I’m sure I’ve done this thread before, but I couldn’t find it. It’s always a fun one to do again.
Share stories of kitchen mishaps that you’ve either seen others do or have directly caused yourself. This can be anything from overbrined pork to pressure cookers producing mushroom clouds.
My first apartment roommate was a good guy but hardly ept in the kitchen. He was a big fan of frozen fish filets. You know, deep fried then frozen, just pop into a preheated oven then enjoy.
Well, one day, he decided that double-deep fried would be double yummy. So he proceeded to fill a sauce pan with oil, then put it on a high burner. Oil being just like water, of course, it needed to come to a good rolling boil for it to be useful. So he waited. And waited. And waited.
It never came to a boil. It was getting rather smoky, though. He decided that while it might not be hot enough, he’d give it a shot anyway. So he dropped in the fish filet. The resulting explosion was rather impressive. The hot oil ejecta reached the furthest corners of the tiny kitchen. It’s a miracle my roommate wasn’t badly burned.
So we did the safety/cleanup thing, then my roommate fished his fish out of the fishy oily fish mess. Ah, perfectly fried to a delicious deep golden black. And still frozen on the inside.
A minor mishap, but what the hell. The first time I ever tried to make meatloaf, I recalled that my mother always added about a tablespoonful of pancake syrup. Maybe it helped bind it together, I don’t know. Anyway, I was out of pancake syrup, but I figured honey was close enough.
Even the dogs wouldn’t eat the resulting “sweetloaf”.
My sister once decided to make zuccini bread. She either couldn’t find or didn’t have one ingredient. It was either baking powder or yeast. Mmmm, zuccini hardtack.
I made a volcano cake once, by accident. Before you all get too excited it wasn’t a hot lava spewing type of volcano it was more of a hot lava oozing type of volcano. I misread the directions and used 2 tablespoons of baking soda instead of 2 teaspoons. Fortunately, I had decided to put the bundt pan on a cookie sheet so after it started cooking and boiling over the sides at least it didn’t end up on the bottom of the stove. It was quite fascinating watching it though, the batter just kept spewing over the sides, I was sure there would be nothing left in the pan but there actually was enough left for a cake when it finally finished. It took much longer to cook than the recipe called for but it was also still edible so it wasn’t too much of a disaster. It actually tasted pretty good but that was probably because it was made with milky way bars.
I was recently toasting almonds for my almond truffles under the broiler. I was also blog rolling at the same time. I forgot the almonds until I couldn’t breath, and when I clawed through the smoke to check on them, discovered that they were actually on fire. Big, flaming fire. I closed the oven to rob the fire of oxygen and turned off the broiler, so it went out a couple of minutes later, but all I had left was a big, charred lump of black stuck to my non-stick pan.
I had put a tablespoon or two of oil in an aluminum frypan and was heating it up - over much too much heat, it turned out (I was an inexperienced cook). The phone rang, and I went into the next room to answer it. A few minutes later, the smoke alarm goes off. I figured my oil was smoking, so I hung up and walked into the kitchen - to see foot-high flames arising from my pan.
I didn’t have an extinguisher (I do now!) and I knew water was bad for an oil fire, so I grabbed the handle of the pan to throw it out onto our concrete porch. Unfortunately as I carried the pan to the door it began to melt, and hot molten aluminum dropped onto the carpet and burned holes in it. Also, the kitchen had to be repainted because of smoke damage.
My ex-roommate did this one day when I wasn’t home. I came home to find curry powder on the stove, chicken fat in the garbage. our pan sitting on the back porch looking not quite right and no curried chicken. I’m just glad that he didn’t burn the house down, he was fully capable with his inability to do anything the proper way.
I’ve got a few. This is not to say I’m an inept cook. I’m an average cook, but as I only taught myself in the last five years or so, I’ve had a few mishaps.
[ul]
[li] Chicken Tikka Makhni, which is supposed to be in a cream sauce. Forgot to add the baking soda or powder or whatever. Only needed one spoon, but instead of a rich, thick cream sauce, I ended up with thin watery gruel. Eew.[/li][li] Fried Eggplant. This weekend, actually. I dunno what I did. It tasted great, but the texture left much to be desired…it was all mushy and gross-looking.[/li][li] **Paneer ** (Homemade cheese). My first trial, and it came out beautifully until I put it in the syrup (I was making sweetened cheese balls). Well, they all fell apart and crumbled, and I was left with them floating in the syrup.[/li][li] **Burning plastic. ** I posted this one in the MMP some time ago, but I accidentally turned on a burner underneath a plastic container and it lit on fire. Electric stove, by the way. But that’s not the worst part…instead of picking it up and lightly tossing it in the sink, I panicked and screamed, and my boyfriend came running, looked at me like this :dubious: and tossed it in the sink for me. [/li][li] Hot oil. The worst one ever was when I was 15…I was trying to make rotis while my mom was away, and put too much oil on the tawa (griddle). I slapped the roti down, and the oil splashed up, burning my arm from thumb to elbow. I had huge, ugly blisters, and ended up having it wrapped for three weeks. I had nightmares that the scars would be horrific, but instead, they’re very faint and happen to be almost the same color as my skin (so glad I have brown skin!). You can’t even see them unless I point them out. [/ul][/li]tdn, I also made keema-aloo this weekend, with fresh rotis. It came out divine. You should have been here.
