I was finishing a jar of extremely hot peppers (7 pot primos) that I had fermenting on Thanksgiving day. I made a hot sauce with them and cantaloupe. I had them in a pan at a low simmer to meld the flavors. The problem was the steam coming off was potent as hell. It filled the house when everyone was arriving and coughing from the hot sauce in the air, me included. We had to open all the windows, dig out the fans to get it out of the house, freezing everyone in the process.

  • Not me, but family lore. When my parents had just started dating in their 20’s, my mother was housed in “The Beaver Hut” with a bunch of people including her twin sister (my aunt). It was spaghetti night and they were making a homemade sauce. My aunt was putting in salt. Instead of a teaspoon, she put more like a quarter of a cup or more. Everyone else was going to fish it out, but she was like “nah, it’ll be fine” and stirred it in.

    Needless to say, it was not fine. It was so salty that everyone except my father refused to eat it.

    Note: It might have been something else like pizza. With spaghetti, it you screwed up a sauce that much it’s easy enough to make a substitute sauce from kitchen staples and odds and ends.

    • Sounds similar to something my family recounts. We were living in Lima, Perú at the time and had friends from Switzerland or Argentina come visit us. On the way to our home someone noticed a bakery advertising black forest cake and they decided to buy one to mark the occasion.

      Well, apparently that bakery had failed to consider that while salted butter may be the default form of butter in Perú, the default form of butter where the recipe was from is unsalted butter.

      My parents and their guests (I was probably around 3yo at the time) ended up playing Uno. Whoever lost a round had to eat a piece of this cursed black forest cake.