Most of the time I'm alright with my cooking. Just don't eat the cherry torte. Or the ratatouille.

I once accidentally liquified a muffin. Yeah.

What.

That makes less than sense. How do you ''liquefy'' a '''MUFFIN'''!?

Same here. Put a mini-muffin in a microwave for a minute, and...muffin puddle.

Don't ask me how this was possible but this troper once filled the entire house with smoke while trying to make instant oatmeal. INSTANT OATMEAL!

When this troper was little, he and his sister would save the leftover melted icee we would share whenever we went to the movies. Afterwards, we would use the melted icee as a base for what we called "potions." We mixed in whatever we could find into it: ketchup, salt, baking soda, chocolate syrup, mustard, and anything else we could get our hands on. Then we both had to taste it... I'm pretty sure that both of us spat it out into the sink every single time, but we just kept on doing it...

This Troper can cook nowadays, but my friend and I used to make... really weird foods when we were little, and something similar to that was something we managed to concoct once. It had ketchup, pickle juice, soap... and then we tasted it. I did something similar with my current friends at a restaurant just for fun not too long ago- we mixed all the dressings at the salad bar, salt, pepper, garlic butter... it actually wasn't too terrible after we tasted it, too.

This troper took a lot of home economics, but when you combine a smidgen of culinary knowledge with a self-admitted absent-minded professor mentality, it can and did lead to disaster. I actually added a quarter cup of salt to bread dough instead of a quarter teaspoon once. Yuck!

This troper's father has some pretty infamous dishes to his name -- such as coffee cake containing actual ''coffee'' (both in ground and liquid form), charcoaled pancakes that looked exactly the same as the day they were first made when pulled out from behind the couch months later (it's a long story), and cinnamon-flavored chili con carne. (And not just in the "gentle dash of cinnamon" style. He put in cinnamon in ''place'' of chili, so it was really cinnamon con carne.) He's better now. Usually.

Hey, the label on the cinnamon shaker ''suggests'' putting it in chili con carne. I've done so myself, and it tasted...more like curry than chili, but not bad.

That kind of chili actually has a name, believe it or not -- "Cincinnati-style".

A relative of this troper makes apple and Mars Bar sandwiches.

Sounds delicious. Chocolate good. Caramel good. Apple ''good''.

Mostly to prove that the "laws" of physics get a little more bendy in the kitchen, this troper regularly consumed yogurt sandwiches in junior high school. The specific brand of yogurt was of a fairly thick consistency, and the wheat bread seemed to absorb a good deal of the loose moisture. This troper has absolutely no idea what was going through his head when he invented the things, other than possibly "There are no clean bowls, but I'm hankerin' for some yogurt. There's some bread..."

Someone else eats yoghurt sandwiches? Excellent! (Flavoured is especially good.) They laughed at me,oh yes,they laughed... then gagged. Fools.

Subverted: This troper's friends seem to think she's a terrible cook, either due to her lack of care for all things feminine, or due to the fear that she may have poisoned the food on purpose. Really, she's not...with desserts anyway.

On the other hand, while accidental, her mother once put turmeric instead of cinnamon on an apple crisp she was making. Luckily, she realized her mistake and managed to wash it off. It still managed to turn out pretty good.

Same troper's father once suggested her aunt was this as a joke when she served a punch with cream soda. They had only had the pink kind of cream soda, and so looked a little off. Said father commented "You know it's not a good sign when the host serves Pepto-Bismol before dinner."

This troper once tried to use a tortilla shell in place of a hot dog bun. Without changing any other components. It was ''awful'' and got thrown in the garbage half-eaten. (At least this troper was the only one who had to eat it.)

This troper wouldn't describe himself as Lethal, per se; it's just that other people don't seem to enjoy Scotch Bonnet peppers as much as he does.

Now that's MY kind of cooking! I tried habañero peppers in an omelet once before, and most of the time my chili has at ''least'' three kinds of peppers.

This troper once put too much salt on his curry. He tried to balance it out by adding cinnamon. didn't work. On the other hand, he used to be infamous for enjoying bananas with hot sauce.

Dessert Pickles. That is all.

This troper knows several people like this. My friend's father and brother have been known to make such monstrosities as fish-and-chocolate-chip waffles and jalapeno-fish-potato quesadillas. His uncle has also been known to eat pickles...dipped in pudding.

His mom has also told him about an incident where a Home Ec student used a full bulb of garlic rather than a clove. The room apparently took several days to air out.

This troper did that, too. I didn't know that a clove was what you called the little pieces inside the bulb. He was making pasta sauce and put the whole damn thing in. Apparently, garlic is an EXCELLENT preservative. Mold won't touch anything with that much garlic in it. Apparently, it's not fit for human consumption, either. It's still in the fridge for some reason, though.

This troper used to believe that being forced to eat your own cooking would make you a better cook. It doesn't. It does, however, lower your standards of food to a merely nutritional level i.e. "I'm pretty sure this won't kill me." and "If I can keep it down, it's food.". I restrict myself to following recipes or cooking stews, but I've slipped up even then - people still talk about the chick pea, mango chutney, banana and natural yoghurt combo I made that the book reassured me was "absolutely delicious". '''''Eeeent!''''' 'Course, preceding that was a sentence wondering why no-one else had come up with it before...

Found the note I'd made right after I 'cooked' that monstrosity:"Don't ever make this again. Tastes and looks like vomit.".

