I once absent-mindedly poured the better part of a kettleful of boiling water directly into a 3/4 full caterer’s-size tin of Nescafe. (My parents bought a lot of things in economy/caterer size to save money. This was the first - and last - time they did it with coffee.)
Obviously my brain was functioning sufficiently well to know that hot water goes on the coffee, but hadn’t quite made it to the point of coffee should be in the cup. :smack:
Heh, this story made me laugh.
I thought of another, that wasn’t an injury at all, but still stupid.
This was in our old apartment, with the electric stove.
Mistake # 1: I don’t know what was thinking, but I put a plastic Tupperware dish on one of the burners.
Mistake # 2: I turned on the wrong burner when I was cooking something - yes, it turned out to be the one under the Tupperware.
Well, the Tupperware actually lit up. I mean, it was on fire. And for some reason, my brain shut down. Instead of thinking, “The sink’s a foot to the left, pick it up quickly and dump it in the sink,” my mind went 'FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" and I screamed. :smack:
My SO came running in, took one look at the situation, and calmly put the Tupperware into the sink. And then proceeded to chastise me. And I don’t blame him!
Ivygirl is no shrinking violet. She screams bloody murder if she stubs her toe.
That said, she decided it would be a good idea one afternoon to slice an orange. With a butcher knife. She sliced the inside of her knuckle down the bone.
I was at work, my husband was napping, and all she did was whisper her brother’s name.
So, stubbed toe…scream the house down. Cut your finger bad enough to need stiches…whisper
That’s really weird - I blew up a plate nuking Morningstar Farm’s veggie bacon.
[Nitpick]
Shouldn’t that be a raviolo, if it was just a single one?
[/Nitpick]
I have had numerous cuts and burns in the kitchen but the one I remember most is the time I used a butter knife to cut open a package and cut my finger badly. It bled a lot and took a while to heal. My theory is that knives intended for cutting have much thinner, sharper blades so leave a cleaner, thiner cut which heals nicely (providing you didn’t actually cut off bits of flesh). Butter knives are thick and have that little serrated bit that just digs out chunks of flesh.
Kevbo’s voice of kitchen experience:
When the spatula you were using to make peanut brittle (covered in molten sugar, AKA napalm) falls out of the pan, do not attempt to catch it unless you really enjoy second and third degree burns.
When the electric carving knife slides off the counter, do not attempt to catch it. Even when not running, the serrated blades can produce an extreamly painful wound.
Do not fry bacon when naked.
Just ran my thumb through the mandoline Saturday night. Chopping carrots for soup, for some reason I figured that it’d be fun to use the mandoline instead of my knife. Worked great for the potatoes and onions which are short and fat so you can use the finger guard.
Figured I’d do part of the carrot until it got low enough that fingers could be at risk.
Obviously miscalculated.
Chug, chug, chug, CHUNK. Ouch, damn, poo, golly gracious, other bad words…run for faucet, clamp paper towel on it, run to bathroom for neosporin and bandages.
Wash mandoline, put away, get out knife and carefully finish chopping veggies.
Soup is good though. Can’t even taste the blood.
Not Injury-related:
When I was younger, I decided to make play-doh (we had a recipe) by myself. Instead of two TABLESPOONS of oil, I added two CUPS of oil. Yeah, the play-doh was unsalvagable.
Injury-Related:
We were baking pies in home ec class (middle school). I went to grab the pie (in it’s glass dish) out of the oven, and had just gotten a good grip on it with one hand when the other pot holder slipped, leaving me grabbing the oven rack with my bare hand. I am somewhat proud to say that I managed to not drop the pie dish, and instead steadied it with the injured hand (after I retrieved the potholder) and placed the pie on the counter quite calmly before I plowed my group-mates out of the way to get to the sink.
More pot holder shenanigans. This time, I was baking cookies in my apartment. Again, potholder slips, leaving me grabbing the barely-out-of-the-oven pan. I managed to set down the pan before I started swearing.
A story I witnessed just too good to leave out: We were preparing for some experiment (I have no idea what it was) involving pop bottles in one of my high school science classes. The little ring of plastic around the neck had to be removed, so a couple of students were over by the lab sinks doing this while everyone else was otherwise engaged. One of the people cutting off the rings calls for the teacher, in a very normal tone of voice, but I looked over… he looked much paler than usual. The teacher got over and immediately backed up and looked like he wanted to puke, and started babbling instructions about cleaning it, wrapping it in paper towels and going to the office. Turns out the scissors he had been using to cut the rings off slipped and sliced into his middle finger all the way to the bone.
