Cooking a really great meal doesn't have to be complicated. Sure, binge-watching Chopped has us all convinced we need vaccuum sealers, ice cream machines and an anti-griddle, but some of the best recipes in the world are actually just a few really good ingredients put together simply. Like guacamole! Yeah, you can get fancy on it but a classic recipe really only calls for avocado, tomato, onion, salt and lime juice. It's so simple that it's almost impossible to screw it up.
Almost.
One of the biggest downfalls of simple foods is how easy it can be to screw it up. Imagine picking up sugar instead of salt for that guac recipe. Now you've got an onion and avocado dessert paste that nobody wants. My mom has salted her coffee and sugared her eggs more times than I can count. And as a Puerto Rican, I can assure you messing up the rice might as well be the end of any meal. It won't matter how good anything else is.
One reddit user asked:
What is an easy way to f*ck up a simple meal?
Screwing up the rice was one of the first answers - so I feel pretty culinarily vindicated right now. Here's that answer, along with quite a few other kitchen horror stories. Long story short: check your labels, check your heat, read the directions and try to stay at least KIND OF sober. Cooking usually involves knives and fires, after all.
Read The Directions!
I don't know HOW she manages to do this, but my coworker has failed
at least 10 times to make that craft microwave macaroni and cheese stuff.
There is like three steps. Add water, Microwave, Add cheese.
She keeps adding the cheese before microwaving it and burning the crap out of the cheese. I don't know how she hasn't learned yet.
- Lelentos
The Worst
Undercook the rice. The only real way to salvage undercooked rice is to turn it into something else like fried rice.
- BradC
Drink Responsibly
GiphyDrinking too much and forgetting the burgers on the grill for 4 hours.
- swagasus
Not Even Close To Oregano
In home ed we were once tasked with making tomato sauce. I told this dude I was teamed up with to put oregano in it and then turned my back to do the dishes. Came back to taste test and it was the worst thing I've ever tasted.
He apparently didn't know what oregano was and had put in almond extract.
Say It Louder
Overcooking meat. I'm going to say it louder for my parents OVERCOOKING MEAT! It took me until I was an adult to realize that you shouldn't need a glass of water to eat a bite of chicken to help get it down. Like, chicken can be moist and flavorful, holy crap!
Wax Paper And Heat Don't Mix
Use wax paper instead of parchment paper. They look similar, but wax paper is for cold and parchment paper is for heat. Remember, wax melts when it heats up. I've had a very hectic and crazy week this week. I went home last night and cooked some oven roasted potatoes... on wax paper.... I went to go have a shower and I came out to the kitchen filled with smoke. It wasn't pleasant.
Cheesy Noodle Cereal
My best man once in college made a simple Mac & Cheese meal from the blue box and added WAAAAAAYYYYYY too much milk to it. He was basically eating cheesy noodle cereal right in front of me while I'm asking "Woah, isn't that a lot of milk?" He'd insist that was just the way he makes it.
I asked him about it years later and he admitted he knew he totally messed it up, but just wanted to save face.
Liquid Smoke
I was cooking chicken, simple pan fried chicken. I decided that a little smokey flavor would make it pop so I reached for something in our cupboard my wife likes called 'liquid smoke'. Now its shaped alot like a soy sauce bottle so in my haste I assumed you unscrew the cap and there would be a nipple inside you would use to squirt a few drops in.
There was no nipple, I dumped half a bottle of liquid smoke into the chicken. It was chicken jerky.
Mind Your Milks
GiphyWhen making a clam chowder, do not use sweetened, condensed milk. It is disgustingly sweet. Bad mistake.
I tried making mac and cheese. I really tried.
I am Danish, so I just halfassed and google translated an American recipe, that said evaporated milk, but it translated as condensed.
I invited all my friends for blunts and mac. We were horrified.
I was dating a vegan girl and tried my hand at making a vegan version of chicken pot pie and added soy milk. I accidentally used the vanilla soy milk. It was a weird, sweet, gross mess.
- Lulu_42
Mom's Steak
Growing up on a farm where we raised cattle we ate a lot of steak. I was never a huge fan. I didn't see what the appeal was until just a few years ago when I made steak for myself.
