Stupid things you've done in the kitchen

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I did the most asinine thing in the kitchen Friday night. My husband decided that he wanted some dessert. I’ve been working on losing some weight recently, so we hadn’t had any in quite a while, but we were having company Saturday, so I figured I’d make some cookies. But wait - we were out of chocolate chips. Eh, no biggie. We’ve got this giant block of chocolate - surely I can chop some off and use that for chocolate chunks. Ummm, right.

As I was carrying the knife to the chopping block, I had a brief image of myself with a bad cut on my hand. Well, I thought, if I’m careful enough that won’t happen. I wasn’t careful enough.

After, oh, 20 seconds of chopping, the knife slipped and, though I was holding it correctly, my left hand tightened reflexively - around the blade. The very, very sharp blade. Which chopped off a bit of my fingertip.

I quickly washed my hands. My husband was glancing from me to the chopping block in horror. I grabbed a towel to stanch the flow of blood. “What are you looking at?” I asked. He wordlessly pointed at the knife. Stuck to it was the bit of my fingertip. “Ewww,” I said. My husband almost threw up.

“Oh, well,” I said. “It’s not much. Let’s have dinner.” So after a few minutes (when the bleeding had slowed enough), we did. It took a remarkably long time for the bleeding to stop (about a half hour). By the time it stopped I realized that I wasn’t quite certain how to treat this. Neosporin just didn’t seem to be enough. We called the RN line on the back of our health insurance card. The nurse advised me to get my injury evaluated as soon as possible. It was 10 p.m. by that time, so I headed to the ER with a book and left with a huge bandage and a sore arm from a tetanus shot.

I don’t know what was stupider - me being so incautious as to lop off a bit of pinkie or me deciding I wasn’t going to have it checked out by the ER until the nurse and my husband told me I needed to.

Anyway, I never realized how frequently I used the shift key until now. Arrrgh.

So, what stupid things have you done in the kitchen?

2

I’ll think about it, and come back with my worst. I haven’t done as severe damage to myself as losing a bit of finger (ewww!), but I do have some cut scars, and a burn on my arm that seems to be permanent. Ya know, reaching into the oven, put arm on rack…

I just wanted to share this thread, from another board. It is pages long, and has some great stuff - I will never again . . . (Part 1) - Food Traditions & Culture - eGullet Forums

Susan

3

I’m going to have to say frying bacon in a tank top. I’m sure I have done stupider, but that is the first that springs to mind.

4

Mmmm… chopped bit cookies.

5

I think the stupidest thing I’ve done is grab the handle of a cast iron skillet bare handed, after using it for the past hour.

I couldn’t use that hand for weeks until the burns went away. I’m lucky there’s no scarring.

6

On the same theme. I made french fries… you know, with burning hot oil…inot in a proper frycooker but in a kitchen pot. Whist wearing a shortie nightgown. Big splash of oil on my upper thigh. Slapped the oil (why? Have no idea.) and big gooey mush of tissue came off, sort of like the brown spots on a banana…

I left the wound alone…did nothing at all to it… but now have a very pale scar that no one can see except nurses and doctors. Ok, since 80% of my friends are nurses make it “that almost everyone can see.”

7

I’ve never done anything really stupid in the kitchen. Of course, I don’t spend much time in the kitchen, and this is why. There are hot things and sharp things and machines that chop, dice and mangle once-living flesh and veggies. Kitchens are scary, scary plaes.

In my shop, on the other hand (or what’s left of it) …

8

I stuck a knife through my palm while trying to remove a pit from an avocado. It may have been the stupidest moment of my life in or outside of a kitchen.

9

I once poured about a liter of boiling water on myself. Chest, stomach, and arms. It was an experience that was exactly the opposite of kittens and sunshine.

10

At least you were wearing something on top…

Deliberately questionable actions? I’ve got a fantastic recipe for caramel pie that requires boiling three unopened cans of sweetened condensed milk for three hours.

I haven’t had one explode on me yet.

Yet.

11

Hmmm…where to begin…

*cooking eggs in a bathrobe.
(I learned butter splatters too)

*Pushing the ice I was chopping back down into the blender with a plastic serving spoon.
(I learned nobody likes Plasticene Margaritas)

*After chopping Habaneros, deciding to rub the itch in my eye.
(I learned why they use pepper in ‘pepper spray’)

*grabbing the white carton with the blue print to pour in my morning coffee, but stopping after I saw orange liquid start to pour.
(Well, I could have added ‘Ovaltine’, stirred it up, and pretended it was non-alcoholic Gran Marnier coffee. But did I? No. I’m such a wasteful Quitter…)

12

Leave that to us professionals.

