Okay, people, it’s FRIDAY!!! Yay!!! Although I don’t know why I’m excited because it means my husband will go to work and leave me alone with the child all day and all night. So yeah, yay Friday. :P

Anyway, yay Flashback Friday at least! It’s your turn. ‘Fess up. Tell us about when you burned the roast beef when your future in-laws came over or how you forgot to put the yeast in the bread and it never rose or how you mistook the salt for the sugar or vice versa and had a very interestingly flavored dish. Not that I did any of those things. I didn’t! Really! But maybe YOU did or worse or funnier or better! So, write your post and then come back here and leave a comment or send a trackback and we’ll all come over to your blog and laugh at you commiserate with you over the great meal that wasn’t or at least almost wasn’t. Okay, get out of here and blog people! BLOG!!! Wait! Read my post first and then blog! Thank you! :D

Okay, I wracked my brain and I really couldn’t think of a time when I actually ruined a dish or a meal. Well, I couldn’t! Sheesh! I’ve come close, and I’ve had some other catastrophes, but not actually ruined anything, so I thought I would share three little short anecdotes with you that include kitchen disasters or near kitchen disasters. Here we go!

When we were first married, I decided to be the dutiful little wife to the Italian dude and make lasagna from scratch, so I found this recipe to try and off I went. I was doing great until I got to the part where it said 2 cloves of garlic. I looked at the garlic bulb and I looked at the recipe and I did what any reasonable person would do: I asked my husband. But, unfortunately, at that time in his life, a cook he was not. So, he did what any normal red-blooded male would do. He made an “educated” guess and guessed that a clove was the whole thing. Yeah, he thought (and I followed his lead) that a clove was actually what we now know to be a bulb. So, we started adding garlic and adding garlic and adding garlic until we had added probably half of the first bulb. At that point, we looked at each other and said this can’t be right, so we did what any intelligent newlyweds would do. We called his mother. Who, after she stopped laughing at us, explained the difference between a clove and a bulb. Well, at that point, we weren’t going to start over so we decided we would just have a lot of garlic in the lasagna. Then our friend, who was staying with us at the time, came home from work, (she’s Italian too) took one whiff of the heavily garlicked lasagna cooking in the oven and pronounced the smell “heavenly”. And the taste? Well, I have to be honest and say it tasted absolutely unbelievably terrific. If you like a lot of garlic. If you don’t, you’d probably not be too pleased. But, nonetheless, after that, I crossed out the two cloves of garlic on the recipe card and changed it to four. And sometimes, if we’re in the right mood, we even put more in. In our house, the rule is you can never ever have too much garlic.

When I was a kid, my father was a firefighter. He was also somewhat of a chauvinist and expected my mom to do pretty much all the work in the house. Which irritated me to no end. He did cook once in awhile, because as you know, firefighters are usually pretty good cooks. However, on this day, he was not cooking. He was sitting on his butt in his recliner just like every day, reading his newspaper. (And my husband wonders why it drives me crazy when he sits on his butt and reads the newspaper, but I digress.) My mom was in the kitchen cooking who knows what. At the time we had one of those ovens that was above the stovetop. And whatever she was cooking in the oven caught fire. My mom had the door open. I went shrieking at the top of my lungs into the living room to get my father (which was pretty ridiculous because kitchen and living room were not that far apart, but he WAS. NOT. PAYING. ATTENTION. (as usual). Anyway, finally, (after I resorted to calling him by his full given name) he got up off his lazy ass and went into the kitchen to deal with the problem. Without saying a word, he went to the oven, closed the door, turned around and walked back out again. Damn him. Of course, the fire went out because he took away its air. Could he not have just told us that instead of being so smug? Uh no. And if you’d ever met my father, you’d know that.

And finally, just a few short months ago, there was the cookie sheet incident. Did you know that if you are trying to boil water to make something and you accidentally turn on the burner underneath the cookie sheet that is sitting on the stovetop instead of underneath the pan of water that if you pick up the cookie sheet with your bare hand because you smell it burning and finally realize what you have done that you will burn your hand rather nastily? Well, if you didn’t, now you do. And my advice? Don’t pick up the cookie sheet with your bare hand okay? Especially if you need said hand to tote around an infant. Not good. Not good.