I got home from work starving. Scrounging for food and not properly packing a lunch is never the solution.
Eggs and turkey bacon, however, are.
So I assemble the ingredients - alas! No eggs.
Perhaps the bacon in a whole wheat tortilla with…other ingredients. Like sauteed onions. Good! Perhaps some jalapenos sauteed. Why not? Never tried it before. Kitchen experiments sometimes turn out well, and sometimes is a pretty good percentage, right?
I open a jar. They smell delicious. Bacon goes in, bacon comes out onto piping hot tortilla. Excellent. Things are shaping up nicely.
I throw in the onions and jalapenos. They brown nicely in the bacon fat leftover in the pan.
Then I start coughing and wheezing and my eyes water and don’t stop for 20 minutes. Because, in my infinite wisdom, I didn’t think that perhaps sauteeing jalapenos was a bad idea. That their airborne fragrance, oils, and aroma would work their way into my airways and inflict pain and suffering. The poor SO climbed the stairs to get away.
It’s airing out now, but I coughed while eating the whole thing (it was edible, if not great) and coughed for a good while afterwards. Thank goodness for fresh air.
So, what are your greatest kitchen disasters via experimentation? Edible or not?
In college I once nuked a pie pan and blew up the inside of my microwave.
Try doing a stir fry with hot pepper sesame oil sometime. It will have much the same effect.
Not a disaster arising from an experiment, but a disaster nonetheless:
A couple of weeks ago I was pretty sick. I wasn’t worried about getting good food into me, I was worried about getting ANY food into me, and hopefully with minimal effort. I picked up a frozen pot pie.
After having the thing in the oven for an hour, I was starved. I took the cookie sheet that it was on out of the oven and set it on the stove. All I had to do was lift up the pot pie, turn around, and plop it on a plate. As the pot pie was very hot, I used a couple of pot holders and lifted it by the edges.
Allow me to fight your ignorance – the cardboard shells that pot pies come in are not rigid structures.
Halfway through the transport process, the pie started to – well, fold in half. The yummy contents started oozing out the top and down the sides. I managed to get some of the thing onto my plate, but only some of it. Maybe a third. The rest ended up on the potholders, my hands, and the floor.
So there I was, too sick to even really be out of bed, hungry as hell, with a third of a pot pie on my plate, messy pot holders that needed to be washed now, a huge mess on the floor that needed to be washed now, and piping hot cream sauce burning my hands.
I pulled out the rinse-with-a-spray thing at the faucet and it broke under the sink spraying water and I cannot bend down to get under the sink to turn it off so I had to call the water company and water run in the kitchen for about an hour.
In a similar vein as jalapeno peppers, do NOT try to sear a pepper-crusted steak indoors in February. You just might drive your wife out of the house for half an hour and order Chinese for Valentine’s Day instead.
Well, it was a long time ago. I was experimenting with this pressure cooker. If it cooks fast on 15# of pressure, how much faster could it cook? Sop I modified the weights on the release mechanism by gluing quarters to the top. I had the pressure roughly doubled
and a nice little whole chicken inside. Headed off to take a shower and that was a good thing for me. I must not have added enough liquid inside as the solder relief plug blew out. As I remember, almost that whole chicken exited from that little hole and fat covered all the walls. What did I learn from this? I learned that I needed to remove those solder plugs and replace them with solid bolts.
See, I thought “I love jalapenos! Fresh or jarred!” And it never occured to me what would happen; one of my favorite dishes when I’m sick is garlic and red pepper flakes sauteed in olive oil and poured over pasta. The red pepper flakes just turn fragrant, not horrible!
Hot cream sauce is literally the worse sort of burn, because it clings to the skin. Water or broth instantly burns and drips, but the cream stays and keeps on burning :(.
This I like
Thanks for telling me, since I actually was going to try to make one in next week :smack:
First time I ever made gravy, and it was for a bunch of people at Christmas. What was I thinking? Ah hell, I was 21 years old and allowed to fuck up. I didn’t understand my mother’s instructions: instead of using a reasonable amount of turkey drippings, I used ALL of it and mixed it with an equal amount of flour. I ended up with about 2 gallons of what looked and tasted like spackle.
My culinary claim to fame is Chicken Curry with Roofing Nails.
My house was re-roofed right before I bought it. They stripped off the old wood shingles and installed asphalt ones. One day, I’m experimenting in the kitchen and I’m trying to make a chicken curry. The stove area is getting a little smoky, so I click on the vent fan. The air flow isn’t that great, so I pull open the filter, and all this roofing material falls out on top of the stove. Shit! I check carefully, but can’t find any sign that anything fell into the pots and pans. Whew.
The resulting meal was… less than what I expected, but there was enough for leftovers and I wasn’t that put off by it, so I put the remainder in the fridge. At dinner the next day, I pulled the Tupperware from the fridge, gave it a stir before putting it in the microwave, and found two nails. :eek:
How about learning to make homemade tomato sauce? Using some of every green herb in the kitchen, and grabbed taragon. It is green, sitting their with parsley, oregano, etc. Shaker isn’t attached, so half the bottle goes into the sauce. About 3 tablespoons. Can’t hurt, right?
Still get grief for that one.
I have also grabbed the self-rising flour and used it for cookies. Self rising has salt in it. The cookies also took salt. Salty cookies not too good.