As words on the screen that doesn't sound so bad. Except maybe the chickpeas.

The worst thing about it was the sweetness/saltiness of the mango chutney. Combined with the brown rice I was eating it with,it was haaaarruuuckk... sorry 'bout that,I'll get a shovel.

This troper, while making pancakes, once caused the batter bowl to melt while the cakes failed to assume properly coherent molecular bonds. I blame quantum physics.

Real-life example: this troper's husband. Confirmed by his family and close friends, because he absolutely refuses to cook anything for me. I don't want him to, either, not after hearing about the biscuits that came out resembling hockey pucks.

This troper's cooking abilities seem to vary from producing pretty good, perfectly edible food and creating something charred and unrecognisable.

This troper doesn't tend to add extra or incorrect ingredients by mistake, thankfully, but tends to be very forgetful of what proper ingredients should be included, or which instructions go when. For instance, said troper once forgot to add noodles to a dinner. A pasta dinner. A ''pre-packaged'' pasta dinner, with the bag of noodles sitting mere centimetres away from the pot. Cooking is therefore an infrequent activity, at least for anything beyond "microwave for three minutes and serve."

This troper is less known for being lethal for the QUALITY of his food, but instead the cooking. Please keep in mind most of these stories are from his childhood, but they include: Placing a metal-rimmed plate in the microwave, a tupperware container on a stove top, forgetting to shut off the stove and filling the room with burning rice smell. Though he has one on his mother, who had a habit of placing eggs to boil, and wandering off to forget about it. Burnt eggs look STRANGE in that context.

This troper set the electric kettle on fire.

Strawberry chicken. A few ''minutes'' later, it came back to haunt me. Horribly.

This troper tried to invoke this trope by making a chicken sandwich with such bizarre condiments as spinach dip, hot sauce, and Heinz 57. It was... actually pretty nice, even though it's probably a heart attack on two slices of bread. I call it the Kamina, because it is made of win and gar.

This troper would like to introduce you to the Blowtorch sandwich: English mustard, piccalilli and salad cream/ketchup,with the other side sprinkled with malt vinegar. One bite will burn through the gummiest of blocked noses. A favourite of my childhood.

This troper cooked fish sticks once, or at least tried to. She messed them up, and she happened to cook them so badly even her dogs wouldn't eat them.

This troper's mother:

once served egg soup for ten meals in the space of a week.

thought bread topped with ketchup and Velveeta, then heated under the broiler, constituted "pizza".

regularly made potato salad with Kraft Thousand Island Dressing instead of mayonnaise. To this day I '''hate''' Thousand Island.

This troper has ruined cereal. Somehow, some way, ''cereal''.

You added the milk first too, huh?

It's not impossible; This Troper once tried to "drink" Cocoa Krispies out of a glass... I ended up drinking all the milk and having a soft, gooshy mass of cereal at the bottom. Yum.

This troper can make pizza pretty reliably. However, my last attempt at making cookies not only tasted like I imagine styrofoam does, but were a faint pink in the middle. None of the ingredients were red or pink. Then there was the time I screwed up instant pudding...

I once had instant pudding come out rather badly (it remained a beverage). I blame the use of soymilk instead of dairy milk for that one. Thought it would work, but it didn't. Live and learn (and the cat helped consume the mistake).

Subversion: When he was 6, this troper got it into his head that a cake would be delicious if it combined all his favourite foods - bizarrely, his mother endorsed this dangerous notion. This resulted in a normal chocolate cake... except it contained chicken and potatoes, amongst other things. He took it to school and fed it to his year one class... and it tasted good! Most likely mother convinced him to forego the extras, but she denies it.

Mustard + toast = disgusting.

This troper with bizarre eating habits found this out the hard way. Although, in my defence, mustard, toast, gravy and cranberry jelly seemed like a good idea at the time..

This troper does... wrong things. Like ketchup and toast. Or PB+J on garlic bread. Or a belief that butter and salt belong in black tea with the milk and sugar. Or tapioca pudding used as dip for corn chips. But those were ''okay''. This troper, however, doesn't want to '''talk''' about the time he tried to make fruit juice with a blender. It's not that I'm a bad cook- on the contrary, I do rather well, but I have occasional loose ideas about taste combinations.

the PBJ on garlic bread sounds like it might be good, I love garlic bread.

The butter+tea one might not be so bad either - some Tibetans put yak butter in their tea. The salt, however...

In junior high, this troper was friends with a girl who couldn't make Jell-O set. Eight years later she attended a wedding where this girl was a bridesmaid and had also made the cake. Naively, the troper thought her culinary skills must have improved to take on a project like that. They hadn't.

This Troper enjoys cooking and finds it fun...except she's no good at it. The only time I made something edible was my first try! Then everything went downhill. The most memorable screw-ups are as followed:

Adding a cup of every ingredient in brownie mix instead of teaspoons and tablespoons. Those turned out as rubber stuck to the pan. Also got burned, me not the brownies.

Scones that came out of the oven covered in mold, if that was really what that green stuff was.

Making a souffle that came out as charred coating at the bottom of the ramekin. Got burned that time too.

Accidentally letting the udon noodles boil for 12 hours.

Breaking our top-of-the-line Kitchenaid microwave while trying to heat up a soft pretzel.

Hell, she can't even leave the kitchen with a bowl of cereal with leaving behind a trail of Cheerios!

This troper would like to know how on earth someone can ''accidentally boil something for TWELVE HOURS''???