My mom just over cooked the sh!t out of the steak. I like my meat rare to medium rare and her steaks were always under seasoned and over cooked.
I used to not be able to eat steak without A1 sauce or something similar. Now when I make a steak I don't use any sauces, just the seasoning on the steak itself.
A few months ago me and my wife went back to our home town and stayed with my parents. They had just butchered a steer so they had plenty of meat and wanted to treat us to a nice meal. I offered to cook the steaks under the guise that I was being nice and helping my mom not work as hard.
I asked everyone how they wanted their steaks done and grilled them all up to everyone's liking, timing when to put them on so they would all come off the grill at the same time but be done to different internal temperatures.
It was a damn good steak. My little brother who still lives at home said something like, "Wow I didn't know steak could taste so good." and it really hurt my mom's feelings, but god damn stop over cooking meat.
Dropping it on the floor.
I used to work in a meat department and from time to time things would get dropped on the floor. I was one of the only people who was willing to take that stuff home.
At one point an entire pan of 12 oz ribeye steaks fell on the ground. I quickly picked them all up and the ones that were directly on the floor I rinsed off, then I packaged them all up and my boss sold them to me for $.25 per pound. I paid less than $10 for over $200 worth of steak.
I put them in my freezer and was just sure to sear the floor steaks a bit more than usual and I ate so much steak for a few months I got tired of it. It was cool though because I could experiment with different methods of making steak without wasting a good cut of meat.
Whooooops accidently dropped the filet mignons on the floor again. Don't worry fellas, I can care of it.
Not So Easy
Easy mac, Forget to add water.
Ive done it three times and its probably one of the WORST cooking f--- ups you can do
Are you the reason we had to deal with monthly midnight fire alarms back in the dorm?
Chillax
So i doubt anyone will see this, but making chili "hot" instead of spicy. See some people equate mouth burning heat with good flavor and thats a god damn lie. Yeah there are good hot chilis out there, but they have complexity to them by using different chilis or unique spices. But there are a LARGE group of people out there that think that chili powder, salt, red pepper, and TOO MUCH tabasco sauce. It's gross, please stop doing that.
Heat does not equal flavor. Spicy is one thing, but you really can make great chili with out it being so spicy it just burns your
Gone To Pot
My ex wife managed to end up with actual flaming food while trying to cook for herself. Twice.
First was the reheating of chicken nuggets. No, four nuggets from the fridge do not take the same amount of microwave time as the whole package from the freezer.
Also, when the Kraft Dinner box says "drain the noodles, return them to the pot", do not put said pot back on the burner and get distracted by the end of the commercial break. I really liked that pot.
True Grit
Oh god do I have a story here. I used to work at a group home, and part of the job was cooking a big family meal every night for all of the residents. One day we had a super nice temporary staff worker on, and since she was a former line cook, she volunteered to handle the meal. Now nobody was going to object the a professionally done dinner, so we all focused on other work and let her do her thing.
An hour later we sit down to eat, and frankly it looked amazing. Perfectly seared pork chops, roast green beans, and corn cooked with brown sugar. We all piled our plates eagerly and sat down to eat. I was the first one to eat a fork full of the corn, and while the taste was good, something was really off about the texture. It was super gritty, almost to the point where I could feel it grinding and crunching between my teeth. I took a second bite, trying to be polite, but the dry crunchy texture just kept getting worse. As I'm dealing with that, one of the residents who was a bit less subtle took their first taste, and they let their surprise and displeasure be known pretty much immediately.
Now that it was clear that something was seriously up, the race was on to figure out what happened. Turns out that one of the residents left their container of kinetic sand sitting on the kitchen counter. For those of you who don't know, kinetic sand looks like and has a texture that you could totally mistake for brown sugar if you weren't paying attention. Having no reason to think anything other than food would be sitting on the kitchen counter, the poor temp worker took a big scoop and tossed it right in her corn.
Needless to say we all gave her crap for that one, but she took it well and we all spent most of the meal struggling to eat through the laughter. It was a good dinner otherwise though.