Upon moving into my brand new apartment from ol’ Mom & Dad’s place, I was fascinated with the garbage disposal. I don’t know why…they had one, it just never worked on anything say tougher than soggy bread. One summer’s eve I decide watermelon rinds would be cool to chop to bits and grind up (and I actually believed they would make my apt smell watermelony). So with serrated knife and running garbage disposal, I commence to the lopping of rind pieces. At least until the knife hit my index finger just at the second knuckle. It didn’t go toward the bone, that would be too easy, it was more of a lateral cut, creating this nasty flap of skin. No stitches because of location, but lots of tape. The scar, which looks like a check mark, is still visible some 20 years later.
Same finger this past summer while laying tiles in the kitchen: one of those stickie kitchen tiles, a box cutter, and a location that needed the tile trimmed. I slipped and the box cutter stabs my pad of my index finger, slips out, slides up my finger the the second knuckle. That was again no stitches, but glue this time - which if looked as if you smeared Elmer’s glue on your hand to peel it off later.
Now that this has been bumped or zombified or whatever, I can ask if it makes things easire to use your 3 foot tongue to stir the pot than a spoon.
Age 16, at work, I sliced off the corner (right next to the outside of my nail) of my right thumb with a deli slicer. That sucked.
Age 40, at home. I was working for about 2 weeks on a home renovation project, employing all manner of destructive and dangerous tools (circular saw, reciprocating saw, Ram-Set gun, etc.) with not even a hint of a scratch or injury. One Sunday afternoon after cleaning up from that project, I was scrambling to get the kids’ lunches ready to eat in the car so we could drive out of state for a family event. Grabbed the roll of plastic wrap to wrap a sandwich and sliced a nice long gash into the webby crotch of my thumb/forefinger with the serrated edge of the box. I slapped together a makeshift bandage, which I had to change about 5 times that day- damn webbing bleeds forever and doesn’t heal very quickly. I’m fine with power tools, but don’t get near me with cellophane.
Chicken and pesto is one of those easy combos that it turns out is also a remarkably easy way to get salmonella. I seriously thought I was dying a few times.
If work incidents count toward kitchen idiocy I have another story to share. When I was working as a concessionist at the local movie theater the kettle in the popcorn machine broke, causing the bottom cover to come off completely leaving a bunch of loose wires exposed. Management in their infinite wisdom decided we should still use the popcorn machine even though it was technically broken. We hit the first rush of the night and filled up the popcorn machine to the top and as I was dumping a batch of popcorn from the kettle into the warmer unit the wires caught some popcorn on fire. Popcorn is really, really flammable and the entire machine went up in flames. After they put out the fire they went to the store and bought microwave popcorn to sell instead.
I know I’ve posted about it here before, but I had some fun when I was home over spring break. In my defense, I don’t normally cook: I live in a dorm, eat in a cafeteria, and my tastes generally run to ‘fast, greasy, effortless’ food.
But when I was home, my mother had picked up a new Morningstar Farms product (I think I’m noticing a trend, here) - some sort of ‘scramble’ mix, a bag of frozen chopped up veggies and such. The idea is you toss that in a pan, add eggs, scramble, enjoy. I got up one morning, both my parents already at work, and pondered what to eat. I like and have previous cooked eggs, I said to myself, so I will cook some of this tasty-looking scramble stuff.
Pan goes on the burner, gets sprayed down with that spray stuff you use for that purpose, frozen stuff goes in the pan. I stir it around with a spatula as I page through the newspaper and drink coffee.
Oh, wait, I’m going to need eggs for this to work. Hastily, I grab two out of the fridge, pull out a clean bowl, and crack the eggs into the bowl and stir them. As I’m doing so, I gracefully manage to knock my mug of coffee a bit too close to to the edge of the counter. But fear not! I notice and grab the mug…and somehow overcompensate, and knock my coffee over the other way, drowning the newspaper.
Cursing ensues. There are only three paper towels left on the roll in the kitchen. I go and rummage through the closet and finally find a fresh roll. Meanwhile, the vegetables begin to get rather well-done in the pan.