This troper comes from a long line of chefs and restaurateurs, and as such, she and most of her family members can cook quite well. Her ''sister'', however, is a notable exception. One of her most infamous stunts involves frozen pancakes; another time, she was warming oil in a pan. Said oil ''caught on fire'' because she had the stove up too high. Both times, she came close to setting the house ablaze, and she was officially banned from ever attempting to cook again after the last stunt.

This troper considers her spaghetti sauce to be the best ever. Others disagree. Apparently a whole chopped onion, three segments of garlic, a spoon of ginger and two teaspoons of pureed chilli per serve, plus a liberal dash of curry powder, with some tomato for colour and body is an acquired taste.

... THAT SOUNDS FUCKING DELICIOUS.

I SECOND THAT MOTION!

We have a motion and a second, all those in favor, DIG IN! Though I'd up the garlic to half a bulb...

This troper knows someone whose attempt to cook bacon ended up with repeated activations of the room's smoke detector, and a burning oil smell very like the one made by another friend's car.

This troper can cook competently, but also has an exotic taste for the bizarre, resulting in 'snacking' being done out of view of others. Note: When eating pickle stackers & whipped cream sandwiches, eat them quickly or the pickling juice will make the cream curdle.

Above troper's family members are all wonderful gourmet cooks, but all suffer from the problem of occasional absent-mindedness. Like not paying attention to the amount of brandy going onto the banana's foster. (The house was sold with the black spot still on the ceiling.) Or, accidentally vacuum-sealing a pot shut. Or getting a necktie stuck in a pasta press. Or, her own attempt to read the side of a cup the wrong way around and spilling the contents on her feet.

I recall a story about my teachers daughter who had apparently put something other than cooking oil on some chicken. I don't remember what it was, but whatever it was, the chicken was bubbling and apparently poisonous.

This troper's mother almost ''butchers'' desserts. For example, her pavalova is as hard as a rock and dryer than the Sahara desert and her flan looks like roadkill and tastes like dirt. On some occasion she's been known to almost ''murder'' other meals as well such as dinner. Also his father has been particularly bad at making meals- especially breakfast, the cereal looking like it's melting and tasting like sludge being on example.

This troper is fairly competent at cooking. Except for that one time he underestimated the amount of chili pepper to put in pasta sauce. And that time he left the butterscotch chips in the hot cupboard. And that time he mixed up Celsius and Fahrenheit when cooking a lasagna.

This troper's grandmother burnt nearly everything she baked or fried, including brownies. No, .

According to this troper's father, his grandmother (or my great-grandmother) was the worst chef ever. She could screw up heating a can of Spaghetti-Os. Apparently, most of the problem came from when she'd take expired things and say, "Oh, it's fresh! ^_^" But she's somewhat justified in the fact that she spent part of her adulthood in the Great Depression, where she had to be ''happy'' to find anything to eat, expired or not.

ThisTroper is more or less average in cooking itself. Her problem is that she's got a shitty attention span and sometimes ''forgets'' she's left something cooking and goes make other things. Some days ago, she was so absorbed in other stuff that she forgot about the meat in the pressure boiler...

This troper has managed to set ''instant ramen'' on fire. No, '''I MEAN IT.''' He also always enjoyed a soft drink his family all referred to as "suicide"; Coke plus Diet Coke plus Mello Yello plus Sprite plus Dr. Pepper, occasionally with a shot of carbonated fruit punch, all preferably from a soda fountain. Now this troper wants some. Remind him to make it the next time he goes to a fast-food joint.

Sheesh, and I thought my husband's Taco Bell drink mixture (Diet Coke, Baja Blast Mt. Dew, and Code Red Mt. Dew) was unusual! I'm also still puzzled by ''how'' you managed to set ''ramen'' on fire.

Actually, suicide is Copyright 2008 by New Jersey. 2 12 year old boys on a college campus decided that if sodas can sometimes mix well, anything can. Not only did we mix Coke, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, Red Mountain Dew, Water, Milk, Root Beer, Chocolate Milk, Lemonade, Tea, Coffee, and Fruit Punch. Not only did it look horrendous, but it formed a mousse like texture at the top, and may have created single-celled life. He vomited, but I paid him for betting him to do it.

I'm ''really'' not sure how I did it. I've never managed to do it again, either, but it still makes for a really interesting story to tell. And a good way to get out of cooking things!

I drink combinations like that all the time. It has a taste of coke.

Really? It always tasted more like one of the citrus sodas, to me.

This Troper's friend mixes every single soda available at the fountain in equal parts when we go to get a Polar Pop.

Iced tea and Sprite makes a pretty good combination. We call it an Aaron Pammer.

This troper is less of a lethal chef and more of an average one with huge fluctuations in quality. He's made well received oatmeal cookies, and most of what he cooks is edible, but he has been known to start fires in toaster ovens and burn even simple instant dishes.

When this troper was six, her and her brother made 'Eggs Ranchero' for Father's Day, but we had no salsa. Cue every pepper powder and hot sauce in the house going into two small eggs. The spice-eggs ratio was, I think, 8 to 1. My father dubbed them 'Poisoned Eggs' and we've made them with all the hot sauce we can find each year afterwards until my brother moved out and I started sleeping in until 2 in the afternoon. Just thinking about it is making my lips start to tingle, actually.

