OK, not me, but a woman I knew. She was an intelligent woman, but just not a good cook. Once she was making cookies and the recipe called for cream of tarter. She didn’t have any, but she did have tarter sauce, so wasn’t that pretty close?
A second incident with the same woman was when she tried to make candy. There’s a test of temperature where you drop a drop of the candy into a glass of cold water, and it will solidify into a soft ball, or a hard ball, or a soft crack, or whatever. This URL will describe it better than I. She misunderstood the hard ball into meaning to stir and heat the candy solution until it formed a hard ball in the pot. She was stirring this molten, semi-glowing mass of sugar in a pan until her wooden spoon caught fire.
One I did: I was 11 or 12, and don’t even recall what I was cooking, but my pan caught fire. I managed to very calmly grab the box of baking soda and dump it over the fire, effectively putting it out, before having hysterics.
Another one I did: I was 22 or so, and my roommate and I were making a big dinner for some friends. I drained the potatoes and dumped them into a glass bowl (that had been used for the same purpose at least a hundred times before). I then added milk, butter, salt, and pepper, and mashed away. About two minutes after I finished mashing the potatoes, the bowl asploded all over the kitchen.
And yet another one I did: I was making a cake, and used to crack the eggs right into the mix. Well, this one time the egg had a imperfectly form little chick in it. I nearly threw up. That cake never got made. And now I crack eggs into a small bowl before putting them into my batter.
And here’s the one my then-fiance did: I stopped by his apartment one afternoon, and as I walked down the hall the smell of something nasty burning grew stronger and stronger. When I got to his door, it was apparent that the smell was coming from his apartment. I knocked. No response. I knocked louder. No response. I pounded on the door, getting ready to go bother a neighbor and call the fire department, when the door opened. He stood there, his hair sticking out in every direction, as he’d been asleep. He was heating up some split pea soup. Put it on high and went to sleep. The whole building reeked of it, and in the 6 months he stayed in that apartment, the smell never entirely went away.
I’ve only set our current oven on fire twice. One time I was roasting peppers for chili, the other time I was boiling water and some schmutz on the burner pan caught fire.
When I was living in California, I melted a pot boiling water for ramen. It was my only pot… and we didn’t have a fridge yet, so I went to Carl’s Jr.
There were balloons over the tops of the bottles and they still exploded? How is that possible? Unless I’m not following your description, the balloon is going to pop long before the bottle explodes.
My mother and pressure cookers. Lethal combination.
She had an old Presto pressure cooker - aluminum with a gasketed locking lid - the thing looked like it was designed by Soviet engineers during the Cold War. Very industrial. She decided to stew a somewhat elderly and extremely fit hen to something approaching chewability in this monstrosity. Chicken and accompanying vegetables and liquid were put in pressure cooker and put on the heat with the hissy gadget on top. She then went outside to settle some childish dispute or other and forgot about the chicken in the pressure cooker. Bad idea. Her attention was returned to the kitchen by a thunderous explosion - the pressure cooker had gone off. Up to that point I did not know that an entire stewing hen could exit the pressure cooker through the steam valve. Bones and all. The hissy gadget remained embedded in the ceiling for several years afterward, my father refused to remove it on the premise that it would serve as a reminder. It didn’t.
Fast forward a few years. My mother has acquired a bigger, better and even meaner pressure cooker that she used for canning fish, jams and jellies. Our grapevine was in full fruit and she decided that grape jelly was the thing and the pressure cooker was ideal for cooking down the jelly - “Look at the instructions, dear - it says you can do it right here.” Coward that I am, I declined to participate in this vaporific adventure and went to bed. An hour or so later, the entire household was wakened by another thunderous explosion. This time it was grape jelly exiting through the steam valve. I’m sure it could have launched a Saturn rocket. The entire kitchen was Concord purple. Mom had forgotten the hissy valve again and there it was - embedded in the ceiling a few inches from its predecessor. Several years and several coats of paint later, that kitchen still had a purple aura.
Dad put a picture frame around the hissy valves on the ceiling. Mom asked me if I wanted the pressure cooker. I didn’t.
