So I’m baking up a nice chicken pot pie. I get out a small stack of aluminum pie tins I had from a previous occasion of pot pie. Then I see something disgusting: moldy and desert dry crust sticking to the bottom one of the pile. For some reason I can’t fathom, instead of throwing away the last tin I used to bake pot pie (which had to be at least five months ago, if not a lot more), I just put it back in the cabinet with the other tins! Ugh!
Please demonstrate I’m not getting early onset Alzheimer’s or something by sharing similar stories of yours!
Thanksgiving is pretty much the only time of year I do heavy cooking, and in particular the only time I’m likely to use the oven. The Thanksgiving before last I bought a bunch of plastic food-storage containers to hold the leftovers. Since my kitchen is quite small and doesn’t have a lot of cabinet space, after they had been emptied (and washed) I ended up storing them in the oven.
So. Last Thanksgiving I gear up for the annual full-court-press cooking cavalcade: with the turkey being prepped on the counter, I turn on the oven to preheat. Shortly afterwards there is the appetizing smell of burning plastic…
The first was about maybe 7-8 years ago, and my wife and I were planning on frying something or other- probably french fries or old tortillas into chips. Anyhow, we’d reused the grease in the fryer particular grease a few times, so we drained it into an old 2-liter soda bottle to go into the trash, and refilled the fryer with fresh grease and went about our frying fun.
I’m not sure why, but I didn’t put it in the trash right away, and left it on the counter. So the following morning, I’m leaving for work, and decide that I’ll sneak a swig of “soda” from the bottle on the counter before I leave. Bad choice. I ended up taking a huge swig of several-times reused frying oil. Somehow, I gulped it fast, and didn’t barf my guts up everywhere, but I tasted that nasty-ass oil for about 2 hours, and burped it for even longer.
The second was when our gas oven door was having problems- the previous homeowners had apparently set something really heavy on the open oven door. They were truly idiots (I ought to start a pit thread), and this was about par for the course as far as appliances and home maintenance was concerned.
Anyway, I’d installed a new door hinge assembly on the oven, and was feeling pretty proud of myself later that evening when I decided I’d broil some chicken breasts (I think). So I turn on the broiler, and let it pre-heat… until I start smelling a faint burning plastic smell. I throw open the broiler to find that I’d left my cordless drill on the rack, and was happily broiling it like a steak.
So now one entire side of the drill is all melted and funny looking, and the other is fine. Drill still works like a charm, so go DeWalt!
Every couple of weekends or so I make blueberry muffins from a recipe I got from my mom. It’s one of those recipes that I make often enough that I barely look at it because “I know what I’m doing.” A few weeks ago, I put the muffins in the oven, set the timer, went to pull them out when the timer went off… and I had a muffin tin full of blueberry hockey pucks. I had forgotten to add baking powder to the dry ingredients when mixing!
Mrs. Cretin’s Mother, a wonderful person*, was also a really good cook. Among the feathers in her hat were her pies, especially her lattice-top apple pies. She created her most noteworthy example in the early 1960’s.
She’d put together yet another masterpiece, let it cool overnight, and put a nice fat slice in her husband’s lunchbox. Lunchtime arrived, Fred sat down with his work buddies, opened up his lunchbucket, and felt compelled to brag about his wife’s incredible apple pies. As he later told the story, he may have gone overboard with the accolades and superlatives.
Having finished crowing, he theatrically took a big bite, which was the hard way to discover that the world’s greatest cook had accidentally grabbed the wrong spice jar. Instead of cinnamon, the pie was full of cayenne pepper.
Fred was a rough tough man’s man kind of guy, quickly weighed his options, and decided to save face (not to mention his wife’s honor) by eating the whole piece without letting on that anything was amiss. Internally he was on fire from the throat up, by “a man’s gotta do what…” etc.
I’m TreacherousCretin and I approved this posting.
I’m proud to say I won the Mother-In-Law lottery. She was a gem.
This is kitchen but not so much cooking. My aunt’s husband was head janitor at OTB. He brought home an industrial sized mop head. These things are ginormous and if you don’t have the industrial strength bucket to clean and squeeze-- well, lemme tell you the rest of the story.
