A friend of mine once microwaved an insulated mug. :smack:
As for myself, around 14-15, I burned myself while removing a cookie sheet from the oven, leaving a perfectly linear, perfectly horizontal scar approximately 6" long across my stomach (I was shirtless at the time). The scar lasted about 6 years, but wasn’t very noticeable since it was in one of the creases of my abs.
At age 8 or so, unable to locate the nut crackers, I attempted to crack walnuts by forcing them down on a nut-pick. Fifteen minutes later I confronted my mother with a thin piece of metal protruding from either side of my hand.
Her father caught us in the kitchen once.
On a more serious note, the stupidest thing I can think of involved mixing a lot of volatile chemicals together in a jr. chemistry set which exploded and left large purple stains on the wallpaper. Other than that it’s sort of hard for me to have kitchen accidents, since I stick to a KISS method of cooking.
You see I was trying to cut chunks off a block of chocolate, and the knife twisted sideways. I only cut a third of the way through the finger and I could see the ligament. I’m all by myself and the blood is gushing out the cut, unless I used the other hand to seal the two sides. It was a race between stopping the bleeding or passing out on the floor and bleeding to death. I managed to get adhesive tape around the finger to cut off circulation enough to bandage the finger wound closed. I tilted the finger down in the sink and put the tape around the finger, while the blood poured down. I could then wash off and dry the finger enough to slap on bandaids. It took two days to not bleed the moment I removed the bandaid holding the cut flesh sealed together.
I was in the middle of Christmas baking and every dish I had was dirty. The counters and sinks were full. I couldn’t wash dishes for weeks. I had to wrap the finger in plastic and tape it sealed to shower.
So you are not the only one. They need to put warning on chocolate blocks warning of the hazard. I can’t watch them use a meat slicer at the deli anymore. That has more to do with somebody that had a four inch slice on their hand from a deli slicer. I could hit them to this day, for showing me the damn thing.
My aunt was canning tomato sauce in quart jars. She took a filled jar and was walking with it even with her chest. It shattered, and she had scalding tomato sauce all over her chest. I think it was third degree burns. It was a very nasty sight.
Well, (first off, I’m naturally blonde, that explains a lot). This wasn’t my kitchen, but the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in which I bartended when I was in school.
So, one of my first couple of days there (people on the barside could order food too), I was taking a Pupu platter back to the kitchen (one of those snack tower things with eggrolls, pork and with a mini-brazier?)
The little brazier thing was still on fire, so I tried to blow it out. (Hey, it works with fajita candles!)…
The thing goes “PPPPOOOOOFFF” but doesn’t go out (duh). “Huh” I think, “I guess I didn’t blow hard enough”.
So I try again, only harder. “PPPPOOOOOOOOOFFFFF” Luckily for me I didn’t lose any hair, eyelashes or eyebrows, I was just the right distance away. Only after the second try did I realize that it was NOT like the fajita candles.
Sterno, who knew? Also, I’m so glad I had no witnesses to this. Until now.
Do you realize that you can catch a potato on fire in the microwave? OK, do not go out on a drinking bender and then come back home and decide to bake a potato. For 30 minutes in a microwave. And then pass out on the couch. Fortunately, it was caught before the house burned down.
Yikes. So did you merely snag your eyelid and miss the rest of your eye?
Mine is pretty standard. My loaf of banana bread rose more than I had anticipated, so I had to pull out the top rack before I could remove the loaf. It turns out the rack was bigger than I anticipated too. Burned my arm pretty good. On the plus side, I have a pretty badass scar on my right bicep. The thing is, if anybody asks about it, I gotta tell 'em I got it baking a loaf of banana bread.
My mom has done the glass pan on a hot burner as well. There were three of us in the (small) kitchen and no one was even cut. That was lucky. I’ve burned my hands on hot skillets, oven racks or doors, and pans too many times to count. Then there was The Great (and Foolish) Bourbon Experiment, but that wasn’t so much about cooking as stupidity.
I blew up a plate in the microwave one time, nuking some Morningstar Farm veggie wings. My roommate and her then-fiance (now husband) had been watching an episode of CSI in the other room, which inspired them to put the plate pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle and attempt to determine the cause of the explosion. I don’t think they figured it out exactly (I had microwaved veggie wings a hundred times before I blew up the plate), but they did decide where the exact point of the explosion occurred.