I’ve done it in the nude at a camp site without an apron.

I do have a very nice scar between my thumb and index finger on my left hand where I stabbed myself.

13

Not exactly stupidity on my part but a weird injury. I dropped my best and sharpest kitchen knife which bounced off the kitchen floor and stuck two inches into the side of my calf stopping when it hit bone. Five stitches and a permanent scar.

14

While not culinary in nature, I did do something incredibly stupid in a kitchen once.

When I was in high school, I was a science geek, amateur chemist and budding pyro. My friend and I decided to make a homemade smoke bomb with salt peter and table sugar. Simply mixing them dry and lighting them didn’t do much, so we decided to melt them together.

Melting went fine. Melted stuff goes into an empty 35mm film cannister (yeah plastic), then the plan was to insert fuse and submerge in ice water to solidify.

Everything was going fine until I was dipping the thing in the ice water. I suppose the shit self-ignited or the fuse went off from the heat. Regardless, I suddenly had liquid hot magma shooting into the palm of my right hand. And the ceiling in the whole house was filled with about 3 feet of thick white smoke.

I had some pretty severe 2nd degree burns to my right hand and had to carry around a moist paper towel for the next week or so.

15

Carefully removed the metal whistle thingy from my old-fashioned teakettle using a hotpad, and then reached my bare arm across in front of the steaming spout to put the whistle down.

I recommend those gel bandages that are waterproof. There’s hardly any scar anymore.

16

Not my home’s kitchen but the kitchen of my summer job at Burger King.

I deep fried my right hand.

We had fry vats with automatic basket lifters. Dump the fries in the basket, put them on the arm, push the button, and the arm would sink the fries into the oil and lift them out automatically after a set amount of time.

One day the arm fell off the motorized post in the back and fell into the oil. I grabbed two long tongs and lifted the arm out and tried to work it back onto the lift rod in the back. Suddenly, the upper tong slipped and the arm fell and dragged my hand into the 375-degree oil.

I yelped and yanked my hand out. It was visibly blistering in probably 10 seconds.

I called my mother, who had been sharing a bottle of wine with my visiting aunt, and she said “What you’d do that for?”

Gee, Mom. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I lost about 10 days from work while I healed from that. The ER just cleaned it in a miniature whirlpool bath, wrapped it loosely and told me to keep in higher than my heart and don’t break the blisters (they were protective).

It looks just fine today.

Of course I have the usual compliment of nicked fingers, chopped skin, etc. (including one that me see my own muscle sheath. Wow!) from inattentive chopping but the fry vat is the best story.

17

I once burned myself with a Ravioli.

On the back of my neck.

18

My stupidest thing I also posted in the “worst pain” thread. In my defense, I was 15. I was cooking rotis, which is Indian flatbread lightly fried in oil on a griddle. Well:

Mistake # 1. I put way too much oil.
Mistake # 2. I was home alone.
Mistake # 3. I had never cooked them alone before.
Mistake # 4. I flipped it toward me, instead of away.

As you can guess, mistake # 4 was the clincher. I could have done all the others and still be OK. The roti splashed in the oil, and the oil splashed onto my right hand, from the thumb down to the wrist, all up my forearm, and some of it even splashed onto my upper arm. I was able to get my face away fast enough at least.

Blisters formed, huge puffy ones, and I had to call my mom and we had to go to an emergency clinic. My arm was wrapped for three weeks and I had recurring nightmares in which it was scarred black, or even worse.

The scarring at this point is so faint, I have a hard time pointing it out.

I would like to hear the ravioli story. I imagine a fellow flipping accident. :slight_smile:

19

Yeah, when I opened the thread, I thought, “In the kitchen? Not so much. Naked with long, unbound hair cooking over a campfire - now there I’ve got some stories!” (But they all end up with minor burns and other people pointing and laughing.)

20

I had no idea these would be such gory stories! I came in here to tell about the other day when I was cooking pasta on the stove. I’d set the microwave timer to 12 minutes and busied myself online. The timer dinged, I got up and opened the microwave door, saw that nothing was in it, wondered why it went off, then went back to my computer. About 10 minutes later the smell of very mushy pasta hit me.

But if we’re going for gory, I once tried to open one of these lollipops with the only thing handy - a steak knife.

I ended up with a hole in my eyelid that I could *just * see through.