Reddit user WeirdJawn asked:
"Older Redditors, what do young people get completely wrong about past decades?"
As a young person, I was fascinated with the idea my maternal Grandmother lived through the transition from horses to combustion engine vehicles, the inception of commercial air travel, the creation of the motion picture industry and the invention of television.
But I've lived through vinyl LPs and 45s, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and digital music players.
If I wanted to see a movie as a kid, I went to a theater—or drive-in—or waited for an often heavily edited version to air on TV. Then cable movie channels were introduced, followed by LP size video disc players, then Betamax and VHS, DVDs, HD and Blu-ray and now?
Digital downloads and streaming services—I haven't been to a theater in years.
GiphyTV
"Up until video rental stores in the early 80's, at school the next day every kid was talking about what was on TV the night before, as every single family was watching tv together every single night."
"With some exceptions, most people watched the same thing as their schoolmates or co-workers, just to be a part of the conversation."
~ Grimjack2
"There's something very isolating about modern media.
"You can be into a TV show, or YouTube series, and nobody else you know has heard of it."
"I'm a fan of aYouTube series—RedLetterMedia—that's pretty popular and very well regarded amongst its fans, and only one of my friends has heard about it.
~ SlashThingy
GiphyUnanswered Questions
"Probably just how often you had to accept that you couldn't find out the answer to something."
"If you had a question you could ask your family, maybe your friends, maybe your teachers, and your last chance was the check the library."
"But if the library didn't have the answer, then you just had to accept that you weren't going to get an answer (or you'd have to hope to come across that answer someday in the future)."
"Now you just ask Google and get 10 answers in just seconds."
~ john_jdm
GiphyOne & Done
"How on-time you had to be for your favorite shows because there was little to no chance you’d see that same episode again until they (hopefully) did re-runs during summer."
"I remember waiting anxiously for the nightly news to be over so I could watch my favorite TV shows."
"Commercial breaks were just mad rushes for the bathroom, or to the kitchen to get something quick to drink."
~ ladyeclectic79
"Once it was done, it was gone."
"The happy tears I cried when they finally released The Stand miniseries on DVD about a decade after airing."
~ Barrys_Fic
"I feel I was in the last generation of this, even though channels were much more prevalent and reruns of everything was the norm."
"I remember rushing off the bus with all my friends because we were absolutely SURE Goku was gonna defeat Frieza this episode. And it was a crap shoot whether or not the driver would be fast enough for us to make it."
"Years later when DVDs started becoming more prevalent, they STILL didn't put shows on collectable media regularly. You couldn't just get an entire season of a show and binge it."
"At most you could find a 'best-of' compilation of five or six of the most popular episodes, and that was only if the show was incredibly popular."
"And what I am describing here was considered 'having it good' compared to older people."
~ McFlyyouBojo
GiphySay Cheese!
"That it was incredibly common to just not have pictures of events or other things we see as important now."
"Not only did we have entire vacations where no pictures were taken, we could go months without a single picture being taken of any member of our family unless it was particularly notable."
"A trip to St Louis? No pictures. A trip to Disneyland? Maybe a picture at the entry gate or one of the souvenir pictures of us with a character."
"A trip to zoo? No pictures. An average day? Forget about it!"
"Frequently, the only pictures taken were at major holidays like Christmas or on someone's birthday."
~ bbbbbthatsfivebees
"I explained that to my kids the other day."
"What if every picture you took cost a dollar?
"And you don’t know if it’s even good until probably weeks later, as long as the photo lab doesn’t f*ck up processing."
"Or your film or pictures don't get lost in the mail going to or from the developer or they don't send you someone else's photos by mistake."
~ beebsaleebs
"You had to plan ahead to take a photo."
"'Did you remember the camera? Did you remember to buy film or flashbulbs?”
~ brazilliandanny
GiphySo Few Options
"It's an exceptional AMOUNT of media to consume now. In the 90s, you had 3-4 super popular channels, and 4-5 low rated channels. They all showed one show at a time."
"Now we have a dozen streaming services with infinite media options."