This troper has on occasion managed to burn rice, but once when she tried to make chili con carne, she managed to burn chili powder in a hot pan, then added onions. This pretty effectively cleared the kitchen of all occupants. People were coughing for a good 20 minutes.

This troper is usually a pretty good at cooking and baking, but he has a fondness for doing weird-esque things, and also sometimes experimenting. Outtakes include lasagna that looked like porridge, yet tasted and felt mostly normal, more lasagna which this time looked normal, but now essentially one third of it was porridge, minced meat that tasted quite a bit like fish, a cake-ish thing that... well... looked FAR from normal, and tasted pretty weird too, and tip of the iceberg, steak that was dubbed a biological weapon by everyone who tasted it. The last one I claim was due to sabotage.

This troper's ex-boyfriend, bless his heart, was a HORRIBLE cook. In the eight months that we dated, he has managed to break this troper's good spatula ''while making pancakes'', literally burned soup, and made rice with the consistency of sand the first time and mashed potatoes the second. He made spaghetti that was okay once, considering that it was just tomato paste and meat. It wasn't long before this troper realized why he was often content eating ramen...uncooked. (In case you're curious, this troper can throw down in the kitchen. He gets it from his mama).

This troper's father once managed to burn ''mashed potatoes''!

This troper had burned soup, water (That kettle's bottom was glowing red by the time this troper got to it.), and ruined cheese 'n chips and instant coffee before. In this troper's defense, the can that the coffee came from doesn't actually say how much is too much.

Subverted, this troper actually bakes things quite well. Strange.

Here's a subversion; this troper would be considered a good cook if she weren't so lazy and almost never does so. But played straight wherein she likes to 'experiment'. Apparently soy sauce ''doesn't'' improve the flavor of scrambled eggs; who knew?

I'm not sure why that wouldn't work (I would try it), but I'll take your word for it. Of course, this comes from someone who likes soy sauce and grated Parmesan on popcorn.

Wait, what? I love soy sauce and any form of eggs. Practically everyone I know does. Regional tastebud variations?

This troper's grandmother often remarked that eating burnt food would make your hair grow curly. Probably not coincidentally, she and all her children have curly hair. And an ex-gf, while the results of her cooking wasn't lethal, was dangerously accident prone in the kitchen. This troper had to disable the fire alarm anywhere she lived, but the food was excellent, provided no one had to evacuate during the process.

This troper was once at a camp where every group had to cook something. His group picked pan-fried chicken. Everything went well until the ''oil caught on fire'', whereupon somebody tried to cover the pan. After about half a minute, the flames were still licking around the edge of the lid, so another member of the group got impatient, dashed to the pan, and ''smacked the lid away''. The resulting column of fire was about double the height of the nearest (one-floor) building. And after that, the chicken was still raw on the inside! (We dubbed it Chicken A La Hiroshima.)

This Troper. Can and will burn everything. I've burnt a grilled cheese sandwich, I've burnt franks in blankets, and I tend to have to ask how to do simple things like put water up to boil.

Pretty much ''any'' depiction of a school cafeteria in Western media is going to feature the products of a LethalChef. In this editor's experience, TruthInTelevision.

And in this troper's, who at one point smashed a window pane with a BOILED POTATO!

WeirdAlYankovic did a song about this, aptly called "School Cafeteria". Sample of the lyrics: "Today in the school cafeteria / They introduced a brand new malt / It's called boysenberry dysentery / Please pass the salt"

Our chicken nuggets were always kind of bouncy. And you'd be lucky if the pizza even looked like pizza.

Subverted with this editor's schools. Of course, it helped that the place was so crammed with ProductPlacement that there was a guy in a Red Baron mascot outfit walking around it one day.

The food at my former elementary school once gave my friend ''food poisoning''. I could also kind of feel food poisoning.

This troper credits the horrible cafeteria food at his elementary school for his ability to eat ''and enjoy'' just about anything, up to and including peanut butter, ketchup and hotdog sandwiches. It did put him off peas and sauerkraut for years, until he found out that they actually are good when ''properly'' cooked.

This troper's elementary school once served a so-called "cherries jubilee" which looked delicious and tasted exactly like vomit. Also, the rice at the school was well known - not only was the ice-cream-scoop-shaped mass completely solid and able to be lifted and turned upside-down with a fork in one piece, but it was often tinted with a ''neon greenish hue'' this troper had never seen before or since.

This troper's Hall of Residence once served up a chilli. A couple of the students smelled it; one ate some. Then, to a man, the whole lot stood up and left the dining room in disgust. The Hall management offered a grovelling apology the next day.

ThisTroper's uni cafeteria is an odd variation. On one hand, they sell decent sandwiches and coffee and the French fries are quite edible. On the other, the mashed potatoes and the chicken dishes... eeeeewwww!

This Troper had the bad luck of going to a school where what the high school didn't eat that day went to the middle school the next. Thus, from fifth through eighth grade, we had soyburgers that you could stretch, load up with half-hard peas, and use as slingshots. And that was the ''best'' thing on the menu.

This Troper and all she knows generally refer to the dining hall food as 'Doof' because it is the opposite of food. We're only half kidding.

This Troper was nearly rushed to the hospital after discovering that the cafeteria soup station's "vegetarian corn chowder" contained ''shrimp,'' which she has a potentially lethal allergy to. The only person angrier than she was was the cafeteria's manager ... who shared the same allergy.

This troper has quite a few stock jokes he used to make about the food in his schools' cafeterias. The ones he can remember right now are:

Vegetables are supposed to be green, and meat should be brown. Not the other way around.