[QUOTE=Wile E]
IThe first was my mothers attempts at homemade wine. She put little balloons on top of the bottles, the balloons were supposed to expand with the gas produced by the fermentation and I think that eventually they were supposed to deflate as the gas disappated but that’s all theory since the bottles still exploded. The smell of grapey fermented yeast permeated the porch for ages.
/QUOTE]
Sorry - I am unable to resist here. Was the wine “Chateau Neuf du Pop”?
One year, when I was in college, I rented the first floor of a tiny 2-floor house. One day I decided to make chicken soup. I cut up a whole chicken, stuck it in a pot with water and seasoning, turned the burner on high, went into the bedroom and went to sleep.
Several hours later, I was awakened by the sound of my upstairs neighbor crashing through the back door, to see if the smoke-filled house was on fire.
The glass bottle did not explode but the balloons sort of shot off the bottles, spewing the yeasty grape juice so I used a little literary license because saying something exploded is much cooler.
The Kimchee, however, really did explode.
My great grandmother was cooking apples in her pressure cooker. The brown stain was still on the kitchen ceiling when my mother sold the house decades later.
I’m told that the newer pressure cookers are not nearly so dangerous but as yet I haven’t tested that theory.
Here’s another exploding pressure cooker. One time, my grandmother’s decorated the kitchen a lovely shade of pea soup. It required both repainting and re-wallpapering the entire kitchen.
I cooked a brisket in the oven a couple of months ago and kinda overfilled the baking dish with olive oil and various seasonings, thereby causing a fair amount to bubble over out of the dish and eventually had a decent lake of liquid on the bottom of the oven. It was partially baked on and pretty gooey and I didn’t see any oven cleaner and figured wiping it up would either ruin a towel or tear a paper towel.
So at about 10:00 pm I locked the oven door and turned it on to self clean. In my defense, it was the first time I’d ever used self clean. I had no idea that once you start self clean it can’t be stopped. You can’t turn it off and the door is automatically locked. The smoke started billowing out after about 10 minutes. Did I say smoke? The prolific, nauseating, eye watering, acrid clouds of funk started billowing out after about 10 minutes. That’s when I discovered the unstoppable cycle and permalock door with the gaping gapped gap. Opening every window in the kitchen, living room, den and library didn’t deter it from heading upstairs to the bedroom so it could be filtered through my pillow. On it’s way past, it was sure to electroplate itself onto the smoke alarm. It’s not a smoke alarm with a little transistor battery. This one has red wires that went into the ceiling and is about as unstoppable as the solid rocket bosters on the shuttle. 'Bout as loud too. After disableing it with a letter opener and a rock, I headed back downstairs and tried to fan the smoke column towards one of the open doors with a towel. I also ran out to the fuse box in the garage and looked for anything marked “oven”. I settled for “1st floor” instead and then ran back in to fan some more since now the ceiling fans were, as were the lights, without power. So I’m standing in a blackened kitchen at midnight or so, can’t see a damn thing, arms are tired from fanning, nose hurts and thinking to myself man, did my wife ever pick a good night for business travel. What sucked even worse though was that this didn’t get the oven clean. Now it was just a baked funk and you’ll have to ask my wife how she ever got that mess clean. I was for just buying a new oven.
O, please do not fear the pressure cooker! They’re soooo cool! You can cook stuff so fast! Even if you have an old-fashioned one (which is what I have), they’re not scary at all. Just always look (look, with your eye!) through the vent pipe before you put the lid on to make sure it’s clear of potential blockages, don’t fill it more than 2/3 (most cookers have a line inside the pot) and never walk out of the kitchen when it’s on the heat—but doesn’t that rule really apply to most stovetop cookware, anyway?
Based on the stories in this thread, I’d say the problem isn’t walking out of the kitchen, it’s staying alert enough to actually go back into the kitchen within, say, an hour.
Das Glasperlenspiel - I laughed so hard at your story that my kids came running from all over the house to see what was so funny. Thanks for sharing that!!