"It's becoming increasingly difficult to engage in office conversation because so much content is available, people do not have to stray as far from their interest to consume content they want to consume."
~ MemeTeamMarine
Smoking Or Non?
"They understand restaurants had 'smoking sections' and that bars & clubs were filled with cigarette smoke. But I don't think many understood how pervasive smoking was."
"Non-smoking areas or sections didn’t exist before the 1980s. There were ashtrays and people smoking literally EVERYWHERE."
"Jury boxes had ashtrays in front of every juror. Judge smoked, lawyers smoked, the gallery smoked."
"You smoked on planes, trains, busses, taxicabs, and in all transportation centers."
"You smoked at the library, the PTO meetings at schools, the town hall and all city offices. Hell, you could smoke at the courtyard at my High School as a student."
"You smoked in the elevator and on the escalator. The mall. The grocery store. Sports venues. Doctor's offices. Hospitals. Sitting at your desk at work even if you were in a cubicle or open area."
"The movies. The plays, opera, concerts and every other public performance, people smoked."
"A non-smoker would come home often smelling like smoke. One was constantly surrounded by smoke. It was insane."
~ parkerjh
"You literally made ash trays as a grade school art project, that’s how common it was."
~ _Poffertje_
GiphyWhat Choices?
"Probably under estimating how few choices there were."
"Today, it seems like everything imaginable is available in a variety of sizes, delivered to your door over night."
"Catalogs and mail order had 4-6 week delivery."
"Malls were the best thing ever—all the stores in one place, a wide variety of products and sizes and not downtown."
~ 2Loves2loves
"And also just how little people knew they were missing out. If it wasn't on network evening television (Channels 2, 4, 7, 9, and 11), or on a store shelf in your town, or in the Sunday newspaper... it simply didn't exist for you."
"If you had an inkling something existed—say, tin foil that comes in sheets instead of one giant roll—you could go around asking people, if you wanted. But you were more than likely to just get a shrug and, 'Why would you want such a thing?'."
"Let's say you were particularly enterprising, so you dial '0' and ask the operator for the number for corporate headquarters of Reynolds Aluminum Foil, if you knew the city it was in. Because there was no internet, and the only way to find a number was by dialing '0' and speaking to a telephone operator."
"But even if you spoke to someone at Reynolds, they had no way to exchange money for goods at that level, and they probably would just tell you they sell it in the Ohio area, and that would be that."
"You went to the market. They have one brand of pancake mix, and no one had ever heard of anything different, and why would you want a different brand, anyway?"
"Then you go to the hardware store, and they carry one brand of paint, and no one had ever heard of any other brand of paint."
"And it was that way for a long, long time."
~ nOwsL-ACEna-pe2323
GiphyOne For the Road
"How common drinking & driving was."
"Until MADD came along, people did this routinely."
"It's where 'one for the road' originated."
~ HailRoma
"Yes! When my friends and I had our 18th birthdays in late 1979, the thing to do was to celebrate by driving through Beer Barn, where you could literally drive-through to get beer, wine, wine coolers, whatever."
"Then open them up and drive while drinking. At 18. This was in Texas."
"It also was not uncommon for my dad to drive while drinking when he was taking us wherever at night."
"Zero education on why you should not do that."
~ emeraldcity4341
Good & Bad
"I am definitely older (born in 1949 so Baby Boomer)."
"What today's young people don't appreciate is how, growing up, we had to invent our own sources of fun."
"There were no video games (which I enjoy playing), just 3 channels on a black-and-white tv (we didn't get color until 1967), and no real entertainment aimed at kids."
"All we could do is interact with each other and play established games like marbles or maybe an organized sport like Little League baseball."
"There was a baseball diamond, overgrown with weeds, across the street from us, but mostly we played in the woods that surrounded us, climbing trees pretending to be pirates or some such.
"I loved the bookmobiles that would visit my street, and I must have read every biography (all bound in blue covers) in my elementary school library."
"It was a different era with many fewer distractions and much more time for sustained imagination."
"Being a different place and time, we developed different skills for interacting with the world and each other than young people do today."