How they classify ingredients: If it might be edible, they call it meat. If it's probably inedible, they call it a vegetable.

The soup of the day: Cream of used gym socks. (This troper still has yet to figure out what that soup was supposed to be, but remembers that it was pale and smelled burnt.)

Everything has the same flavor: Burnt.

Also, on one occasion, this troper saw the cook taking out a tray of pizzas from the oven, ''with the plastic wrap still on''.

At this troper's university, the cafeteria is pretty much that. The rice is always extremely dry, the meat is either burnt or undercooked and is often extremely fatty, the vegetables taste strange, and there are urban legends of body parts having been found in the food.

This Troper has no idea how to cook beyond "the directions are on the side of the box", but still manages to not set everything on fire. Except that one time with the toaster. I wasn't even using it at the time, seriously! However, when he cooks rice and beans for himself, he likes to... experiment. Minced onions, salt and pepper, garlic, onions, more chili and curry powder than is safe for human consumption, and more onion? Not actually that bad. Of course, he likes onions. Other people might not share said love of onions. In fact, he himself is hesitant to cook for anyone else... because he's afraid he'll overdo the spices, and someone ELSE will suffer for it. It's probably a good thing he's a BigEater, so he'll always eat his own cooking.

This Troper likes to drink Deit Pepsi and Lemonade, If mixed properly, it actually tastes okay, but too much lemonade and EEW!!!

A former girlfriend of This Troper's cousin accused me of being this despite the fact that I can cook almost anything when given instructions whereas she ''ruined every pot in my aunt's house trying to boil water''.

My dad once mistook a box of unsweetened baking chocolate powder for instant hot chocolate mix. The end result tasted more like chalk water than anything else.

This troper thinks every good cook is entitled to at least one major failure in the kitchen.

Her mother's: something in a pot on the stove was burning so she dumped it in the sink. The burning stopped but the pot collapsed in on itself and had to be reheated before it regained its shape.

Her brother: mixed up Celsius and Farenheit temperatures when making bread. ''The Joy of Cooking'' said the water for the yeast should be a hundred degrees, and it was. The bread was the texture of a limp dishcloth.

Herself: you probably don't need a whole package of Thai curry paste when making enough curry for two people. In her own defense, she found it quite tasty. Her mother ate two bites, followed by half a container of yogurt, and complained that her mouth was still aflame.

This troper's friend/charity case (long story) sometimes forgets how to cook and ends up eating undercooked ramen while talking about how delicious it is, and once made himself extremely ill by eating sloppy joe filling that he apparently couldn't tell was several months expired (think about what months-old sloppy joes look, smell, and taste like). His father isn't any better, and made the whole family sick by undercooking the Thanksgiving turkey while trying to grill it on a barbeque grill.

I'm usually a pretty competent cook, but once found myself very nearly serving turkey sashimi at Thanksgiving (salvaged by slicing and microwaving). Come to find out if you're using an oven bag, you really shouldn't put the lid on the roasting pan, because the assembly doesn't heat anywhere near as quickly.

This troper was at a buffet restaurant with a bunch of friends, when one of us had the bright idea of mixing up all the sauces available (not just tomato and chilli, but soy, sambal (lots of peppers and prawn paste), hot sauce, and I think a little bit of garlic from somewhere). The resulting mess was used as a punishment for a subsequent 'guess the number' game.

This troper's father has yet to live down the time he put sugar into a pot of gravy he was cooking instead of salt.

While this troper's father is actually quite good (although his habit of preparing food he knows damn well his kids hate and then getting huffy when the compliments don't flow is a bit annoying), he will never live down the Napalm Curry incident. (Even though he insists the bottle was labelled "mild", it ended up ''infernal''. This troper is unapologetically hazy about that evening, but he seems to recall that an entire tray of ice cubes was used in the next half hour).

This troper is mostly lethal for forgetting about things on the stove, and is perfectly capable of putting something up to cook, and then going off to watch a movie for an hour and a half. Incidents include:

Boiling eggs for an hour and a half, then having to chisel them out of the pot, and try to get them off the ceiling. Twice.

Leaving a keilbasa in a covered pot of water, fortunately off the heat, to be found two days later. Mom screamed.

The infamous Corned Beef Incident, which will remain a {{Noodle Incident}} to you.

This Troper once made some homemade vanilla soft serve ice cream. Unfortunately, there was a hole in the inner container and concentrated brine ended up getting into the ice cream. The resulting ice cream looked disturbingly like spooge but didn't taste that bad, unfortunately eating too much of it causes nausea.

A friend made the same ice cream with too much vanilla extract. One bite caused vomiting.

I'm absent-minded and consider recipes more like guidelines. Add a fondness for experimentation, and you get curry brownies. They weren't all bad, really. At least I didn't think so.

This troper's brother is generally a really good cook,especially when it comes to desserts. However several years ago there was a incident where he and his friends created something called Haribo Pie. Basically boredom + pastry pie shell + a bag of Haribo Starburst (gummy sweets to those who don't know) + an oven = something which stuck to the inside of your mouth and burnt it if you ate it hot and set rock solid so that it was impossible to eat (or extract the spoon that was left in it) if you let it cool.

This troper once got "teaspoon" and "tablespoon" mixed up while adding salt to cookies. People threw up after eating them.

Raekuul's cookies make little girls cry.

Charcoal, anyone?

