The last thread like this had quite a few tales of people taking naps or going to other floors to read while something was on the stove. I assume the fire department made sure that the lesson stuck.
About a year or so ago, I put some taco shells in the toaster oven to heat up. Left the room for a few minutes. The next day, I went out and bought a new fire extinguisher and toaster oven.
Opening up a spice bottle to sprinkle some on, only to find the plastic thing with all the holes has either been removed (usually by me so that I could access the stuff with a tea/tablespoon) or stuck to the lid is always fun.
When I was a kid, my grandmother asked me to wash some lettuce for the salad. So I put some soap and water in the sink and…
One of my kids’ favourite things to tell people is that I once burnt ice cream.
I was making the custard on the stove, before putting it in the ice-cream maker, and I let it burn, but they don’t say it like that.
As an engineer, you need to discover the beauty of weighing, rather than measuring volume, for cooking. Think about it - most ingredients, like flour, sugar, etc - vary greatly in volume depending on how well packed they are. If you go by weight, you are WAY more accurate.
And fewer dishes, too. Put bowl on scale, tare to zero. Add flour. Reset back to zero, add sugar. Reset back to zero, add next ingredient.
Once you go weight, you’ll start being REALLY pissed when some stupid recipe only includes volume measurements.
Yep. Going mad scientist while baking is a good way to up up with Chocolate Macadamia nut flooring tiles.
The glass cups with various measures on them are for measuring liquids. The cups that have one size for each volume (a 1/3 cup,a 1 cup, a 1/4 cup) are for dry measure. It’s hard to get a perfectly accurate measure (precisely to the line) of dry ingredients with the liquid cups. With the 1/4 cup measure etc, you scoop up a heaping cup of flour, or sugar or whatever, and then level it completely full with a knife or some such. With the glass cups, you’d have to tap it level, add a little, take out a little, tap it level again, etc.
The slight difference in accuracy rarely matters for everyday cooking, but since baking=chemistry, it can matter in baking.
In the US, recipes almost never are given in weights. So if you expect to rely on weighing, get some British cookbooks, otherwise you’ll be frustrated.
More & more recipes have weights listed as well as volume measurements. That said, even if they don’t have weights, it’s not very hard to remember a cup of flour is 5 ounces, a cup of sugar (brown or white) is 7 ounces, and a stick of butter is 4 ounces. That’s 90% of your baking weights right there.
You fight ignorance, Sir. 
Label your spices clearly.
Cumin and cinnamon are *not *interchangeable.
(OTOH, after adding curry to a batch of pintos, I did end up with a delightful pineapple chicken dish.)
I had a Thanksgiving debacle that remains, uh, scorched into my memory.
After drinking way too much the night before, I got up and prepared Thanksgiving dinner for my brother. I stuffed the turkey and, naturally, left the bag containing the neck, liver, kidneys and heart inside the turkey.
I wish that was the debacle.
Anyway, I had extra stuffing left over, so I put it in a casserole dish and placed it on top of the stove until it was time to put the dish into the oven. Of course, the burner on top of the stove was on, which created a nice heating unit for the bottom of the casserole dish.
I left the room and came back into the kitchen some time later to find a lot of smoke and a heavily burned casserole dish of stuffing. I was so upset when I discovered the burnt stuffing that I removed it from the burner of the stove and placed it directly on the counter, which quickly began to crackle and turn brown.
With the remnants of the alcohol still in my system, I began to cry, picked up the casserole dish, and carried it into the living room to show my brother what I had done. For reasons I still question, I placed the casserole dish onto the arm of the sofa on which my brother was sitting, and promptly burned a hole into the arm of the sofa.
You have reminded me of another one of mine! Cinnamon is also not interchangeable with chili powder. Worst French toast ever.
Never reach over a skillet for something.
The brand on the inside of my right arm is 23 years old and still vivid, as is the memory.
My mom had a hand mixer that had a cord that could be detached from the mixer. IOW, one end plugged into the wall, the other plugged into the mixer. Once she was using it and the cord fell out of the mixer into the batter. She grabbed the cord and licked the batter off of it.
Mmmm - french toast is a savoury dish in my house, and that sounds yummy! Of course, if you put syrup on it as people are wont to do (instead of ketchup, as God intended), you’d get something yucky, I guess.
It might have been okay if I had made savory French toast, which I do occasionally (but never with ketchup- yuk!) but my batter already had sugar, vanilla and orange zest in it- the chili powder just didn’t go with it. I served it up with powdered sugar and jam.
Lets see, I mistook TBS as LBS and unthinkingly bought four pounds of butter for a recipe. I caught the mistake before I made the dish, but ended up eating a lot of bread and butter snacks for a few weeks.
I have previously mentioned the time I burned the back of my neck with a hot ravioli.
As a kid, I didn’t know how to scramble eggs so I cranked up the stove to max, placed a pan on it and let it get good and hot before cracking an egg on the rim and letting it drop in. It fairly exploded on contact and in a flash I had an egg that was raw on top and carbonised on the bottom. Later on, I covertly learned the proper method by watching mom do it while I helped.
My sister forgot to put water in the Cup O’ Noodles before nuking it.
One roomie of mine didn’t know that one should drain the grease from the hamburger before adding the rest of the hamburger helper. It didn’t ruin the dish, but all that grease made us “Uncomfortable” for the rest of the night.
Using the blender to make slushies. I had done this a million times. Had a full blender of strawberry slushie. Went to remove the container from the base, and for some reason thought you had to twist it 90 degrees. This was enough for the base to unscrew. Lift up and the slushie went all over the motor, and counter.
Baking potatos. Always put holes in them before baking. Friend and I were baking some potatos to have with dinner. She went in to check if they were done by poking it with a fork. It exploded. She had burns on her arms, and a small burn on her neck where they potato landed.
When my wife went to visit family she left a note on the stove that read “Adult Supervision Required”
-Otanx
I put a pot of water on to boil one day and turned on the wrong burner. One that was still covered with a burner cover. I discovered this mistake a few minutes later when I noticed the air in the kitchen was getting hazy. Upon further inspection I found a thin trail of smoke coming from the burner cover - as the electric coil under it was heating up, the paint was vaporizing on it in a spiral pattern. Kind of neat to watch, but a dumbass thing to do.
Yep. Hot pan then cold oil is the general way to do it, unless you’re deep frying, in which case you bring the oil up to temperature with the pan. I still remember the Frugal Gourmet’s mantra: “Hot pan, cold oil, food won’t stick.”
My friend Sonia’s daughter wanted to bake her mom a birthday cake. She wouldn’t let us help her and followed the directions carefully. So when it said “grease the bottom of the pan” she greased the BOTTOM of the pan and set off the smoke alarm which brought the fire department.
Years later, when Bill Engvall did a joke on the same subject, saying a fan had told him about it, she was convinced I had told on her. I still totally deny it.