"Was it better? That's hard to say. We tended to have an insular view of our own little world, while today it is hard to escape what it happening everywhere on Earth."
"We had to wait days for a letter to arrive, and we shared a party phone line with our neighbor's phone. That is a far slower pace than today's instantaneous texting culture. (Yes, I do text.)"
"Some things have been lost while others have been gained. That's the way it always will be. Just wait."
~ BOBauthor
GiphyIn Chilton's article—referenced at the beginning—he stated:
"We [Gen X] will be the last generation to know the world without...
- Cable TV
- Cell Phones
- The internet
- Seat belt laws
- Remote controls for the TV"
What would you add to the list?
We all love our pets.
And be it a dog, cat, parrot, or turtle, we all like to think our pet is cuter and smarter than everyone else's.
Most of the time, that is purely owing to our unending love for them.
But every now and again, we might witness our pet do something truly extraordinary, leading us to believe that our pet truly is the smartest animal on earth.
Redditor CoreyMatthews was curious to hear about the times people were truly blown away by the intelligence of their pets, leading them to ask:
"Pet owners of Reddit, what are some examples of your pet doing something that made your realize how intelligent they are?"
Talk About Coordination!
"I watched both my cats sit in the hallway and roll a ball back and forth between them gently and on purpose."
"They both know how to open doors."- TurbulentStep4399
The Real Truth About Cats And Dogs
"I had a cat that learned to turn on my radio so I would think the alarm was going off and get up to feed him."
"He and my dog would also team up on me in various ways."
"The most memorable was when I had gotten a little water pistol to squirt the cat when he got on the kitchen counter."
"I always kept the water pistol in the very back corner of the kitchen counter."
"I got home one day, and the water pistol was chewed to pieces on the floor."
"It was too far back on the counter for the dog to have reached it by herself (and it’s not the sort of thing she would normally have liked to chew on), so the only explanation is that the cat climbed onto the counter, pushed the water pistol across the counter until it fell on the floor, and then convinced the dog to chew it up."- TheBat3
More Than Most People Can Say About Their Children!
"My 6 month old kitten will alternate bringing his mylar ball to me or my husband to throw--taking turns."
"He plays fetch better than my dog did."
"He puts his toys away at bedtime."
"I have a small basket that we keep his toys in."
"At bedtime, I'll tell him, 'Let's pick up your toys' and he will get any toys that hasn't been eaten by the couch and drop them in his basket."
"No hard balls/toys as he can't pick those up with his mouth."
"I pick up those."- Danivelle
cat playing GIFGiphyThe Female Of The Species...
"I had two Shelties and one large dog bed."
"The female Sheltie did not want to share the bed with her brother, so whenever he was lying on it she would go to the door and start barking like crazy at … nothing."
"He would leap up barking and race to the door to guard the house alongside her and as soon as he got out of the dog bed, she would run back and curl up in the middle of it."
"He never caught on."- NoNefariousness104
Always On The Lookout
"My dog greeted me at the garage door when I got home."
"He then had me follow him to my daughters room, then my sons room, then the front door."
"My mother in law had picked up the kids."
"He was telling me that 'this one and this one are gone and went that way'."
"Let’s go get them!'”- YourFriendInSpokane
Asking Permission Never Goes Unnoticed
"I had a blue heeled mix that was crazy smart."
"Two of many examples:"
"He was occasionally allowed to eat table scraps off of a plate but was never allowed to beg."
"He had to wait until the plate was put on the floor."
"One day I was caught up working on my laptop and had put the scraps from my dinner on the couch on a plate next to me."
"An hour or so went by and I saw him pick up the plate off the couch and put it on the floor so he was allowed to eat it."
"He slept in my room and was getting up in years."
"One night after I was settled in bed he let me know he needed to go outside, thinking an older bladder, I got up to take him out."
"Instead he went to the kitchen and turned to look at me."
"Curious I followed him."
"Same thing , he went to the family room and waited for me."
"When I turned on the light, he went to an end table near the TV where one of my teenagers had left an uneaten piece of fried chicken."