This troper's sister once shared a house with a woman who could literally burn water. Somehow. This housemate managed to burn hot dog buns while leaving the wieners half-frozen, and even cooked a TV dinner according to directions - and still managed to burn the chicken and leave the potatoes frozen. Fortunately, she was aware of her ineptitude and left the cooking to others.

One of this Troper's friends once made "chili" by combining pasta sauce, queso dip and seasoned ground beef. Just the scent of it was enough to send people running to the restroom.

This same friend also made a bacon cheeseburger pizza without first frying the bacon. Needless to say, it contained a truly hideous amount of grease and the bacon wasn't fully cooked by the time the pizza was ready.

Oh, and the same troper's brother is a lethal chef by way of some strange teaspoon/tablespoon dyslexia. I managed to stop him from adding three tablespoons of salt to a batch of cookies, but was not able to prevent him from ruining a coconut curry recipe with six tablespoons of ginger.

This troper blew up scones once. Also, one time when she was baking a chocolate cake it went green and bubbled over the top.

What.

While being a generally good cook, this troper has a love for experimenting. Sometimes, it leads to a great discovery (Dr. Pepper with fresh lemon juice is quite good), while sometimes it turns out terrible; like the time I tried to make an ice cream pie (To quote Jim: I'd rather not talk about it...)

Chocolate pudding with bits of bacon thrown in. It's delicious, but my god do you feel guilty eating it. It is the sweatpants of food, grossly socially inappropriate, but you like it.

In a nutritional science class (AKA over-glorified Home Ec) a girl made what I think were blondies. I took one, commented that it was okay, chewed for about five seconds, then ''screamed'' as the taste of salt suddenly exploded in my mouth. What do you know, no water in the room. God, the only thing worse than bad cooking is bad cooking ''in disguise''. Jesus, how the hell do you make delayed action bad taste?

I'm usually a fairly competent cook, but my take on buffalo chicken is so spicy, it made my younger sister's face come out in blotches. Now that's pretty damn near lethal.

This troper is reminded by the quote at the top of the page of a story her mother told her once... of the ''free-standing spiced apple cider'' that her friend once produced one winter many years ago.

This, perhaps?

Possible, but this troper ''did the same thing once''.

This Troper is actually a really good cook... Unless you want meatballs with your spaghetti and marinara. Which is exceptionally horrifying when you consider that I'm a third-generation ''Italian-American''.

This troper is one of the "results look terrible, but actually taste fine" variation, especially when it comes to baked goods.

This Troper is eating the burnt remains of an egg she "fried" after scraping it off the pan and putting salt and pepper on it to make the burnt bits taste better, while trying to remove the smell of burning from the kitchen.

This troper once made mint cakes (it was a recipe in a book on pies. Don't ask why it was in a pie book) where he confused the frying pan for the required pan. The inside of the cakes was burnt to an extreme extent, but were still edible (just: it was like eating burnt toast, only with some mixed peel). Since that day, I've stuck to making the only thing impossible for me muck up: pasta (although, having had a better introduction to the pans, I might try making those cakes again...).

Another two (this time, beverages) from the same troper: I once mixed a lot of fruit juices up with some milk. It was a few years ago (I think I was nine at the time), but I recall it being pretty good, although no one else in my family took me up on it (it looked like some form of purple sludge). I think they were relieved I didn't offer to give it to everyone over dinner. Finally, I have a habit of mixing a bit of every soft drink into a single glass while at a party. Since no one serves red bull or energy drinks at the parties I've been to, I've never made something I won't drink. Mind you, I have a strong stomach...

Oh, I also didn't mention that my dad was once a chef (a temporary one, I think) and can cook lots of things very well indeed (although we have learnt since my original post that I am fantastic with a BBQ. However, a tip for fellow tropers: if you cook meatballs on metal skewers, don't try to shift them with your bare hands unless you like the smell of burning flesh). My sister is also a fantastic cook (she is skilled with cakes, but is a bit out of practice, having not made one for about two-three years). My mother, on the other hand...well, lets just say that, when I was on work experience, there was a reason why I decided to cook my own breakfast when we ran out of cereal...

Now discovered that my mother is actually a reasonable cook (I was cooking noddles with mince: she not only told me (correctly, as it turned out, although it was still edible) that you needed more than just that to provide flavour, but actually helped me get the mince looking good). So everyone in my family can cook, just my mother prefers not to make meals from scratch, while everyone else generally makes things from scratch. Averted trope?

Averted by me, though my boyfriend claims that he can't cook and cites his inability to open those frozen pasta things[like Bertolli?] correctly[he told me he tried to rip open the bag xD and it exploded all over his kitchen] and the fact that he once made pizza for himself and burnt it to a crisp. He still ate it though. And he has a fondness for super spicy foods. I'll just let you take that to the logical conclusion.

This tropette happens to be a very good cook. Her sisters however...One has repeatedly microwaved things for the time recommended for the oven (Pizza rolls look like charcoal bricks after 15 minutes on high...) and managed to make chicken with blackening seasoning taste (and have the texture of) fish with cinnamon. The other just tends to forget things are on the stove...our house has many a pan with a black bottom to testify.

This troper's friend once said, after I served him a gooey, foot-high bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast, "If I'm ever on death row, I want you to cook my last meal." My cooking tastes fine, but will probably kill you.

This Troper's sister is a ''horrible'' cook. She can never get recipes to turn out right, and God help you if she decides to experiment with herbs!

