Heh, never. The box says to replace every 30 days. Unless you’re putting Indian food in there every day, I don’t think it’s necessary :p.
Niiiiiiiice.
And became Coolest Mom EVER in the process!!
It was really cool, actually.
But what an unholy mess.
Baked Potatoes:
Poke potatoes 6-8 times with a standard fork. Heat oven to 350. Place potatoes on a cookie sheet and heat in oven for about an hour. Potatoes are done when skin is crisp and insides are soft. Serve with butter, salt, and pepper. Optionally serve with sour cream.
Read that again. Especially read the first part again. Ignore the first part if you want to watch what looks like a Jiffy Pop commercial on super fast speed.
Let me put it this way: I left the very large pan full of “gravy” sitting on the top of the stove with the serving spoon in it. When I came back to start cleaning up, I tried to lift the spoon out of the pan and the entire thing came up off the stove. I used to have a photo of me holding the spoon by the handle, with the pan hanging off the end of it. It was ghastly.
I was visiting some friends at college and decided I would go all-out and hold a dinner party in their dorm room - two lasagnas (one veggie and one meat), a cheesecake (I make the world’s best, it’s my retirement plan), and some St Louis style toasted ravioli.
Lasagna and cheesecake were fine. As the lasagnas were resting I started the t-ravs and got my boyfriend, an Aussie who’d never experienced such a thing, to give me a hand. I filled a saucepan 2/3rds full with oil and got it good and hot, and put my boyfriend in charge of putting raviolis in the oil. “Three or four at a time, no more”, I told him, while I breaded the raviolis and handed them to him.
Well, he got impatient, and there was a backlog of unfried raviolis, and I was chatting and not paying too much attention, when all of a sudden there is a huge WHOOF and he yells “Aw crap” and I look over and the saucepan is engulfed in flame and my boyfriend grabbed the water from boiling the lasagna noodles and threw it on the fire and another WHOOF and then the circuit breaker tripped and all the lights went out and my friends were scrambling all over because if they set off the fire alarm they get billed by the campus for the cost of the fire department’s response so we opened windows and smothered the smoke detector with plastic bags and grabbed pads of graph paper to help fan the smoke out of the room and I got to use the fire extinguisher for the first time ever and that bit was kind of fun…
In the end, the only thing edible was the one batch of ravioli I’d stuck in the oven to keep warm, and the cheesecake in the fridge. The lasagnas were coated with whatever comes out of fire extinguishers, and anything remotely near the stovetop was smoldering and generally unpalatable. But we did keep the smoke detector from going off!
I am soooo trying that with the kids when I get home … in the back yard!
I often do the hot pepper toxic gas thing … I just make sure I have the fan on high and the window open before the peppers hit the oil. And I don’t hang while the initial wave of toxic fumes are emitted. Once the worst are offgassed it is ok to proceed.
The worst kitchen fail I have been a part of was actually my mum’s fail. Mum often cooked up eggs for sandwiches before bed. One night she forgot to turn off the ring. It simmered on low all night and we woke to an unholy stench. The pot, which contained two carbon lumps, was tossed and the house was aired out (in Canada, in January) but still EVERYTHING in the house smelled of rotten egg. It was very embarrassing at school that day … everyone stared & held their noses. It was amazing how long it took for the smell to disipate. Definitely mum’s most epic fail. Thirty years later, memories of that smell still makes me shudder.
One of my fails that involves carbon too …
Last Thanksgiving I burnt the gravy. I have made turkey gravy for years, but was using a non-convection oven for the first time in years. Apparently you get fewer drippings and I allwed them to all burn to the bottom of the pan. I made gravy anyway and just loosened the “drippings”. Big mistake, as it was actually just carbon and not well browned drippings. Ended up tossing the foul tasting stuff and having gravy made from GraV mix and oxo cubes. Very sad.
Ah, the WHOOF heard 'round the world.