"He stood and stared and it and then turned to me and I swear he asked if he could have it."
"I laughed and took the meat off the bones and put it in the floor for him, after which we both went back to bed."
"How he knew that chicken had been left there is beyond me!"
"I could share dozens of stories like this."
"He was as smart as most humans I know."
"I will miss him forever."- JCKligmann
dog human eating GIFGiphyPeeing With Purpose
"My mom's cat had a urinary infection."
"So he peed a tiny bit in the bathroom sink and waited by it for my mom to see it."- HyliaSerket
Everyone Wants A Little Attention Every Now And Then...
"A small thing, but my cat will paw at my hand when he wants to be petted."
"The first couple times it happened, I didn't think anything of it, until I realized one day that he basically had me trained/conditioned to pet him whenever he nudged or pawed at my hand."- Square-Raspberry560
And You Thought All They Could Do Was Change Colors
"My chameleon will look me square with both eyes and make a chomping movement with his mouth when he’s hungry."
"He’ll also pat at the glass if he wants to come out."
"He’ll hold a grudge, calculate ways to go or get what he wants."
"One of my Boas will only look at me when hungry."
"She had a go at caudal luring whilst doing it the other day."
"Like 'look, dude, I know you bring the food'."
"I’m hungry, look I’m even trying to lure you to give me some food'."
"It worked."- Ugglug
GiphyA Kind Gesture Is Never Forgotten
"My brother’s cat, Coconut."
"We live 2,600 miles apart."
"The first time I met her, I gave her a little pink fuzzy kitty toy."
"2-3 years later was the next time I was able to visit her again for the 2nd time ever."
"She immediately disappeared & came back with this filthy, dusty, brown toy that had obviously been hidden away somewhere."
"We dusted it off & it was the toy I had gifted her years before."
"She remembered me."
"My brother said he had never seen the toy again until that day."
"She’s also very precious with her toys & will leave them outside his bedroom door as bribes."- emilyyancey
Innate Obedience
"When she was a baby I said, 'Go get your toy!' in the same pitch I always do."
"Never trained her with that phrase."
"She went a grabbed her toy and came back."
"I tested her again the next day and the next day."
"She went to her toy pile and brought back a toy each time."
"She picked up the phrase by herself."
"She's also the first dog I've had that looks at planes in the sky when they fly overhead and recognizes dogs on TV even on mute."- Spare-Bread8416
Get The Tissue Ready...
"I have two cats and a dog."
"A little backstory about my dog:"
" I don't know anything about dog training."
"I wasn't even thinking about adopting a dog but it seems like it was one of those things that 'meant to be'."
"My sister found him on the street at a winter night."
"We thought he was lost and there is an owner looking for him."
"Because where I live we have so many strays and you wouldn't see many 'specific breeds', they are just strays and specific breeds have an owner 99% of the time."
"So we took him home and start to search for the owner but it was obvious that poor dog went through some sh*t."
"And we learned about his story from an animal society; that he had a few owners but all of them left him to the streets because he was barking a lot (we haven't heard him barking even once during that time), he was peeing everywhere (he did it once and that was probably because he was nervous of being in a new environment and that was it), he wasn't listening at all (we had 3 cats at that time and I said no one time when he tried to run at them and that was it, never did it again)."
"And we learned that he has been in the shelter twice with big wounds."
"And I said I'm not going to let him go through more, he stays with us."
"He learned how to let me know he needs to go out all by himself."
"He learned to pee on the pads all by himself on the days that I can't take him for a walk."
"He learned to give me my slippers when I come home all by himself because I wear slippers when I get home."
" He learned how to clean his face by watching cats doing it."
" I still don't know how to train a dog other than a few basic stuff."
"He just learns."
"That's been a really long comment."
"So I'm going to leave that how I know my cats are clever for another time."
"Thank you for reading my sweet dogs story."
"I'm glad to have him and I don't know who was lucky about all those; me or him."- LittleBitOff2Day
dog pies GIFGiphyNever underestimate your pets.
As sometimes you have no idea of the things they might see or notice.
Making it all the more important to give them the love and attention they deserve.