Product giveaway #1

Okay lovely ladies/gents......
today we will have a little giveaway so that you can cook up a storm in your scrapping world....lets have a mixed pack of bling and ink shall we?? Now just tell us a little "cooking" story to kick the show off!!!
My worst disaster? I used to cook for a cafe and they particualy loved my sponges....well I moved home and the oven where I moved was faulty...one minute it burned everything and the next it didn't cook at all not a good thing.... well after 10 cakes (none of which worked) I rang the owners in tears explained the situation and next day a new stove was not only delivered but installed...WHY so fast???? Turns out they visited the cafe a few times a week and what do you suppose they bought to go with coffee?????

Mmmmm Kathie.

Well the first thing that comes to mine os the Chocolate, carrot and pineapple cake i tried to make.
My gff and I used to quite often have big baking days. We'd meet at one of our houses and cook up a storm. Then share it between us. Was a great way to stock the freezer with lunchbox stuff for the kids.
Well this one time I thought I'd make this new recipe. I'd made a carrot and pineapple cake before but thought that this recipe with cocoa in it would be a good way to get the kids to eat it.
Cooked away all day then we sat down for arvo tea and a taste of what we had cooked.
Well the cake tasted aweful! Turned out I was so busy chatting and dealing with the kids that I had forgotten to add the SUGAR!
Still haven't tried the recipe again and that was over 10 years ago!

hmmm..... im pretty sure that nearly everything i cook is a disaster.... danny prefers to cook

hmmm cooking story.... My biggest disaster was inviting some friends over for a roast, and burning everything LOL Wasn't funny at the time, and they declined all invitations after that - mustn't have been very good - another new house story that was!!!

But most of my cooking has been trying to work around allergies. When Wil was first diagnosed he was pretty much living on rice - rice cakes with rice syrup with rice milk on the side - it's actually quite good!!! Aleksandir's 5th birthday party was interesting to plan - we had all the food restrictions, but Aleks wanted to invite all his friends.. So here I was planning a party menu around no eggs, dairy, nuts, chicken, banana, berries, sesame, oh and I know there are others we had to avoid... Anyways we pulled it off!! the cake looked dreadful - it was a swimming pool one and with none of the above ingredients it was very crumbly, so once the jelly was added it kept trying to fall apart ROFL But ultimately we had 20 kids (he invited the WHOLE kindy class!!! But we'd booked out the local community centre) happy, fed and tired when their parents came top pick them up I think if you can do a party menu around multiple allergies you're doing pretty good thank goodness he can now have cooked egg - hence yummier cakes that hold together LOL

I invited some friends over for dinner one night and decided to make a soup to have before the main course (very fancy you know...) so I scoured through my collection of (unused) recipe books and though hmmm, Mushroom Soup sounds nice... so I went to shops bought the ingredients and set about making the soup.

Mind you I'd never actually tasted Mushroom Soup before so had no idea if it was looking or smelling okay... I was just impressed with how clever I was being... So clever in fact that I forgot to TASTE the soup before serving it to my guests... It didn't look too flash (kind of like watery mud as I ladelled it into their bowls but I just figured that must've been how it was meant to look...

Everyone was very polite and only raised their eyebrows a little bit as they surveyed what I'd set before them... so everyone picked up their spoons and started to eat... and that's when I finally got to TASTE the hideous broth I'd spent hours creating... YUUUUKKKKK!!! I was soooooo embarrassed and quickly cleared the bowls away... apologising profusely and trying hard not to burst into tears... I then decied to switch off the oven (too afraid that the roast I was cooking might taste worse than the soup) and told everyone that there'd been a change in plans - we were going to the new little cafe up the road...

Over a decade on and whenever I suggest we get together for dinner someone quickly jumps in the name of a restaurant they've been dying to visit...

It was pretty disgusting soup though, so I shouldn't blame them...

LOL Linda, you would have wanted the earth to open up and swallow you!!! BTW, how did the roast end up?

Pretty ferral by the time I remembered I'd left it in the oven (switched off) three days later.

I ended up throwing out the whole baking dish and emtying a can of Glen20 through the kitchen to get rid of the stench. (you couldn't actually smell it 'til I open up the oven door)...

I was such a ditz back then...

ewwww LOL nah not a ditz, everyone I'm sure has forgotten something in the oven Guilty here!!!! Although I confess my fridge has had science experiments like that come the time I work out it's time to clean it out hahaha

Oh dear Linda. I did that with a pasta bake once. forgot I had popped half of it back in the oven to save some room when cleaning up( small kitchen). Opened the oven yeah about a week later and all these little flies flew out and oh the stentch!

it can be so revolting...
i once left a pot of chicken and sweet corn soup (with the lid on) sitting on the stove (switched off) for over a week...
dh opened it (thinking it was something to scoff down) and instantly started gagging and dry-reaching...
(YEP! another piece of cookware in the bin!!!)...

But I have good dh cooking catastrophe to share...
dh likes to have cold boiled eggs with his salad when we have a BBQ so he popped some eggs into a saucepan of water and left them to boil... only problem, he forgot to come back to switch them off...

I was upstairs in my office with clients when I thought I smelt smoke, they agreed and we headed downstairs to see where it was coming from...

I raced into the kitchen to find smoke billowing from the burned dry pot and the eggs so hot they were actually sparking!!! The quick thinking male client opened the backdoor, grabbed the pot and threw it out onto the grass.

I tell ya... it took dh a while to live that one down!!!
But you know what he said at the time... "I put the bloody things on, YOU should have checked on them!". (Well I would have if you'd told me you actually put them on...) MEN!!!

