I’m the diametric opposite. In the kitchen, I have mojo. Things work. I get right into some kind of gracefulness zone and it’s kind of awesome. In the rest of the world, I trip over the lines in the carpet ( :smack: should stop looking at my feet), fall up flights of steps, and regularly shoulder check brick walls as I try to walk around corners but apparently cut things too close. It’s a spectacle. Thank goodness I don’t bruise easily.
Ninjachick, it sounds like you should update your Will everytime you consider entering a kitchen. I think take out and delivery is the only way you’ll lead a long and healthy life.
For what it’s worth I have a scar on my right temple from when I closed my own head in a door.
You sound like me in the last few years. I don’t have quick motor control any longer, and cooKing in the kitchen is a mess. I’ve been cooking for over a year again, and I have to clean a lot afterwards. Stuff I carry just ends up in a fumble and the stuff flies accross the floor and the counters. I’ve found it very important to keep all drawers and cabinets closed so I don’t have to clean all the silverware and gadgets when I drop or do a fumble fling. I have been treaching myself to let stuff spill, so it isn’t a fumble fling.
Fumble Fling; When a container of at liquidy substance you are holding, starts to slip out of your hand or tip over and you don’t let it fall. You try to keep hold of it or catch it as it starts to fall, and you impart forward momentum to the container, so it flies accross the kitchen instead. Liquid is now on cabinets, counter, walls, floor, curtains, and stove top burners. Spillage may vary, depending on talent.
The Fumble Fling is related to the Bottle Ankle-Kick.
An ankle-kick (liberally translated from Spanish) is a gesture where you catch a (soccer) ball with the front of your ankle/top of your foot and, after controlling it, give it a soft push to send it to your toes, then kick it wherever.
The Spanish national team’s goalie instinctively tried to do that with a falling pot of store-bought mayo right before the Japan World Cup :smack:
And, just to prove that you don’t need to be able to play soccer to try and stop falling stuff with your feet, my completely un-sporty (save for sofa-riding) brother did it a year later.
I’ve learned to hate some house items. I wack the backs of my hands against door knobs all the time. and it hurts for about 30 minutes and bruises somtimes. I hit my arm accross old style light switches often and it takes long shallow chunks out of my arms. My hands and arms are always full of wounds. I pull to the right on occasions and I scrap up my shoulder on those days. I will be standing and eventualy I lose my balance starting to fall to the right. People in a rush cut me off in stores and I can’t stop or dodge quickly, so they run into me. I stop in the isle and wait when a group of people come rushing down the isle, they’ll have to do the avoidance, because I can’t.
Well, I just cut my finger with toothbrush. Yup, toothbrush.
This could be an all time low for me.
“Baby measuring cylinder”??? 
Our pediatrician just used measuring tape and a scale! 
Oh, how embarassing that would be 
I too once cut the hell out of a finger while opening a package with a kitchen knife. Needed stitches. And of course I had just moved to that city a week earlier and didn’t know where the hospital was, and the doc-in-a-box location from the phone book turned out to not be open yet (as in, they put the phone number in before the business was even ready for business) and we had to drive all over creation because I vaguely remembered seeing another DIAB on the other side of town (we found it). The fingertip is still numb, 25 years later. But at least it was a knife that was supposed to be sharp (and I still own it).
Oh, and I’m the one who has twice broken an elbow while doing dangerous things like walking on level ground or down stairs.
I sympathize. I once stabbed myself through the finger trying to eat a carmel for breakfast. While I was being prepped for surgery later that morning (because I had managed to sever both a tendon and a nerve) the medical staff tried to make me feel better by telling me stories of clumsy knife antics, only they all told the same story. (That woman was trying to eat a brownie. Apparently, sweets are dangerous.) I felt so much better knowing there were two clumsy women in the valley rather than just me. :dubious:
The handle or the bristles? I can imagine if the handle bit had a sharp ‘seam’ of plastic or something, but if you managed to injure yourself with toothbrush bristles, then I bow in awe.
What I said before about being relatively coordinated in non-kitchen settings is mostly true, but there are exceptions. A few years ago I nearly broke my ankle while…walking to work. Granted, I was wearing Big Chunky Shoes and walking on an unpaved shoulder of the road, but that didn’t keep anyone from laughing at me.
In my defence it’s one of those electric toothbrushes with the disposable heads. I decide to change the head, and when I took off the old one I noticed some crud buidup inside. So I thought, “I’m not putting that in my mouth”, and proceeded to wash it with my hands. Turns out the top of the toothbrush is , in fact, a ginsu knife, and the bathroom soon looked like a scene from a Stephen King novel. The aforementioned finger is now swathed in a Harry Potter band -aid and convalesing nicely. My ego, on the other hand, is scarred for life.
This will make a nice CSI episode, when they figure out the murder weapon was the disasembled toothbrush, that was reasembled and thrown in a dumpster accross town.
I’m usually a decent enough cook, for a nerdy single male, but the last time I attempted to make Cincinnati-style chili to put on hot dogs and pasta, for a bunch of guests, (mind you, this is chili out of a chili-flavor-packet), I made more mistakes than there were steps in the recipe.
The topper was when the chili was finally ready, so I spooned up a big spoonful of chili out of the pot with the big spoon, and poured it over my hot dog. I was holding the hot dog in my other hand. I poured scalding hot nearly-liquid chili over it. Which promptly burned my hand. Which prompty caused me to drop my hot dog. Into the big communal pot of chili.
As soon as you said ‘electric toothbrush’ I knew exactly what you had done. Those things are dangerous!!
I’m periodically absurdly clumsy and graceful at the same time. Like when I tripped over the couch by backing up into it, while also holding a glass of wine. I rolled over the back of the couch, ended up on my back on the seat cushions, and didn’t spill a drop of the wine. Somehow I managed to keep the glass oriented upwards during the whole thing. A couple of minutes later, when everything had gotten sorted out, I reached out to pick up the glass of wine, now safely and properly placed on the coffee table, and somehow tipped the glass over, breaking it and launching wine all over the place.
I have a theory about my clumsiness: if it’s incredibly difficult for normal people, like vaulting over a hedge and landing on a single paving stone, it’s no problem for me. If it’s something any five year old could do without getting dirty, I will spill, drop, spindle, tear, or otherwise ruin something, and possibly injure myself in the process.
Maybe I’m destined to become a stunt man.
Just a quick bit of advice for those who have kitchen problems, I’ll give you a few pointers that might help you guys out. I’m certainly not a great chef, or whatever, but I can cook a few decent meals that will suffice in most cases. There are a few rules that would help most people out.
I think the main problem with cooking is that people tend to get overwhelmed with the multi-tasking involved. A good thing to do is to go over what you’re doing and do a bit of planning ahead. For instance, Eggs with frozen veggies? I assume that you are going to incorporate them all at once. Not too hard to do. Realize that if you don’t feel you can get the eggs cracked and beaten, just do it before you start the veggies.
Secondly, and most importantly, for all amateur cooks, cook SLOWLY! Nothing needs to go past the half-way point, unless you’re cooking meat. Eggs will cook just fine on 1/3rd heat. Eggs cook at a very low heat.
I think it’s the time pressures that really freak out novice cooks. It’s pretty simple if you just manage to take it slow and plan ahead a bit.