Also, I can’t think of a specific instance, as this has happened more than once, but I have repeatedly over the years confirmed the old adage that hot glass is visually indistinguishable from room temperature glass, as I go to pick up the recently removed baking dish cover, now sans pot holder or towel.
Another one I’ve done a time or six is, after putting the skillet in the oven to finish an omelette or frittata, removing and plating it, I will occasionally forget that the all metal pan came out of the oven thirty seconds before and hasn’t shed much of the several hundred degrees it had accumulated. Now I don’t bother to take the damn towel off. It only took me a couple nicely lined scars on my palm to come up with that little trick. :smack:
In cleaning up after putting the cake in the oven, my mother wondered where the extra box of brown sugar came from,:dubious:until she realized something was missing from the batter. She made me wash and dry the cake tins while she remixed the batter. Good thing it was only banana bread which is virtual foolproof anyway.
Youtube video on how to safely put out a grease fire - this is pretty shocking, what getting water on an oil fire would do. I’m curious now; the vat of hot oil wasn’t on fire, but cold water on hot oil would be a hot, spitting mess, I’d guess - he’d be looking at third-degree burns on his face and arms, I think.
I heard about a kitchen worker who was cleaning vents over the grill with the deep fryers full of hot oil - apparently he stepped right into the deep fryer. :eek:
I heard about a guy working in a chip shop whose party trick was to dip his hand in batter then into the fryer, the desired result being a very hot hand coated in yummy fried batter. He stopped after the time he got the timing wrong and had to explain to casualty staff how he’d come by his burns.
With the exception of the existence of vegetables, I did the same thing. I had removed my chicken from the pan, and was going to make a nice pan gravy with the drippings. The pyrex dish doesn’t behave the same way as the metal dishes I had used previously.
I thought I had it all cleaned up, until a few weeks later (cleaning up another mess), I impaled one of the razor sharp pieces of pyrex into my right, ring finger, at the inside of the knuckle at the end of the finger. It lived there for a good week until it was just too painful to leave in place. Jim Beam as an anesthetic, a sharp knife, and some tweezers took care of the problem, though I still have a bit of a hard scar. The sliver was a 3/8" long, 1/4" wide, 1/4" tall dagger of glass. It makes me appreciate my health coverage now. I had none then, thus the home surgery.
Other mistakes. Making hot sauce from atomic level peppers from the garden… without gloves… then getting (trying to get) frisky with Mrs Butler. :eek: She got heated up… but not in a good way.
Hot glass, and hot metal, look exactly the same as cold glass, and cold metal. They do not feel the same.
We realized spaghetti would burn at some point as kids do to it’s nearness to fire at some point. We then started using it to light candles with hard to reach wicks.
I was 21 years old before I realized that if you microwave tin foil, it will catch fire. I discovered this in the kitchen at my office. Luckily, I caught it, put the fire out easily, and none of my coworkers ever found out.
One more story? One time, my then-boyfriend and I decided to make dinner together, and we finished off with my all-time favorite dessert: brownies topped with vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate sauce. We baked the brownies, and they came out tasting absolutely fantastic. Only problem was, we were trying to watch our weight, and there was no way we’d be able to resist knowing that the brownies were in the house. So we dumped the batch down the garbage disposal.
I once tried baking a pudding cake in a pan that was a few inches too small.
Pudding slop ALL OVER the inside of the oven. Yeah.
Now, how about some stories about others?
SIL deliberately left out the oil from a cake she was baking and did not substitute anything in its place because, she said, some family members were trying to lose weight.
Cousin made a no-carb stuffing for Thanksgiving that ended up tasting like what one would imagine boiled cardboard to taste like if one ever ate such a thing.
She made me wash and dry the cake tins while she remixed the batter. Good thing it was only banana bread which is virtual foolproof anyway.