Linda - I did something similar with one of those heat pads you click the metal tab and it heats and you need to boil them to make them re-set... well hmm they kinda melt if you let the pot boil dry - and fluff up and SMELL!!!

Lol Linda, yes we shoulod know everything!

Oh dear Treena, ours got a leek, not happy!

ewww would be messy Becci, Love them when they work... Hmm I wonder where ours have been packed!! I've not seen them since moving!!! We got a HUGE bundle of them from Agfest a few years ago....

We just have the one, got it at the Caravan show. It leaked all over Brian and the bed when he had a sore back. Made the sheets nice and crusty lol. Luckily it washed out

hahahaha got a good one... when i was pregnat with the twins i had a HUGE cooking spree i emptied all the cupboards adding everthing to anything because it sounded good in my head i even added cornflakes to a cake i made becuase for some reason i thought it would taste like honey joys hahahahaha.... and NO it doesnt!!

LMAO Nikki!

The only thing I can think of is a few years ago I found some meat in the freezer that wasn't labelled so thinking it was a roast, I put it in the oven. Only to find out is was actually corned beef. It was still edible though

some of these stories are classics

hiya well i use to do home economics at school.

i baked a cake and thought i put sugar in it.
i had put salt.

i gave some to dad to eat first, he took a bite and said to be what are you trying to do kill/poison me lol

i didnt mean to.

too funny!!!

I've just remembered something my sister and I did when we were little...

It was a cold wintery day and we thought it would be a good idea to give our dog (Gonzo - the border collie) a nice warm lunch...

So... we took out a lovely big can of Pal, emptied it into a saucepan and proceeded to heat it up on the stove...
The smell was absolutely disgusting and had us both to the point of dry-reaching...
We had to throw the saucepan in the bin because we couldn't get the stench out, it seemed to have soaked into the metal (yep, another pot in the bin!!!)
And what was worse was that the blinking dog turned his nose up at our attempt at fine doggy cuisine and opted to go and sit out in the rain to get away from the stink!
We never did 'fess up to where the pot had gone...

oh Linda, I'm just wondering what is higher, your scrapping budget or your kitchenware budget

Hmmmm... well given the fact that it's been quite a few years I've bought any new cookware... I'd have to say... SCRAPPING!!! (yaaay!!!)

This is a copy of my blog post with my worst cooking moment!

" am amazing woman.... I can give birth to 2 beautiful children...... I can give birth to an 8lb 11oz breech baby naturally..... I can drive a manual car..... I can put up a tent...... I can cover 30 odd school books in contact without getting bubbles.... I can listen to a reader, iron shirts and cook tea all at the same time..... I can understand most aviation industry acronyms.... I can score U12s cricket......I can kill a spider if I have to.....I can organise a Horse Riding Camp for 40 Guides.....I can cross stitch......I can do handstands and cartwheels..... I can take pretty cool photos...... I can abseil...... I can waterski (sort of!)..... I know my phonetic alphabet....


But there is one thing I can not do.... one simple task that has rendered me a FAILURE as a mother, one simple need of a child that I can not meet.....

I can not cook Cocktail Franks with out them splitting!










And we're not talking one or 2 "Little Boys" that have lost their foreskin... we're talking a whole pot- more than a kilo of franks... all split and turned in on themselves. Meg's request for tea was Mac Cheese and Little hot dogs.... this is what I dished up! I am officially a failure as a mother. Imagine the horror and severe emotional scars my kids would have been left with had this been a party food I had served up in front of all their friends!!
Tom obviously realised my utter humiliation at my inability to reheat a simple processed meat (do they actually count as meat?) dish and was empathetic and kind hearted enough to suggest that "Maybe next time Mummy we should get the skin-free hot dogs".

Hahaha- everyones stories are classics. I have a few but one of my favs to tell is the time that Ray and I cooked our first turkey. It was Thanksgiving in Canada and all of Rays family and my family over there were coming for lunch. Rays parents were meant to be there to help with the cooking of the turkey (because niether of us had EVER done it before) but due to some issues couldn't come the night before as planned. Now anyone who has ever cooked a 20lb turkey from scratch knows that if you are going to eat it for lunch, the turkey NEEDS to be in the oven VERY early in the morning...like (6 or 7) so we had no choice but to do it on our own.

We did good...we washed it, got the stuffing ready, got the pan ready, the oven on and then proceeded to stuff it.....this was where the problem came in - no amount of stuffing or shoving from either of us was going to get that stuffing in. It took at least 10 minutes of trying to figure out that we were actually stuffing from the WRONG end!!!!! It might not sound funny now - but it was hillarious at the time.

In saying this: once we figured out what we were doing wrong and we stuffed the turkey and cooked it....the turkey turned out just beautifully - infact it was sad to have to carve it....it looked THAT good!

All your stories are hilarious. My cooking story is from when i was a child and mum had bought a new convection microwave. I had been left home alone and being hungry decided i would cook a pie. I popped it in the microwave for 20 minutes on a glass plate (first mistake) thinking i had put it on convection (for those who dont know thats cooking like a real oven but in your microwave). Problem was that I had actually put it on high so nearly 20 mins later I checked it to find the pie had caught fire and the plate was glowing RED hot. I grabbed some tongs and put it in the sink and turned the tap on. Second HUGE mistake as of course the plate exploded and the house strated filling with smoke. I took it outside but then panicked thinking the neighbours would see the billowing smoke and call the fire brigade so i took it back inside. Needless to say when my family came home to a smoke filled stinky house I was in a whole world of trouble. To this day if they hear I am cooking a pie they cant help but tease me. Funnily enough I am actually a good cook.