I was making the old family standby, chicken in white sauce. In the particular recipe we use, the last step is to take the chicken out of the pan, stir in sour cream, put the chicken back in, and stick it back in the oven for a few minutes to heat up again.
This particular night I used a Pyrex baking dish. Took the chicken out, plopped in the sour cream and BANG, the dish exploded. Glass and white sauce all over the kitchen.
My daughter was also in the kitchen. We looked at each other and both said “COOL!!!”
My other favorite disaster happened to my best friend’s girlfriend, who decided to get all domestic one evening and make chocolate chip cookies. My friend bit into one and said, “this tastes strange. What did you do - use the baking soda in the refrigerator?”
Wanted to make molasses cookies. Decided to throw in a few spoonfuls of wheat bran. Not only was the batter so stiff and grainy that a wooden spoon stood in it upright, but the wheat bran had gone rancid and the batter was bitter and foul tasting. Had to throw the batter out.
Our first Christmas as a married couple; my first pumpkin pie. It was Christmas Eve day, actually, and when the pie came out of the oven it was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. So good that I had to show it off to my lovely bride sitting at the kitchen table.
It was also the day I learned not to make a custard pie in a non-stick pie tin. I got the plate off balance just enough that the whole pie started to slide out of the pan in the direction of the dining room. I managed to catch it, but overcompensated just a bit, and instead sent the pumpkin-flavored napalm all over the kitchen floor, kitchen cabinets, and my legs. Did I mention that the people in the apartment below us ran their heater non-stop all winter, so that it was always 80 degrees in our apartment? That explains why I was wearing shorts at the time.
It really didn’t hurt for the first few seconds…by the time the pain set in I had managed to smear the pie filling all over the fronts of my thighs as I tried to scrape it off. My wife managed to guide me into the bathroom where I sat in a tub full of cold water for 20 minutes or so, because I refused to spend our first Christmas Eve in the Emergency Room.
Somewhere along the line someone managed to take the second pie out of the oven without tossing it all over the apartment. That one was delicious
I make pieroghis for pretty much every holiday, almost always potato and farmers cheese. However, one year my mom asked for her favorite pieroghi, sauerkraut.
I have a strong aversion to sauerkraut. When cleaning through my step-grandmother’s house, my uncle opened the cellar door and we were almost all knocked over by the stench of the crap. Step-grandma had a few large crocks half buried in the dirt floor… for years. Combine damp and sauerkraut. Just typing about it brings back the smell.
But, I’m a good daughter. Grabbed a saute pan, tossed in some butter and onions, let them go until softened. Opened and drained a can of sauerkraut, put it in the pan. Ugh. The smell. I had to step away to dry my eyes and to try and stop the gag reflex I had going on. Guess I stepped away too long, as the stench of sauerkraut turned into the stench of burning sauerkraut.
It was horrible. I ended up having to wash the curtains, wash down the walls, and toss the pan as I could not get the smell out.
When I told Mom that I tried, she laughed, noting that her mom rarely made them because they smelled so bad. Then she ate the potato / farmers cheese pieroghis.
My laughter is interspersed with awwww’s at you trying to stay out of the ER on Christmas Eve. It’s just filled with wackos, it’s best you weren’t there.
It’s not recommended to put anything cold in a super-hot Pyrex pan, or to put it in a cold sink/fridge while still extremely hot, or else you just might get an exploding pan. I’m kind of surprised that a bit of cold sour cream would do it, but maybe that just happened to be put on a susceptible spot. The classic way to shatter your Pyrex pan is put it in a sink and run cold water on it when it’s right out of the oven.
Not a major disaster but a recent one. I made a pot of BBQ pork and beans in the crockpot a couple of weeks ago. The problem was that I started it fairly early and then stayed up late. So I slept late the next morning and the pork and beans that should have cooked for around six or eight hours ended up cooking about twelve.
I tried to convince myself that it was supposed to taste smoky.
As I was later given to understand, even a scratch or a hairline crack in Pyrex can turn it into an Improvised Explosive Device just waiting for the trigger. And dumping cold stuff into a hot dish turned out to be an excellent trigger.
Does anyone really remember when they put that open box of baking soda in the back of the fridge?
A bit of a long story and not quite cooking related, but come along with me anyway.
We occasionally buy those small 8 oz cans of soda for parties and picnics. One day I was craving a soda and we had a lone grape in the pantry. Grabbed a cup and some ice and poured the purple drink in my clear glass. Watching the soda foam, I noticed bright blue streaks amid the purple bubbles. I was surprised for a moment and then thought that the purple dye must be pH sensitive, like litmus paper, and changed color as the pH changed. As the bubbles popped the local pH was changed and the dye turned bright blue from purple.
Now I needed to see for sure, so I called my kids and grabbed a kitchen acid (vinegar) and a kitchen base (baking soda). I don’t recall which I did first, but as I added vinegar (I think), indeed the whole cup of soda turned blue.
“Cool” I thought. “I wonder if the reaction is reversible if I raise the pH?” So I grab the baking soda. Just as I commit to dumping the baking soda into the glass, images of the elementary school science fairs I have judge flash through my mind.
Yes. I made a large, exploding, purple, grape soda volcano in my kitchen.
