"Culinary Disasters:" Funny Food Flops, Fumes, and Fires

"Culinary Disasters" is a feature on Something Awful (The Internet Makes You Stupid), which is

1. Funny
2. Educational

Terrible Things From the Kitchen

"Culinary Disasters" is a collection of accounts from different people, of, well, culinary disasters. Tales of what can happen to innocent, wholesome food, when corrupted by some overly-optimistic and/or ignorant wannabe cook.

They're funny, and provide information that may save some grocery bag from becoming the stew that nobody can forget. No matter how hard they try.

For example, in the first few pages I learned that:

• Parmesan cheese and tortilla chips don't make good nachos: no matter how often, or how long, you microwave it.
• Pumpkin pies require sugar.
• In a recipe for cookies, 1/4 teaspoon is not the equivalent of 1/4 cup: particularly when the ingredient is baking soda.

The Stew: A Murky Tale

This is, to date, my favorite. You'll have to go a few pages in to find the account, posted by Draceran.

The writer's father left for a vacation around Christmas, entrusting the house to his offspring: What could possibly go wrong?

Although potatoes, carrots, beef, onions, beer, Worcestershire Sauce, and French Onion Soup mix can be combined to form a good stew, the writer discovered that there's more to fixing food than just collecting the ingredients.

Not falling asleep helps.

A short excerpt:

"...cook goes to sleep for the non-interactive bits. No problem, right? Wrong. 0330 - A sudden pungent smell of smoke followed by a phone call. Apparently my stew is no longer food, but rather some kind of smoking bog like substance typically found in a cheap fantasy movie. Bubbles were rising slowly, plopping through the glop as a pocket of swamp gas through a mat of duckweed, each one giving a birth cry akin to an oatmeal jacuzzi...."

Eventually, an alarm company and the local fire department get involved.

I'll leave it to you to learn exactly why the father, on returning, asked: "What in God's name did you do to my house?!"