One of her kids spilled milk and she mopped it up with the giant mop (seriously, this mop was ridiculous. I was 10 at the time and had trouble pushing this thing around. Too heavy for children), cleaned the mop in a regular ole bucket and stored it for next time. A week or so later it is time to mop the house. Auntie gets the mop, puts it in a bucket with some Pine Sol and water and commences to wipe the floor-- leaving behind a trail of maggots.
It was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life. Needless to say the mop head was discarded and only regular sized mops were ever used again. Seriously, just typing this has me gagging at the decades old memory.
I once boiled some bones with meatscraps on them for several hours to make broth, then pulled out the trusty collander and upended the pot into it, thus discarding my broth but preserving the boiled bones.
I once craved some homemade pasta, and spent the whole afternoon making the dough, kneading it, rolling it out, and hand-cutting it into nice fettucine ribbons. I prepared a sauce of cream and baby scallops, and when the pasta was cooked, I poured it into a colander I had placed in the sink. I lifted up the colander to proceed to the cream sauce pan, and fumbled the colander, which executed a neat flip-over and the whole mass of perfectly-cooked delicate pasta slithered down into the dirty garbage disposal.
I had to start all over again with some plain ol’ Ronzoni spaghetti.
Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed I did not really know how to cook. So my husband and then the boys had to put up with me learning.
One time I made Mac & Cheese from a box. When the noodles were done I put in the cheese packet, the butter and the milk. But I had forgotten to drain the noodles so it was kind of a thin cheese soup. I had planned on adding ham, broccoli and onion bits to it but…
We ended up eating grilled ham & cheese sandwiches instead.
I used to make several pumpkin breads full of fruits and nuts, baked in coffee cans in the oven. I made up a really big batch of batter and I mixed the pumpkin, nuts, dates, raisins, and spices separately to stir into the big bowl of plain batter. So the last time I made it, I filled up the coffee cans with batter and put them in the oven. Mere minutes later, I saw the separate bowl of stuff to be stirred in. Sitting there on the counter. I think I tried to save a couple of the round loaves, but it didn’t work that well, so I had two unsuccessful ones and four plain muffin ones.
this one was my mother’s but it is too good not to share. this is the story of her last big meal she ever cooked, as she was getting older and her eyesight was almost gone.
*added ammonia instead of vinegar to the red cabbage. Fortunately, it turned a weird shade of green so she knew instantly it was wrong.
*something went wrong with the potato dumplings so they were a soggy, shapeless mess. Still tasted ok, though.
the gravy got scorched while the red cabbage mess was getting sorted. Nasty.
When we moved to New England almost 20 years ago, we had a hard time finding spicy Mexican or Tex-Mex food. One night as a treat my wife decided to make a sort of cream soup with blendered corn and tomatillos, and obviously jalapeños.
Two bites into it my mouth was on raging fire, and despite what I like to think of as a pretty high tolerance for hot/spicy food, it was inedible. It turns out that for some reason my wife got it into her head that jalapeños in New England wouldn’t be as spicy as those in Texas, so she had tripled the number of them in the recipe! Ay caramba! So we put the bowls back down, and beat a hasty retreat down the street for some Thai food.
An interesting sidenote: our dog ate both bowls of soup while we were gone. She was then on diarrhea watch for a couple of days, but there were no ill effects. I’m guessing she never even experienced the effects of the capsaicin.
I’m giggling like mad at all these stories, not least because it wasn’t me doing these things, this time.
My dad could have testified that, like old cooking oil and brake fluid, clorox doesn’t taste very good either, even if it was in a coffee cup. See, my mom thought maybe she could bleach out the coffee stains, and …
I was stir frying some beef some time ago, adding some Worcestershire sauce from time to time and having a sip of Diet Coke from the bottle every now and then as well. Up until I took a swig from the wrong bottle and took a big old slug of Worcestershire. That stuff isn’t meant to be drunk.
I used to have a friend who loved my sweet baked goods, and I was always happy to bake some fresh mango muffins, banana bread, or similar items when I knew when she was about to come over.
Well. Sugar and salt look pretty much the same,even more so if you pour them from their original cardboard boxes into clear glass jars for long-term storage, like I do. As a result, one time when I was expecting my sweet-baked-good-loving friend, I made banana bread with salt for the sugar.
I never have, BUT I have come within seconds of doing so.
When I was a kid, I was told to run the dishwasher while my parents were away. I didn’t realize there was a difference between dishwasher soap and dishwashING soap.
They came home to find the entire kitchen covered in bubbles. Heeheehee.