When I moved into my first apartment, I was fairly clueless in the kitchen. My roommate was far worse. One night he decided that frozen fish fillets weren’t greasy and deep-fried enough. He wanted them even deep-friedier. He filled a pot with vegetable oil and cranked the temperature up to high. He figured that it shouldn’t take a pot of oil much longer to come to a rolling boil than it would a pot of water. So he waited. And waited. And waited. It must have been a good half hour, but that sucker still wouldn’t boil. He decided to throw caution to the wind and toss in a fillet anyway.
WHOOF.
Oil went everywhere. It’s a miracle that he didn’t get 2nd degree burns. When the emergency was over and things were sort of cleaned up, he tried to eat the fillet. It was black on the outside and still frozen on the inside.
You were lucky to have had an extinguisher nearby!
That’s pretty spectacular.
Hehe, how many exploded before you realized what was happening?
Also, who deep fries what is already deep fried??
And it sounds like it was indeed reversible, since the volcano was purple and not blue? 
When I was about 11 or 12, I left my spoon in a bowl of ravioli and blew up my Nana’s microwave. I maintain to this day that I was never told/aware that you couldn’t put metal in a microwave.
Yes!!! A totally successful experiment.
Cool:cool: What say we get together sometime, take a nice, hot Pyrex baking dish, dump in some baking soda and ice cold vinegar?
When I was dating my wife, I thought it’d be a nice change of pace to to grill on a hibachi on the third floor fire escape of the wooden triple-decker she lived in. The neighbors didn’t agree.
Nuking a Wendy’s burger when they still came in the foil-type wrappers.
I burned some popcorn so bad once I had to throw put the pan.
And the ever-popular Not taking the giblets package out of a turkey.
My wife did this too, once. After trying all the Internet remedies (cream of tartar, etc.) I figured I had nothing to lose, took my trusty power drill and put the wire brush attachment on it, and got that sucker clean in seconds.
WARNING: Do not try this with a pan that has an enamel, Teflon, Silverstone or any other coating!
:eek:
Heh. I like the way you think.
sigh
We bake a potato to split between us all the time. About half the time, I’ll forget to poke holes in it until it’s already been in the oven for a while, until I frantically go “Aw, shit!!” and start jabbing away while trying not to burn my hand on the oven walls and ceiling. The other half of the time, I forget completely.
The Other Shoe?
He NEVER pokes holes in his potatoes before they go in the oven. When I told him you should, he looked at my like I have three heads. (Granted, he looks at me that way a lot. But I only rarely deserve it.)
However, we apparently live in a mysterious magical land where potatoes never explode, since despite his deliberate non-poking and my colander-for-brains, it’s never once happened. Not. Once. He doesn’t believe me that it does.
(This is in the same vein as my mother, who has never lost a sock to the dryer in all her decades on this green earth, and also gave me the “You have three heads!” look when I mentioned something about it to her.)
My contribution:
Not me, but a roommate of The Other Shoe in (where else?) college. However, the fact that we laugh about it a dozen years later should count for something, right?
Roommate was making a pot of tomato sauce. He wanted to add a little black pepper. Now, like many others spices, this shaker came with a dual top: one side flips open for the shaker holes, the other side opens up wide so you can fit in a measuring spoon.
He opened the top, and shook the black pepper over the sauce.
Guess which side he’d opened?
The Other Shoe and I were hanging around in the kitchen and saw the whole thing. We both immediately advised Roommate to get a soup spoon and scoop out the inch-tall pile of black pepper perched on top of the sauce.
Roommate looked at us. Looked at the sauce. Looked back at us, shrugged, and proceeded to stir in all the pepper. He was later shocked (shocked!!) to find the sauce was wholly inedible.
I think it’s an infection, really. My SO also looked at me like I had three heads when I told him I only really ever have about 1/2 of my socks matched at any given time. Now that I do our laundry jointly, he’s convinced I’m hiding half of his socks as well. You can spread the disease to others whose laundry joins yours.
Years ago I was on a health kick and wanted to make a low fat chicken broccoli alfredo dish. The recipe called for evaporated milk, and I don’t know what in the hell I was thinking, but I bought and used sweetened condensed milk. The results were, of course, less than edible. Blergh!
I’d be shocked, too. That much pepper in a pot of sauce sounds about right to me. I love pepper in soups and sauces.