While trying to make mini-pizzas, this troper discovered that he had no tomato sauce. He attempted to substitute this with ketchup. "They're both made from tomatoes!" ''Never again.''

My girlfriend once wanted to make pancakes from scratch and had me look up a recipe for her while she was staying two days at my house. She proceeded to ignore the sugar and use baking soda instead of baking powder without adding an acidic ingredient to make it work like baking powder. I didn't try any, but she didn't eat more than two bites before throwing them away. The next morning, we found that a raccoon had attacked our trash can. He ate everything....except the pancakes.

This troper and members of his family tend to have one thing each that just spells EPIC FAIL, oddly, all in the same way.

Me: I can't make any pie whatsoever. Any liquid in it evaporates, so I end up with the dryest pies ''ever''. I honestly don't know how it happens. I don't really want to try anything else after the exploding chicken. Which will forever be a NoodleIncident.

First Cousin: She can't make pudding. It evaporates, regardless of how its made. I actually watched her make instant pudding that didn't need to be cooked, and it evaporated and made a brown splotch on the ceiling.

Younger Brothers: They tried that mixing the drinks together thing, and ended up with something the consistency of marmalade. One of their friends tried it and said that it tasted of (best fit spelling) 'gwaurailbing'.

And no, I don't have any idea why liquid seems to want to escape from us at all costs.

This troper messed up microwaved dumplings.

A friend of This Troper's mum once came over to our house to cook steaks to lighten the cooking load. When we found out he was cooking the steaks rare, taking them off, leaving each steak for 10 minutes and putting them back on we asked him what the hell all the partially cooked steak was doing off the stove. His reply? "It's resting!"

I still remember the time my younger sister ruined a batch of Kraft Easy-Mac by ''forgetting to add the water before microwaving it'' (how she managed to do that, I'll never know). The noodles were completely '''black''' when they came out, and the kitchen absolutely ''reeked''. My sister's own literal NoodleIncident.

And for my part, while I'm pretty good with most things, I ''still'' can't cook custard without burning it. Not that we eat a lot of custard, anyway...

When making a recent batch of apple muffins, this troper had a case of this trope in neglecting to add the brown sugar the recipe called for. A regular batch of ten to twelve would be inhaled in a few short hours. In about the same amout of time the bleugh-batch was down only three, two of which were only half eaten.

I am really bad at cooking-tried to make fried eggs (they burnt to a black crisp that I had to scrape from the pan), bacon (set on fire), chicken (burnt and set fire alarm off). My friend is trying to teach me to cook, which could be a very impossible task.

Surprisingly, this happens to this troper when he microwaves pizza (Usually it's just the smell). He also disgusted some people with his garlic-salt, cinnamon, rosemary, and cake sprinkle pizza.

Once, back when I was about seven, I decided I was going to cook something for myself instead of bothering my parents (who were both busy in the backyard). So I microwaved a pizza. For the amount of time the back said it needed to cook... in the oven. Needless to say, I ended up with a charred disc, a ruined plate, ''tons'' of smoke (with the smoke detectors going off) and parents who were glad I hadn't hurt myself, but still would've preferred I'd just ''asked'' them for lunch.

My younger sister also had her lethal moments, probably because {{Pride}} and contrariness meant she kept rejecting every attempt our folks made to teach her. The highlight came shortly before she headed off to college -- as in literally ''days'' before she was going to move into her first dorm. While trying to boil water, she accidentally switched on the wrong burner, which she'd put some dirty saucepans on (instead of putting them in the sink). While Mom was able to quickly put out the resulting grease fire, my sister had already panicked and called the fire department. (On the plus side, they ''did'' bring in a huge fan to help get all the smoke out of the kitchen... though sis managed to dig herself deeper by drooling over the hot firemen.) To top it all off, when she mentioned the fire to her friends, one of them asked "What were you trying to do, boil water?" -- and she admitted that was exactly right. Apparently, they still haven't let her forget that, even though she's gotten better since then.

This troper is divorced, but back during his married days he had a sister-in-law who was this trope personified. She tried to cook instant pudding (with predictable results), destroyed his microwave making a frozen pizza, and damn near burned the house down when she left the oven on overnight---thankfully with nothing flammable in it.

A few egg stories. First, this troper's sister has gotten into the habit of making scrambled eggs really whenever she's hungry. EVERY time, she somehow manages to get them to stick to a non-stick pan, to the point that when I wash the pan, I need to use a spatula to scrape the pan clean. This troper's response about the 5th time this happened? "DAAAAD! [Troper's sister]'s cooking broke physics!" He'd respond "[Troper]! You know better than to say that! The pan's covered in Teflon! She broke CHEMISTRY."

Not the troper above, but if she hasn't fixed that habit yet, tell her to heat the pan before starting.

When this (same) troper was a kid, he tried to cook an egg in the microwave. By this I mean I pulled an egg out of the carton, and put the thing straight in the microwave. His parents had to buy a new microwave.

This troper is a DELIBERATE lethal chef, after thanksgiving, he didn't feel like having turkey for another few weeks,so he shoved all the turkey in a bag, plus a few firecrackers. the kitchen had turkey everywhere in it for about a year.

My mother has served up broccoli covered in (accidentally) boiled slugs and caterpillars at least twice. Cue Squick. And hatred of broccoli forever.

