Your Worst Neighbor Story

Much like your biological family and your co-workers, you can’t really pick your neighbors. Depending on where you live and how frequently you or the people around you move, you might have lived a life full of nosey or noisy neighbors—and there are few things more irritating than not being able to find comfort at home. Now that my building has been social distancing for over a month, I’ve noticed the people in the apartment next to mine are becoming more brazen with occupying our shared roof deck at all hours of the day. Normally, I would find this to be a minor inconvenience, but they’ve begun congregating directly outside of my bedroom window, peering in with voyeuristic entitlement. I can no longer walk around naked, and for that reason, they must be destroyed.

Given the circumstances, I now consider them to be the worst neighbors I have ever had—horrendous hell-bound monsters instead of just douchebags. Of course, that’s not true, the worst ones were the neighbors who robbed my roommate, but I digress.

Now, I want to hear about your terrible neighbor experiences. What did they do? Did you exact revenge? Did you have to move away? Did they? Drop your entries in the comments below.

Before all that, let’s talk about last week’s winners. These are your most spectacular culinary disasters.

mdm, I wasn’t expecting a story that could’ve resulted in death. Thank you for raising the bar:

Let me preface this by saying I love to cook and will happily spend hours in my kitchen, baking, creating, trying out new recipes… what have you. One Sunday evening, I decided that I should really cook something, perhaps fish, that was languishing in my fridge before it went bad and decided to make salsa to go with it. I was crabby and not feeling it, but was determined to get this meal done so that I’d have lunch for the next few days. I pull out my mini food processor and start dumping tomatoes, cilantro, onions, peppers, and what have you into it. For whatever reason, now I’m incredibly PISSED that I’m cooking and have to clean up, and not looking forward to being at work in just about 10 hours. I realize I’ve cut up too many tomatoes and decide to salvage this horrible evening by making a larger batch of salsa GOD DAMNIT. I dump all the ingredients into my full-size food processor, and switch it on. The thing starts bumping and jumping on the counter like a madman, at which point I FLEE from the kitchen. And thank god I did – about one second later the entire thing exploded and the blade from my small food processor, which, in my anger, I’d accidentally dumped into the larger food processor along with the ingredients, shattered the plastic bowl, whizzed across the kitchen – at about heart level – hit the wall and splattered to the floor. I’ve never cooked angry since then.

fancypantsftw, as some have mentioned in the comments, that’s a ‘winner, winner, chicken dinner’ for you:

Disclaimer: this was when I was about 8, but I started cooking fairly independently around 3 or 4 and have enjoyed cooking my entire life. This is also the disaster that is still brought up regularly almost 35 years later.

I was in charge of making dinner, and despite my age, I was in charge of making it 100% on my own – zero supervision. I decided to make chicken and rice. I had also been reading a cookbook that highlighted a couple of techniques for coloring different items – coconut, croutons (for some reason), marshmallows, etc. This proved to be a bad combination.

I decided that there wasn’t enough purple food in the world and wouldn’t it be lovely if there were purple grains of rice scattered throughout the dish? I tried coloring the rice to no avail, and decided that I would use croutons instead (??). Since we didn’t have croutons, I took bread, toasted it, cut it up into pieces, and shook it up in a mason jar with red and blue food coloring. Then I added the resulting clown vomit to the rice, broth, and seasoning (also, oops, added 1 tablespoon of salt instead of 1 teaspoon), layered on the chicken, and set the whole thing to bake.

An hour later, the red parts made the chicken look raw, the blue parts made the chicken look rotten, the purple cast a bruised look over the whole dish, and the globby bits of colored slime that had once been toast cubes rendered the whole thing inedible. Not to mention that the salt was enough to make my mother immediately spit out her bravely tasted bite- the one and only time she has EVER done that with my cooking, bless her.

To this day, if I offer to make food for the family the response is invariably: “Yay! Can’t wait! As long as it’s not purple.” Punks.

Marillenbaum, disgustingly for me, this doesn’t sound… that bad:

I was 12, and had been cooking and baking with fairly minimal supervision for about three years. My mom (single parents) was busy with errands and needing to work on a Saturday, when we were also supposed to be hosting guests from church for dinner. I offered to make the lasagna for dinner, to save her some time.

Now, it turns out that the pasta wasn’t actually the no-boil kind; that bit of writing on the box was an ad. And the ricotta kept rolling up into little balls, so I kept adding more. Five pounds of ricotta cheese later, the whole thing is in the oven. My mom comes home, the guests come over, and we dig in.

The pasta was basically raw, and shattered when the spatula went in. Five pounds of cheese cascaded over everyone’s plates. My mother was mortified. I was not allowed to cook for company for several years afterwards, and I haven’t made lasagna for the family since.

journey blue, lol:

I was trying to make my boyfriend a nice dish that involved frying zucchini. We were out of garlic so I went to dump garlic powder on it. I dumped cinnamon instead.

We got takeout.

jrhmobile, well, this is… creative:

I got one to share, though i didn’t cook it. I only had to eat it …

Back in college days, my girlfriend wanted to cook my brother and I dinner one night. She was a townie, and lived at home, so she wanted to something special for us out of the goodness of her heart.

She got a recipe from somewhere for Orange Pork Chops. The recipe to cook 8 pork chops called for two cups of orange juice. Unfortunately, she bought a half-gallon can of frozen concentrate for the recipe.

I don’t know if you’ve ever dumped a half-gallon can’s worth of frozen OJ concentrate into a measuring cup, but if you put the whole thing in the cup and mash the slush down real good, it measures out right at two cups.

After 35 minutes at 350 degrees, those glazed pork chops were shellacked. You could’ve driven in nails with them. I loved her dearly, and managed to choke down about half of one before I stopped for fear of chipping my teeth. My brother, trooper that he is, gave her such a hard time about those glazed pork chops he actually ate a second one out of guilt. He was sick for two days.

Thank God I’m still friends with her, and we still laugh about it to this day. I think my brother may still have one sitting on his tool bench …