Plenty of thing. But the first that comes to mind…
I was making crab cakes. In a nice little muffin tin… Well at some point I broke a glass. I didn’t realize some of the glass got into the crab batter. So I basically served my family crabs al la broken glass.
In my early twenties, a couple who were good friends decided to set me up with a guy that they thought would be a good match. They invited Ralph (the setup) and me to their home for cocktails and dinner. I offered to assist my friend Nikki with the cocktails in the kitchen so we could have some quick “so-whaddya-think-huh?” talk. As I was slicing the lemons for the dry-with-a twist martinis, I brought the blade of a cheap, serrated knife across the tip of my left index finger…ouch! :smack:
Needless to say, after graciously escorting me to the ER for stitches, I didn’t get another date with Ralph.
I managed to slice my finger open making a tuna sandwich… on the tin of tuna. It was one of those ring-pull cans, and as lazy as I am rather than grabbing some utensil I was just using the lid to spoon out the tuna. Somehow - I can’t fathom how, but I managed to slip on it and sliced into the side of my finger until it hit bone. It bled for ages, and even though it was years ago I still have a noticeable scar, and the area is a little numb.
This isn’t an injury story, but I was being stupid in a kitchen.
Back in the day, I worked the morning shift at McDonalds. I was the biscuit maker. One of the perks of biscuit making was that I had plenty of time to create glorious breakfast sandwiches for myself (note: this was not an officially sanctioned perk.) One day I had made myself a sort of Dagwood sandwich out of all the various meat and egg products that I could pile on a biscuit, and as a finishing touch, I decided to lay on a slice of cheese and then pop the whole thing into the oven to warm. After a moment, I opened the oven and found…a naked sandwich! What had happened to my cheese? I added another slice and tried again. Again, my cheese vanished. I added another slice, closed the oven for one second, and flung open the door, hoping to catch a cheese-thieving gremlin in the act…but no. Puzzled, I applied yet another slice of cheese and with eyes locked on my sandwich, began to close the oven door ever so slowly…and the mystery was solved. The powerful convection fan in the oven was blasting my cheese slice right off the sandwich, causing it to hit the oven wall, where it was instantly crisped into oblivion. :smack:
My gas grill had a little ignition spark thingee that wasn’t sparking, so while I left the gas on and the lid closed on the grill, I went inside to find a long fireplace match so I could light it from the little hole on the side of the grill. I remember wondering just before I stuck the match in if I should open the lid or not. I decided not, thinking that flames would shoot up sky high due to the built up gas. Instead, BOOM! The great fireball blasted out the little glass window on the front of the lid. Good thing I was standing beside the grill and not in front of it at the time or I would probably not be posting today. I leave the grill tending in more capable hands now.
A friend of mine in high school fried his right arm at Wendy’s. The way I heard it, it was his first day on the job. Someone had just mopped the floor, and he slipped and put his hands out to catch himself. His right arm went into the hot oil up just past his elbow.
The blistering was epic. He oozed so much he had to change the wrapping almost every hour, because it would soak completely through.
I needed to soften some butter for cooking, so I put half a stick in a glass bowl and put it in the microwave sitting on top of the fridge.
Instead of hitting 10 seconds, as I intended, I punched in 100 seconds. After about 30 seconds, I realized my mistake.
I yanked open the microwave, grabbed the glass bowl of liquid butter… and immediately shrieked and dropped the hot bowl of liquid butter all over myself.
My first instinct was to rip my shirt off and stand over the sink to splash cool water on myself. Of course, this is the exact moment that my male roommate and a bunch of his friends walk in the door. :o
I have had a few mishaps as I cook all the time. The funniest was not me, but my son.
He was 16 and I was attempting to teach him how to cook so he would not starve to death once all the ready to eat food was gone and he was left facing only RAW stuff :eek:
We had two skillets on the gas stove and he made a big point of rotating the big polished aluminum handles off to the side so they didn’t catch on his shirt as he walked by “I like to be careful” he had said.
One of the handles was over the other skillet and hot gas streaming invisibly around it. I am sure you can see the outcome. He grabbed the hot handle and his hand stuck, dumping the hot grease and hamburger all over him as he tried to pull away.
No life threating injuries, but he still waits for his younger brother to cook when they run out of real food like deli meats and cereal.
MacGyver
:eek: ) about the