Habits of bad cooks

in my story, i have a couple of bad cooks that can't cook to save their lives, and i'm talking kitchen disaster bad. one of them actually cooks so badly, that it lands another character in the hospital for food poisoning. the other just has food that's barley edible. problem is that i have no idea how bad cooks manage to be bad, since i don't screw up in the kitchen much. i need some ideas about what they would do to be so horrible. thanks.

Well they could get distracted easily, leading to burning or putting the wrong amounts into the food.

- not tasting what they're making as they're doing it... this can lead to definite disaster...
- not using salt, pepper, spices...or, using too much
- not knowing what the spices they're using taste like... (I once had a friend that put tarragon in a chicken noodle soup - not just a little, but a whole cup of it because they thought it looked like thyme... not the best chicken soup in the world)
- letting ingredients sit out for a long time before using them (the food poisoning part), not cooking meats fully, or cooking veggies too much

Undercooking things like rice and grains
Substituting ingredients that are only vaguely related to the original ingredients (e.g. beef for fish, "they're both meat")

For food poisoning, they could use the same utensils for cooked and raw food.

Thinking that one can improvise recipes and then going horribly wrong with combinations - rhubarb and black beans, for example. Bad things have happened this way.

Especially adding too much of anything. Too little can be fixed easily. I'm know for being a decent cook except that I add more salt than most people can stand. And that brings those dishes to "almost not edible" for everyone but me. So, adding WAY TOO MANY EGGS, or way too much baking powder, way too much of a strong spice....

Not reading the recipe through befroe using it
Not knowing the difference between a bulb and a clove of garlic

Oh, I keep thinking of more.
Bad substitutions - a friend of mine butchered an asian style noodle dish by using balsamic vinegar instead of rice vinegar.
Another friend cooked a batch of cookies that had baking soda spilled all over them with unfortunate results.
Cooking pasta incorrectly is a pretty good one because it's supposed to be so basic - from what I hear, you can really mess things up by adding the noodles to cold water and then putting it on the stove, rather than adding the noodles to boiling water.
Frozen food or left overs heated with the plastic still on.

Mixing up salt and sugar.

Mixing up baking soda and baking powder. (Tasted that one in muffins. They tasted like metal. Yuck.)

Bad timing. The meat is done and the rice is crunchy, so you add more water to the rice and hope for the best, then burn the meat and make mush out of the veggies.

Pre-cook something, don't cool it fast enough so it spoils, then reheat (think soup or stew, which is supposed to taste better a day later after the flavors blend).

I did the following as a kid. I tried to make fortune cookies, and just started putting all the ingredients in the bowl as I measured them. I was supposed to separate the eggs, cream the butter, sift the flour, slowly add one thing at a time, blend something with water. It wasn't until I got to the last ingredient, the slips of paper with fortunes on them, that I realized I probably wasn't supposed to put them in the bowl and just stir.

hygeine and safety. Stuff like not washing utensils, leaving meat out and then cooking it, not browning minced meat before adding to a sauce, leaving stuff too long without checking, using blunt or wobbly knives, picking their own mushrooms and herbs without knowing what is safe and what isn't, not washing vegetables for salad and stuff, spoiling ingredients by cooking them the wrong way or at the wrong temperature, or with the wrong ingredients - e.g. letting milk burn.

not checking ingredients before cooking cancause food poisoning. Eggs just beginning to rot, curdled milk, bad meat/fish, mould etc.
Spice. Too little, too much, wrong spice, wrong spice combinations.

Poorly planning cooking times, so that they have to rush to finish and something are either over done or under done, or both.

One of the most rancid things I ever ate included:

- a dish with fish and tomato sauce - the cook figured that instead of adding sugar to take the sour edge off, she could just use rosemary and thyme. Weird and gross!
- a friend of mine baked me 'poffertjes' - a Dutch dish consisting of a plateful of really tiny, sweet pancakes. Instead of using sunflower oil, or, in fact, any other neutral kind of oil, he used asian spiced stir frying oil. It nearly made me puke.
- I also know someone who once tried to boil a steak...I didn't even try to eat it.
- another glaring error: a cook that tried to make a sweet parsnip dish, than switched the cinnamon that was supposed to go in there with nutmeg. Because both spices 'looked the same',

Although I'm a fairly good cook myself, I did make a grotesque mistake last year. I was preparing a seven dish grand dinner, so I was somewhat stressed and rushed. The third course was a soup hollandaise - asparagus soup with grangon shrimp. The shrimp were fresh, or so I thought - it turned out they had been salted. I didn't taste the soup before serving it, and it was so salty that the dinner guests nearly choked on it. Embarassing!

My mother is a terrible cook. She'd cook everything the same length of time (25 minutes, whether in the oven at 350 or on the stove at medium high heat for 25 minutes), so some things would be underdone while other things would be overdone. She'd also forget and take a nap, burning everything.

Her substitutions would be based on the oddest things. Instead of flavor, they may be because of color (cantaloupe instead of pumpkin because they're both orange, for example, or tomato soup as marinara sauce because they're both red).

Shortcuts were another of her big errors. On one memorable occasion she put tomato sauce, ground beef, and spaghetti noodles in a pot with water and cook it all together in an attempt to make spaghetti with meat sauce. The dog enjoyed it, though.

Once she made a birthday cake and the icing on it and the candles in it when it was fresh out of the oven. The icing melted off and the candles melted into the cake. There were a lot of candles, too.

Because of her terrible cooking, my brothers and I all learned to cook when very young. I suppose something good came from her mistakes.

Not knowing how to stir foods in the pot correctly - if you're melting butter or stirring a sauce and you just move it around with your wrist, you'll burn whatever's in the saucepan. You have to use your whole arm and really scrape the bottom of the pot so that everything gets moving. This was one of my biggest problems when my brother was teaching me to cook!

Also, simply not knowing what tastes good together makes for some bad dishes.

An easy thing to confuse is baking soda and baking powder. Vastly different results...

Hygiene issues can make for some interesting problems, too. The last thing you want to hear before someone storms out of a kitchen is, "...and anther thing, I never wash my hands after using the bathroom."

A bad cook dealing with the results of a hunting trip can go pretty wrong, too. No matter how much you like your roasted raccoon or opossum, you probably don't want it with the head still attached. Unless you're into the little tidbits on that part of the animal's body. Even worse than putting it on the table with the head attached is deciding halfway through the meal that you're "tired of it looking at you" and twisting the head off.

The very first time I made potato soup by myself, I decided to put in basil, oregano, garlic, onion powder, pepper, and salt. It tasted REALLY bad.

Not reading the recipe all the way through. One of mum's classic mistakes. We made cheesecake one Christmas. I was working Christmas Eve, as was dad, so mum was on her own. She was supposed to make the base in the morning to store in the fridge to harden and do the cream part that night to rest overnight. What did mum do? Add them both in the morning... The cream top sunk into the biscuit base.

Another classic is the "shove everything in the pot and hope for the best". Burnt onions, burnt carrots and soggy potatoes with stringy mince is what mum calls a casserole. Ugh.

Spaghetti bolognese is interesting. She never puts enough tomato in. I or my dad have to save it but adding salt, pepper, more tomato puree, herbs and a dash of lemon juice. I also fish out the badly burnt onions.

I cook when dad is working, mostly for self defence.