Some buddies decided to make pancakes, but the recipe called for eggs and they didn’t have any eggs.
But they’d seen the mayonaise commercial, “You have to break a few eggs to make REAL mayonaise”. Figured to substitute mayo for the eggs.
Except they didn’t have any mayonaise. They did have some Miracle Whip.
Just use your imagination. Yep, that gross. They actually looked great, (I didn’t try any) but had a gooey center.
Me? I was cooking some beef and onions in a covered skillet. It was simmering away when I decided I needed to make a beer run, this is maybe 9 PM. All I had was a $100 bill, the local convenience store wouldn’t take one of those. I could pop into the local bar, buy 1 beer with the $100 and slam it, head to the store.
So I turned the burner off and headed out.
Met some buddies at the bar and started shooting the bull, then shooting pool. Some time had passed, but now I didn’t need any beer and I went home. Only to discover I hadn’t turned the burner off. The house was so full of acrid smoke I literally couldn’t see. Skillet as ruined, glowing beef and onion embers in the bottom. The only thing that kept it from bursting into flames was the lid, so it just smoldered for a couple of hours. What a stinking mess!
I was making lobster bisque and wound up with a carton of sweetened cream instead of plain. I have never seem presweetened heavy cream before or since.
Not my boo-boo, but my BIL was baking a chicken in the oven and thought he set the timer on the microwave for an hour. Instead, he turned on the microwave for an hour with nothing in it. He says the glass plate was on fire and it burned a hole through the bottom of his brand new microwave!
I was cooking one evening, with my daughter helping. The recipe called for mixing some sour cream into the pan drippings to make the sauce. I took the chicken out the glass casserole I’d been using and mixed in the sour cream, right out of the refrigerator.
The casserole dish exploded, shooting shards of glass and blobs of sour cream all over the kitchen.
My daughter and I looked at the mess and simultaneously said
I was watching a Good Eats marathon one Sunday a few years back. I was getting hungry, and decided to make something from that show. Hmm, the pan-fried trout sounded great. I ran off to the store and got the ingredients.
It was a hot day and I had no AC, so I was wearing naught but undies in my apartment. I was trying to remember the recipe from scratch while I was cooking. As I flipped the fish over, I tried to remember what Alton said about flipping the fish. “Oh yeah”, I mused, as my flaky and tender trout fell to the raw side, “always flip it away from you. Otherwise…”
Logic is no substitute for experience and/or scientific knowledge. Especially when that logic is fatally flawed.
Said roommate from the OP was entertaining his girlfriend. He’d made up a big pitcher of iced tea, apparently substituting ice cubes with sugar granules. He gave his GF a glass, and when she finished it he offered her another. “No thanks”, she said. “It’s too sweet for me.”
“So just put some more Sweet’n’Low in it”, he replied.
No amount of arguing would convince him that more Sweet’n’Low did not equal less sugar.
My ex put some fried chicken on and went to lie down. When I came home four hours later, the house was fill of smoke, the chicken was a charred mess, and I had to throw the frying pan out. Fortunately the kitchen door was closed and the windows were open.
He also put a cast iron pan on the stove, took the lid off and put it on a burner, then turned on the burner with the lid on it. I noticed it ten minutes later, turned the burner off, then put the lid in the sink and turned on the water. Steam burns are very very painful, and I had four of them.
Every now and then, I take it upon myself to cook something I’ve never even seen before, let alone eaten. When I was fourteen, this was fudge. (No, seriously, I’d never had fudge before. This was before all the candy/fudge stores seemed to spring up in the malls.)
So, I got the recipe, and my dad took me shopping. I could not find evaporated milk. The only thing I could find was sweetened, condensed milk, so I asked my dad what the difference was. “Oh, they’re the same thing,” he assured me. So, I used that.
Now, not ever having even seen fudge before, I had no idea that the hard, crumbly, gritty stuff that was the end product was not what was supposed to happen. My parents refused to eat any. My brother adored it (it was very sweet). I ended up asking a friend who laughed for about five minutes before explaining the sweetened, condensed milk was much different from evaporated milk. In my family, we now refer to those results as “boo-boo fudge”. I still give my dad a hard time, and my brother still occasionally, wistfully asks for some if I mention making a batch of regular fudge (which I do just fine now).