My worst kitchen injury happened when I had to make flan for my son to take to school for extra credit. I decided a cool way to divide it into individual servings would be to get some of those tiny ice cream cones and coat the insides with melted sugar. So naturally I held a tiny ice cream cone in one hand and poured hot melted sugar in that general direction with the other…Duh! A drop of hot sugar rolled across my finger and instantly hardened. I had time to think, “Whoa that hurt. I’m glad it’s over n… it’s still burning it’s still burning aieeeee!” I took another moment to set the hot pot down on the stove and then got my finger under the cold water and pried the stiffened sugar out of the valley it had carved. I have a cool scar now.
The kicker is that the hot sugar destroyed the cute little ice cream cones and I wasn’t in the mood to fool with that damned flan anymore, so the kid went to school without any extra credit snacks.
One time I was stir frying steak strips in the wok. I’d pour a little Worchestshire sauce in, fry a bit, take a swig of Diet Coke, pour more sauce in, etc. All went well until I took a swig from the wrong bottle.
As for the blisters, they lanced mine. I thought it would hurt, but the scary thing was, I didn’t feel a thing. I mean, my whole arm was numb from pain.
My husband also asked me why I did what I did. Then he said that if I developed gangrene, we’d have to lop my hand off. To which I replied that was no problem - I’d already gotten started.
Cleaning hot peppers with my bare hands and using my finger nails to extract seeds from the hulls of the peppers.
For two whole days it felt like I mashed my thumbs and forefingers with a hammer. The tender skin under my nails was burning away and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Not me, but out of respect for the responsible party I will not mention her relationship to me. We were recently moving out of our apartment. We were cleaning up. I had bought oven cleaner and sprayed down the inside of the oven to let it sit. This person then see’s the can of oven cleaner and thinks, “Oh, thats for cleaning ovens!” She promptly sprays it all over the top and around the outside of the oven. When all the paint started to blister she mentioned it to me. OK so nobody got hurt this time.
I too have done the “frying in the nude”. When I flipped the steak, I splattered hot grease all over my chest. The funny thing is, about a day later I had completely forgotten the source of my injuries. I spent a few days wondering if I had picked up some type of weird fungus.
I dropped some instant rice into a pot of boiling water and rather than stir it, I picked up the pot and swirled it around, splashing hot water into my belly button. The scar below runs about an inch and a half.
I cut myself badly enough to still have a scar now, more than 10 years later- with a butter knife.
The backstory: My boyfriend from high school (with whom I broke up amicably and by mutual agreement when I went off to college and neither of us had a car, just for the record) got a summer job selling Cutco knives. We were (and are) still friends, the knives were nice, and I wanted to help him out by buying something. But I was a poor college student, was clueless about cooking, and lived in the dorms and ate my meals at the dining hall, so I had no real need for kitchen knives. But there were butter knives that had a nice sharp edge, so I bought one, thinking it might come in handy.
Fast-forward a couple of years. I was taking summer school classes and living in an on-campus apartment with a kitchen, and still had the butter knife. I used it to try to cut open a plastic package (yes, I know, that was dumb). It slipped and cut my left middle finger. Badly. Blood all over the place.
I was trying to soak up the blood with a wadded-up paper towel while I frantically searched for the Band-Aids. It bled a lot, and I didn’t want to go to the campus health center because of the stupid way in which I had cut myself. (In retrospect, I probably should have) Then I started worrying that I was going to bleed to death. Then I started really hoping that my atheist friends were right about there being no afterlife- I really did not want to spend eternity explaining how I managed to kill myself with a butter knife.
Fortunately, I did find a Band-Aid and the bleeding did stop. But I’ve still got a scar on my finger, more than 10 years later.
Mr. Neville exploded a glass baking pan. He set it on a stove burner (this is something we have to do in our kitchen, because it is small and we have lots of gadgets) without checking if the burner was on. There were shards of blue glass all over the kitchen. We’re lucky it was blue- it made it a lot easier to find the pieces. He’s damn lucky- he didn’t even get a scratch on him from it.
