing and learning their lessons. Here are some hacks that can improve your cooking experience.