I once went to a restaurant where all the food looked like it had been scooped out of a toilet. I honestly couldn't tell what some of the dishes were. We ended up chucking all of it into the big bowl of soup we'd been given and dared one guy at our table to drink it (he didn't - if he had, he'd probably have died).

I managed to light French toast on fire once. Don't ask me ''how'', because the stove wasn't up too high and I was watching it the whole time, but somehow there were flames. A lot of flames. I'm a terrible cook at the best of times--my husband actually won't let me cook anymore, because I've given us food poisoning three times--but incendiary French toast was a new high even for me. (I lit a pizza on fire once, too, but that was just because I put it in the oven and then forgot about it because the timer didn't ding.)

This troper's girlfriend, bless her heart. She could burn cold cereal. We once had to evacuate our apartment (which was currently housing seven or eight people) because she tried to make macaroni and cheese. The kind from a BOX. She has also killed four toasters since we met and once set a large pot of chili on fire. Don't ask how. She got it cooking, walked away, and when she came back you could roast marshmallows on it.

When this tropette was four, she wanted grilled cheese. Sequentially, bread, butter, cheese, butter, bread. Okay, she had a cheese sandwich. Then, of course, came cooking it. Naturally, put it in the toaster! Thank God her parents asked her what she was making before she could ruin the toaster.

Recently, I managed to make sludge in a coffeepot. SLUDGE in a COFFEEPOT.

After learning how to make a basic white sauce, this troper attempted to make alfredo sauce completely from scratch. While there weren't any spectacular fireworks to speak of, it had the consistency of thin syrup and I had added too much flour to the roux. Pretty much the only thing I'm good at making from scratch is grilled cheese sandwiches, and one of my favorite snacks is potato chips and ketchup.

This Troper once went to a restaurant that served soup. Said soup tasted like charcoal.

This troper once made cookies in food tech. She forgot to add the sugar, and then burnt them. After that incident, it was for the best that she dropped that class.

This troper baught a frozen pizza from the store and put it into the oven to heat it up. Unfortunately, I never heard the timer on the oven go off and after a few minutes, I forgot about it. I think it was about... three or so hours when I remembered it?

This troper is generally the Less-Than-Lethal variety, creating dishes that look like abstract art but taste exactly like what they're supposed to be. However, I've also had my fair share of frozen pizza mishaps--most notably when I forgot to separate the pizza from the cardboard that was inside the wrapping. (Although, on the subject of abstract art, any attempts at ''actual'' art will turn out ''exactly'' like putting a LethalChef in a kitchen.)

This troper somehow burned her FOOT, while making INSTANT. FREAKIN'. RAMEN. And the noodles STILL came out bland. And this happened about after she burned TEA.

This troper's finest moments in the kitchen include:

Turning frozen Chinese-style rice into charcoal ''in the microwave'' (and stinking the kitchen out).

Having a boiled egg explode in the saucepan. Not just crack. Explode. As in, pieces of eggshell flying across the kitchen.

Having a grilled cheese sandwich explode in the sandwich toaster. My sister said the toaster looked like something out of a horror movie afterwards.

Setting a bread basket on fire.

Cooking pasta that ended up part burned, part sludgy, part practically uncooked (that's what happens when you overcook pasta without using enough water).

Making omelettes into scrambled eggs on a regular basis. (Troper's sister: "It looks like a map of Middle Earth! You can see where the Orcs have attacked!")

Having a pork chop melt. Yes, melt. All the fat turned into sludge and stuck to the pan.

Finding out I'd run out of sugar while making a cake, and using honey instead. Needless to say it didn't exactly work.

This troper once used a line in a fanfic that was partially based on an actual occurrence: peanut butter sandwiches that were somehow both soggy... and stiff and rigid. Served with burnt corn that was already cold.

This troper has a friend whose sister read about someone putting red pepper flakes on vanilla yogurt, so she tried it... and liked it. The rest of the family felt sick.

A few of the posts on this site could arguably count... note the chai soup, for example. Or the mint syrup/yogurt/juice combo. Ew.

My friend once told me that she managed to make a cup of tea go green. Just a regular cup of tea. Subverted when I found out she was lying and just said that she couldn't make it because she didn't want to make the dozens of cups of tea our weekly games club goes through.

This troper's sister once managed to burn ramen noodles in the microwave. How did she manage this blunder? She forgot to add water. However, she has since improved and can now make rice on the stove without burning anything or setting it on fire. And she remembers the water.

This troper and her best friends just tried to make some microwaved chocolate cinammon cupcakes (since I don't own a freaking oven...) and managed to produce a batch of literal charcoal. And the smell... This troper's grandma will never live it down. The other batches somehow became ''volcano'' chocolate cupcakes. At least they tasted pretty good. The other times this troper tried to cook, however..

Burnt omelets for dinner

Soggy French toast

This tropette can't cook to save her life. I put stuff in the microwave and it explodes. I'm also somehow capable of burning Chef Boyardee spagehetti w/meatballs. I don't even try to make cereal, it might actually just burst into flames.

A subversion: not too long ago, this troper's mother decided to make a cup of coffee. And when she poured the coffee into the cup...THE CUP EXPLODED, hurling little pieces of glass right across the room. I am NOT making this up.

My mom once accidentally put in too much spicy green curry sauce on some shrimp. I ended up eating food that was TOUCHING the shrimp, and then running around and frantically looking for water.

{{StrykerX}} Once managed to break a whisk and a measuring cup. I WAS MAKING CORNBREAD!!!