When I was in high school, my best friend and I were making brownies from a mix. We forgot to put the eggs in, so when the brownies had cooked for the amount of time given on the box, they were still liquid. My friend got the bright idea to put the eggs in right then and there:
Me: They’re frying in the pan!
Her: Stir faster!
We ended up throwing it out. My mom later came into the kitchen and asked if we’d been making some sort of yummy chocolate thing. I truthfully told her “no”.
My mom used to keep bacon grease in a soda can in the fridge. My sister once accidentally drank it. I think this had something to do with her becoming a vegetarian soon afterward.
Plasticene Margaritas would be a good band name, though.
I nuked some ravioli in a small, semi-spherical bowl. When I got it out of the microwave, I was using a cloth rather than an actual pot holder. So it slipped out of my hand and fell about three inches onto the counter. Because of the shape of the bowl, the shock sent exactly one single ravioli rocketing straight into the air until it hit the ceiling. Whereupon it fell back down. Between the time it went up and came down, I had lurched forward to keep the bowl from bouncing around. So it came down on my neck just below my hairline and slipped down my back underneath the bathrobe I was wearing. Sometimes I wonder if anyone ever noticed the red spot on the ceiling.
Fortunately I’ve never done anything in the kitchen that left scars. Most other rooms in the house, but not the kitchen. I’ve been dumb in the kitchen though!
Just stupid:
One day I stayed home from work because I wasn’t feeling well. When I finally got up, I decided that I must have pasta. Things went okay with the cooking, at least until it was time to drain the pasta and pour it into a bowl. I deftly drained the pasta, set a bowl on the stove and poured the pasta in while waiting for toast. Before long I noticed a strange smell. Like…melting plastic? Yup. I put a pastic bowl on a hot burner. Swift move, that.
Stupid and ouch:
Vynce watched my teenage self do this without a word, then couldn’t figure out why I got mad when he laughed. Brothers. So I made myself a nice hot bowl of soup. Being my clumsy self, I dropped the spoon into the bowl. Acting quicker than thought, I reached into the soup and pulled it out. Ow! Hot! And immediately dropped it back in. Nicely scalded fingers. :smack:
I posted about this a couple of months ago. It didn’t involved injury, but it was certainly stupid.
I was craving some homemade pasta and invested some time in the kitchen kneading, rolling out and cutting some fettucine noodles made from good durum wheat pasta flour. I prepared the cream and scallop sauce, cooked the noodles, and drained them in a colander in the sink. Mouth watering, I lifted up the colander so I could pour the pasta into the serving dish with the sauce, but I bungled it. The colander executed a perfect flipover and dumped the pasta into the sink, and the entire mass slithered down into the dirty garbage disposal. When I posted about this before, some Dopers suggested digging it out of the disposal, but that’s a bit of a stretch.
We had to settle for Ronzoni and a late dinner. I’m still cursing myself for that.
I’ve posted before about spooning up a piece of pasta to taste if it was done, then having it fall off the spoon and onto my chin. Good story for everyone who asked me “How did you get that blister on your chin?”
I landed myself in Urgent Care after stabbing myself in the hand with an oyster knife while I was shucking a plateful to welcome my husband home. Got a tetanus shot and a nice big bottle of antibiotics, too, given that the doctor had no idea what little beasties might have been living on the oyster shells. Nothing says “Welcome home, honey!” quite like nearly fainting and getting blood all over the kitchen and bathroom. Sigh.
When I was a kid, I decided to make some cookies while home alone after school. I preheated the oven, and when I opened it to put the cookie sheet inside, flames and smoke came pouring out. I panicked and slammed the oven door closed, then ran to the next-door neighbor’s house to ask for help. Fortunately, she was home and came over to assess the situation. Turns out that my mom had put my lunchbox into the oven to dry off (it was a tiny kitchen, and the oven often doubled as a dish rack). Anyway, it was a metal lunchbox with a plastic handle, and the handle had melted off and caught fire on the oven floor. Opening the door gave it enough oxygen to really burn, and fortunately it completely burned out by the time my neighbor checked on it. Whew.