The smoke detector goes off. More cursing ensues. I toss the soggy newspaper/paper towel mess into the garbage, nearly tripping over the NinjaMutt, who had been dozing nearby and is now fleeing. Then I grab the pan off of the burner.
At this point, it’s relevant to mention that my mother swears by cast-iron pans, and thus, I was using one. The handles are not insulated. In my haste I grab it rather close to the actual pan. It’s quite hot. I more or less fling it in the general direction of the counter. I get it onto the counter just enough to knock the bowl of raw egg onto the floor, then the pan follows. Raw egg and hot vegetables jump onto my bare feet. The smoke alarm is still blaring.
Even more obscenities are shouted. In an attempt to reduce the number of times the smoke alarm goes off my parents have it right beneath the ceiling. I’m five feet tall. I grab the step-stool, manage to pinch my finger in the hinges opening it, and finally silence the horrid screeching. The dog has long since ran away to places that are less scary than the kitchen.
My index finger is bleeding slightly. The palm of my hand is bright red and painful, and my foot is still reminding me that I just recently dumped things directly from a very hot pan onto it. The floor of the kitchen between the stove and the sink is covered with an awful mess of burnt vegetables, raw egg, a cast-iron skillet, and shards of a bowl.
I spent half an hour cleaning up, ate a peanut-butter sandwich for breakfast, and made peace with the NinjaMutt by giving her some leftover chicken my parents had in the fridge and then some quality bellyrub time. My mother was pleasantly surprised that I had mopped the kitchen floor for her.
I really haven’t ventured beyond sticking things in a microwave since.
Ummmm… I know that salmonella is common in chicken, but what has it to do with pesto?
I stuck my hand in a blender, held on to the blades, then turned it on.
I was sober.
(I still have my hand.)
i did the ‘superheated hot grease down the legs while wearing shorts’ thing. bitchin’ blisters bigger than of the palm of your hand. hurt like you wouldn’t believe… didn’t wear jeans or slacks for weeks afterward.
back when we were kids my baby sister tried very hard to burn down the kitchen once. she had a habit of putting a pan of oil on the stove to heat up while she ‘quickly’ went to do something else for a moment. one saturday afternoon, i’m hanging out in the tv room at the rear of the house. the kitchen was at the front of the house we lived in then, probably a 30-second walk from point A to point B. so i’m sitting there all relaxed and comfy, when i hear my name called. **then ** i hear her scream like i’ve never heard her before or since - a sound you know instantly means something very bad is happening. i don’t remember getting from the tv room to the kitchen. i only vaguely remember grabbing the box of baking soda from under the sink - you know: the one that’s a plastic-reinforced box? god himself couldn’t open it on a good day.
fran said i ripped the top off as if it were made of typing paper: with good reason. she’d set one whole wall of the kitchen on fire and it was beginning to eat its way into the ceiling. it’s amazing what adreneline can do to you, ain’t it? 
i got to it in time, but i still called the fire department just to make sure. needless to say when mom got home, she was NOT amused. and that was the last time baby sister put a pan of oil on the stove to ‘heat up’ and the last time we didn’t have a full-on working fire extinguisher at hand. to this day in our own separate houses we have a fire extinguisher each in the mud rooms off our kitchens.
my girlfriend (who is a 23-year veteran of the state excise police and has handled some seriously nasty barroom incidents in her career) managed to nail her hand to the top of a can with a carving knife a few years ago. fortunately the damn fool had sense enough to sit down before she passed out and did even more damange to herself. she says she doesn’t remember dialing 911 or her then-boyfriend (now husband), but she evidently did.
when the paramedics got there, she was out cold, her hand still fastened to the can by the knife! :eek:
Mon Dieu. I feel so talented. I’ve never even set the fire alarm off.
My specialty, however, is exploding things in the microwave. I’ve shattered dishes – mostly cheap Wal-Mart plates – but way more impressive was the time we found out that you can substitute Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur for any arbitrary amount of milk in microwave fudge, and it will still set. It will also erupt like a massive alcoholic-chocolate mushroom all over the interior of the microwave if you do not take it out and stir it about twice as often as the non-alcoholic recipe recommends. That was fun.
I also know instant couscous explodes just like instant oatmeal if you microwave it too long. Despite this, I manage to do it about once a week.
Recipe please? My friends and relatives will set up shrines in your name.
My kitchen worst was the classic butter knife vs. plastic bag. My knuckle took a month to heal.