It’s the most wonderful day of the year… if you want to see everything I completely messed up in 2016!
This is one of my favorite posts to write every year — I went back month by month and dug up things I’d completely forgotten. This year was rough. Maybe not as catastrophic as some years, but definitely full of memorable kitchen mishaps. I might even dedicate a post to cookbook recipe fails one day.
This is the seventh year I’m sharing my disasters, and oooooh, there have been some great ones. Here are the previous years I’ve documented:
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
Now, let’s look at the worst of the worst that came out of my kitchen this year.
Way too much going on here: chorizo, queso, whole wheat orzo. I wanted to love this, but it was a chaotic mess with far too many competing components.
I like the recipe itself (I even referenced it in a video recently), but the photos turned out terribly. Sliced sausage or kielbasa is not flattering — it always looks kind of gross in photos.
First, why did I try to use that bowl as an actual serving bowl?
Second, this pasta was painfully bland.
Third, my fork looks awkward. And is that goat cheese or feta? I couldn’t even tell.
These cookie bars had promise, but they came out bone-dry. Total fail.
My cheesy garlic pull-apart bread literally crumbled down the center. I apparently didn’t follow a recipe — because I totally know what I’m doing. Clearly not.
This was horrific. The photo and the recipe for frittata muffins screamed 2009. The egg muffins were unappetizing and not even good, hence the desperate addition of sriracha.
These were supposed to be chewy, hold-together granola bars… but they were an insane, crumbly mess.
My lemon meringue pie was so liquidy it couldn’t be sliced. Why. Just why.
No idea what happened with this sorbet attempt. I think I was aiming for blackberry or strawberry sorbet, but it turned into watered-down ice cream instead.
Placing ice cream scoops on the counter in an “artsy” arrangement did not pay off. They looked terrible.
This salad was ambitious: kale, fingerling potatoes, soft-boiled eggs, bacon, blue cheese. In testing it became too many things at once — a confusing mash-up of three recipes trying to be one.
Remember the olive oil banana muffins I shared earlier in the year? The first few trials were disasters, and I still don’t know exactly what I did wrong.
Doesn’t this look delicious? Creamy Dijon chicken was a flop — burnt chicken, heavy, clumpy sauce. Tossing it over pasta made it worse.
I was so excited for a holiday pear pie with a snowflake-crust design. It came out with burned edges and undercooked sections, proving yet again that pie crust and I don’t always get along.
Two weeks before Christmas I attempted gingerbread crepes. I made up the recipe on the fly and ended up with something inedible.
And just last week, my go-to gingersnap recipe produced terrible cookies. It took three more failed batches to realize I’d doubled the butter but not the rest of the ingredients. Brilliant.
There were plenty more fails this year, including some from everyday dinner and lunch recipes. These are the highlights — plus the time I dropped seven gallons of turkey brine on the kitchen floor on Thanksgiving morning. That was memorable.
So tell me: what was your biggest kitchen disaster of 2016?