I still remember a stupid trick my mom did, that fortunately didn’t result in injury. We had some cheap saucepans, my mom’s sense of smell was very poor, and if she got involved in a good book she didn’t notice anything going on around her. Put together the combination with her boiling some eggs on the (electric) stove. She finally surfaced as the last inch or so of saucepan was melting down onto the burner. My dad had to replace the whole unit, obviously.
I pulled the same trick myself a couple years ago, again involving eggs, but this time it was with a good pan that didn’t melt. It did boil dry, however, and to this day I’ve never gotten the outside of the pan completely clean.
I can’t recall too many other kitchen injuries other than very minor ones. But put me together with fabric and a rotary cutter and watch the blood flow!
I burned myself pretty badly making an omelet, once. I was on a boat (that had a full kitchen) and we hit a bit of choppy water. Well, the eggs and the pan went sliding to the floor.
No, nothing touched my legs - I was able to jump out of the way successfully. On bending over to retrieve the pan, however, I put my other hand down to support myself. Huh, I put it directly on the gas burner.
Somehow, I managed not to get any permanent scars, though the blisters made a nice pattern for a few weeks.
I used to have a pet iguana and I was making his morning meal before I went to class. I was cutting up some squash with a big knife and for some reason on the last cut I practically slammed the blade down on my hand and cut myself pretty badly. There was blood everywhere and it was still bleeding when I got to school and it went all over my desk.
Stupid?----Once got one of those neat mandolin slicers at a county fair.
Used it for the first time, decided I didn’t need the holding guard it came with and ended up with a sliced pinky!
Stupider?---- I did the same exact thing again! On the same pinky finger, a nice chunk of meat came off. On the THIRD time I used it, I used the darn guard.
Ten or eleven years ago, I decided I wanted a bagel, except all of our bagels were frozen, and the microwave turned them into unchewable messes. I cut through a frozen bagel with a butter knife, the sharp edge facing my palm.
The band-aid cotton turned purple with blood in about two seconds. There is still a quite visible crescent-shaped scar on the base of my right index finger.
In my defense, I was only eight or so at the time, and it was early.
Note the stupidest, but the most recent: I bought some dental floss, which for some reason the manufacturer encased in a package that could not be opened by conventional means. Not thinking too much, I wandered into the kitchen and found the first sharp thing I saw – a bread knife – a large one with serrated edges. I proceeded to saw through the dental floss package, and on my last thrust, something at the back of my mind made me think, “Hey, I may need to use some caution here.” As I was pondering that, the blade zipped through the rest of the floss packaging and came to rest about a quarter of the way through my index finger.
It bled a lot, but I didn’t experience too much pain; I got all involved in cleaning the finger and wrapping it tight, and my biggest concern was whether I should go and get stitches. Several days of cleaning, smothering with Neosporin and rewrapping, and it ended up as just a curious sliver of scab that, as of a few days ago, fell off. So now it’s looking sorta normal, but along the cut my fingerprints have slid sideways by about half a millimeter.
Speaking of Cutco knives…When I was in the 6th grade I was home alone after school and I sliced my left index finger while slicing banana bread with a serrated bread knife. It didn’t hurt at first, but then I looked at it then the blood started flowing. I rinsed it off in the sink and while rinsing it I was “what it that white thing- crap it’s my finger bone!” I wrapped it with a wet paper towel and waited for an hour for my mom to get home. It ended up needing 3 stitches. I still have a scar 20 years later.
My next favorite is the burn I got when the small pork roast shifted in the pan as I took it from a 400 degree upper oven. I didn’t have it in a proper roasting pan I was using a pan similar to this one. The handle ended up hitting the underside of my right arm about 3-inches up from my wrist. What a nasty burn for what seemed only like nanosecons of contact. I was grateful that Mr. Geeks mom had some Silvadene that she brought over right away. Now I have a small guitar pick-ish shaped scar on my arm.
We were recently moving out of our apartment. We were cleaning up. I had bought oven cleaner and sprayed down the inside of the oven to let it sit. This person then see’s the can of oven cleaner and thinks, “Oh, thats for cleaning ovens!” She promptly sprays it all over the top and around the outside of the oven. When all the paint started to blister she mentioned it to me. OK so nobody got hurt this time.