I was making homemade cream of mushroom soup. I put the boiling contents of the pan into a blender to whizz and forgot to hold the lid.

Me and every wall and window in my kitchen got covered in boiling hot part made soup!!!! Mushrooms taste better in a plate than on a wall!

When my wife and I first married she was given a fresh chicken, which had not been beheaded or pulled of its intenal bits. Being a bit sqeamish, she had three large gins, put her best kid gloves on and promptly did the deed, by now pie-eyed!

So much so she left one glove inside the chicken, during stuffing it with sage and onion. Much to my mothers disgust, cooking it produced a terrible smell as the kid gloves cooked.

My wife served her up chicken breast and glove stuffing. This all happened some 40 years ago but is still talked about, to my poor wife's embarrasment.

I was doing a cookery exam and had made an apple pie.

However I had the pie on my hand and as I was trimming the edge with a knife I dropped it.

I then panicked scooped it up and reshaped it and turned it into a an apple turnover.

I was only 12 or so, but when my Mum asked me to put a Fray Benton tinned steak-and-kidney pie in the oven (remember them - in a pie-shaped tin? What can we have been thinking of?

I didn't realise you had to open the tin and take the lid off. Until of course there was a huge bang when the pie exploded, bursting open the oven door, bending the baking shelf, and spattering half-cooked pastry and gravy all over the kitchen. Oh dear, how they all laughed at me (eventually!)

I think the worst cooking mistake I made was after I'd had a really good Home Economics lesson at school where I had made a Pineapple Upside Down cake. It had turned out really well, and therefore I decided that I was the best cake maker in the world!

The next day I decided to show off to my friends by making them some Viennese Fingers. My granded was a baker, so I used his ingredients and stuff, and was really showing off, saying how great a cook I was, while trying to follow the recipe book.

I made the mixture up and put it all into the bag and squeezed it onto the baking tray, making the little grooves and everything. Put them in the oven and waited, all the time saying how great they were going to be and how I would have to start making them to sell at school.

Eventually, they were ready, I took them out of the oven and they were all totally flat and had joined together to make one flat biscuit pancake! I had forgotten to put grease proof paper on, and I had also wrecked my grandads baking tray. I never lived it down, and the Pineapple cake must have been a one off as I have never been able to cook anything good since!

I would like to say that my first attempt at a Sunday roast began in all innocence, inspired by a love of food and its preparation, but that's not really the case. I had an ulterior motive and paid the price.

With an insatiable appetite not entirely located in my stomach I was aiming to impress an attractive young woman with my culinary finesse. I approached the project with the calculating precision only evident in the minds of disreputable young men.

I laid out my kitchen kit like Jack the Ripper and set out about butchering several potatoes that had been loitering provocatively in the corner of the kitchen for several weeks. I deftly reduced a handful of substantial carrots to waif-like crudités and somehow managed to disrobe a cabbage in such a way that I was left with a large sprout.

The vegetables prepared, I turned my attention to the meat, a plump and seductive chicken bearing the proud badge of bedsit food - a reduced-to-clear sticker.

We'll brush over the stuffing. Suffice it to say that it's wise to add water to Paxo outside the bird. I then encountered a small but profound technical hitch.

My Baby Belling oven would have made a wonderful resting place for a canary but stoutly refused to accept my offering of chicken, spuds and roasting dish. Fortified by several gin and tonics (purely for medicinal purposes you understand) I remained undeterred. A few blows from a camping mallet and hey presto.

Left to cook slowly during the afternoon the tantalising aroma of my chicken and potato terrine a la Belling lured me gently into the warm bosom of over-confidence, until the doorbell rang.

I awoke from my Bisto revelry with a start and nearly banged my head on the thick black pall of smoke hanging over my settee.

Choking I leapt to my feet and as I tumbled down the stairs and realised that I had neglected to cook the sprout, OK, Al dente veg it is then.

I flung open the door, tried to be charming, offered an apéritif and then dashed to the kitchen to open a window and the oven door.

Where once there was chicken now sat a calcified sculpture of a bird hewn from a lump of coal. All was lost. My hopes of just desserts vapourised like brandy on a crêpe Suzette.

"You do know I'm veggie don't you?" she said as I shuffled into the room.

Working on a Malaysian beach front cafe I had been hired to provide 'Western' dishes with limited ingredients.

When making my first pseudo spaghetti bolognaise I couldn't get the flavour right despite adding several spoons of what I thought was salt eventually I compromised and got the flavour from soy sauce, not until after liberally adding the salt like substance.

Unfortunately much to the amusement of the local staff it transpired that I had added about 4 tablespoons of Monosodium Glutamate enough to give anyoner who ate my spaghetti a healthy headache.