Early in my cooking days, I made rhubarb pie. I followed the recipe EXACTLY, and it told me to fill the lower crust with rhubarb, then to pour sugar over the rhubarb before covering with the lower crust. When the pie was served, we discovered a half-inch of solid sugar on the lower crust. Everyone joked that I had used sugar cubes. The rest of the pie tasted fine, though.
The first time I tried to make pesto I mixed up the terms head of garlic and cloves of garlic. The recipe called for 2 cloves so I put 2 whole heads of garlic in the food processor. I figured it looked like too much, but went for it anyways. The heart breaking thing is that it was the sauce on a pizza with artichoke hearts and sundried tomatoes so I didn't find out the error of my ways until the entire pizza was done. 2 lessons learned that day: 1) taste as you cook 2) a head and a clove of garlic are two very different things.
My boyfriend did this when he first started cooking. He was making an Indian dish and it called for 2 cloves of garlic. He thought a clove was a head of garlic, so he put in the whole head, thinking he didn't have enough garlic since he only had one "clove". It was extremely garlicky, but I did help him eat it. Thank God he only had one head of garlic! We still laugh about it almost three years later.
When vegetarian DBF lived in State 1, we often went to an Asian restaurant that served vegetarian gyoza (a sort of Japanese dumpling/potsticker), which is a rarity; they are normally only made with pork. We really loved these gyoza. When he moved to State 2, I decided to find a replicate and these gyoza for his birthday when I went to visit.
I went to the grocery store to get ingredients, one of which was garlic. The recipe called for four cloves of garlic in the gyoza themselves and two in the sauce. At the grocery store I was unhappy to find out how expensive these cloves of garlic were, but I bought them anyway, as it was a special treat for him. I started preparing the gyoza that night at around 10, after my family went to bed. I had never worked with fresh garlic before, so peeling each little segment of the cloves took a long time. I spent at least an hour getting the garlic peeled.
I went to visit and cooked up the gyoza for him. He mentioned that they smelled very strong... He was only able to eat two. I, too, was ignorant of "cloves" versus "bulbs." The dish had 10 to 15 times the amount of garlic the recipe required.
I have since made the recipe correctly, and we eat it to this day. :)
I'm really enjoying these stories. DD is 19 and still remembers her 4th birthday as the year I blew up her birthday cake. I lovingly baked, cooled, and decorated her cake and set it on the stovetop (still in the glass pan it was baked in). Later, I turned on one of the free burners to cook something. Except that I had accidentally turned on one of the burners under the glass cake pan. Heating unevenly, it exploded like a bomb, sending glass shards and cake bits everywhere.
Ah, yes. In my household, this was Taco Night. I had made a delicious apple crisp, taken it out of the oven, and put it on a burner to cool. A minute later, I turned on (what I thought was) another burner to cook up the taco filling. Minutes after that, BOOM! No more glass casserole dish. I picked a few large glass pieces out of the taco filling and salvaged two scoops of the apple crisp. In retrospect, we probably shouldn't have eaten any of it, but we live!
One Thanksgiving, my mother brought a pie with us to the house of the cousin hosting. When the pie was cut, we had to ask what kind it was. The inside was very dark brown, and an odd texture. Mom said it was apple pie, and she didn't know why it was so dark. It tasted somewhat like mincemeat, but not good. Eventually we found out that she didn't have enough flour to thicken the apples, so she used baking powder or soda instead...