It’s been quite a winter for many of us: storms, blizzards, arctic winds, freezing rain, and just about everything the season can throw at us. I’m telling you, it’s enough to bring on a serious case of cabin fever.
I thought we could all use some cheering up, and today’s Kitchen Talk will hopefully do just that. After all, laughter is the best medicine, right? (Or was it chocolate?) Our group therapy session starts right now and all you have to do is tell us:
What’s your most memorable kitchen mishap?
And by ‘memorable’ I mean worst, funniest, weirdest, or “so absurd it crosses into the realm of awesomeness.”
My story involves an aborted meal, destruction of beloved bakingware, and the possible inhalation of toxic fumes. How does one achieve that kind of widespread destruction? Just hurriedly stick a pan of lasagna into a hot oven and wait until an unholy smell permeates the kitchen. Then remember with horror that the pan was still tightly covered with plastic wrap. Not only will you manage to ruin dinner but you’ll also have to toss out the glass pan (who knew that stuff would be impossible to peel off?) and leave the house until that awful burnt-plastic smell dissipates.
Nanci’s mishap happened just this past Thanksgiving, when she painstakingly prepared turkey soup with the leftover bird. She put everything into the electric roaster, cooked it for about 6 hours, then put it out in the 20ºF night air to cool overnight. In the roaster. Which happened to be quite insulated. In the morning, she found still-lukewarm soup waiting for her, which she sadly had to discard.
Betsy shares, “I stuffed ungodly amounts of potato peels in my dad’s garbage disposal and broke it one Thanksgiving when my only responsibility was the potatoes. Shining moment.”
We all have our own shining moment and now we want to hear yours. Come on, we’re all friends here. Share those stories with us!
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prairieprincess on 2.20.2014
Just last night I baked a potholder @ 400 degrees! I was preheating my oven and noticed a weird smell. I opened it and found my pretty pink potholder browned and smoking, a few more minutes it would’ve been in flames (not that that’s ever happened I’ve just “heard” that’s what would happen, fine it happened once or twice or ok so i’m a repeat potholder baker offender….) But don’t worry I snapped a picture to share with my facebook friends before I rescued the potholder.
Kristine on 2.20.2014
I had a glass baking dish that had something burnt onto it that would not come off. I knew baking soda was the trick, so I filled the dish with water and baking soda, and set it on the stove and lit the burner (it can go in the oven, so this is OK, right?). Thank God I walked away from it, because a few minutes later, the dish exploded into tiny shards of glass shrapnel and flew all over my kitchen. Word of advice, do not but glass on a gas burner.
Jessica on 2.20.2014
I have to borrow this one from my lovely mother – it was after Thanksgiving when I was a kid and she was boiling the carcas to make soup. She must have forgotten about the boiling pot on the stove and we left the house – she returned to a house FILLED WITH BLACK SMOKE, as all the watr had boiled away and shattered the bottom of the metal pot. We spent months washing every piece of fabric in our house to get that awful smell out.
Marielle on 2.20.2014
Ooo! Saw this on twitter and knew I had a story to tell. This, my friends, is the story of how I made a meal that went against the Geneva Conventions, as my then-beau said.
I was making a special extra-spicy batch of a Thai style chicken recipe that I made often. Our friend the bartender wanted it to blow his face off, in his words. We were living in NM, and everyone tends to have a pretty high heat tolerance there, myself included, so I knew I had to really ramp it up.
The recipe originally called for 1 to 2 serrano peppers. I started off on this excursion with 8. Somewhere in mid-recipe, I stopped to have myself and the bf taste it. We decided it had some heat, but it wasn’t enough.
Here’s where things went very very wrong. I had about 10 more serranos, and we decided it’d be cool to throw them all in. And this would have been fine. Except, as I said, I was in mid-recipe. Because I’d made this recipe a hundred times before I kinda did things without really thinking too much about the steps. So, what I had was a screaming hot pan for stir-frying. I threw in 10 just diced, very raw peppers. No big deal, right?
Well, the next part of the recipe was just part of building the sauce. What part, you ask? The one where you throw in the water.
So.
I threw a bunch of water onto a screaming hot pan full of raw chiles.
In case you don’t know what happens when you do that, what happens is PEPPER SPRAY.
I started coughing within a few seconds, my eyes watering and burning and barely able to speak. The bf was in another room, and the poor kitty had wandered into the kitchen to see if he could find eats. Within five minutes I was frantically opening windows, we were considering leaving, and the poor kitty, no lie, had his face pressed against the screen door sniffing air in desperately.
The recipe turned out fine, incidentally, and to specifications. The bartender loved it. But…I think that still qualifies as a kitchen disaster, don’t you?
shari on 2.20.2014
I know we have all turned away from the oven for half a second and burned the garlic toast, but I managed to set it on fire TWICE in the same night.
Annika G. Plummer on 2.20.2014
I once had a beautiful yellow cast iron pot that sat on the top of my stove all the time. It sat there partly because I didn’t have space for it in a cupboard and partly because it was too darn cute! For some reason, I didn’t use it much. As I was single at the time, I didn’t have hardly any reason to need to use a big pot like that. But one day, I decided to make cream cheese chicken soup, a recipe of my boyfriend’s mother. Hers was always so good. How hard could it be? I’d never made a soup like that before, but it looked easy. One step of the recipe was to boil the chicken. I’d never boiled chicken before, but I figured my cast iron pot would be just the ticket for the task. Started it up and as the water got hotter, it must have put too much pressure on the pot, and I watched in horror as it split and hot chicken water spread all over my stove (an electric stove with coil-top burners). I swear the water-chicken mixture multiplied, as it was EVERYWHERE. It was pooled in each burner and there was a “lake” of it under the hood of the stove. Needless to say, I haven’t made that again!
jackie on 2.20.2014
Wanted to roast a chicken for my son and his new girlfriend, first time meeeting her. I had never roasted a chicken, I stuffed it with lemon, garlic, set it in a big huge roasting pan, all I had, and did not put it on a rack, did not have one. No liquid. Turned oven on to 400* pretty soon the house was filled with smoke and the pan and chicken and everything was burnt to a crisp! I now cook wonderful chicken in stoneware covered roaster, perfect everytime. BUT now the girlfriend is daughter in law and turned VEGAN, wonder if it was my fault? haha….
Monica M on 2.20.2014
Used self rising flour by mistake instead of regular flower to make fried chicken. Poof!!!
marcia on 2.20.2014
I had decided to make baked french toast for breakfast on Christmas morning — I had prepared everything the night before & threw it into the oven just before we started opening gifts. Apparently, my baking dish was too shallow and everything bubbled over into the oven. The brown sugar/butter caught fire and my entire house was filled with acrid, black smoke. It was 8 below zero that morning and we had to open all of the windows and turn on every fan we could find. I spent the next two hours trying to clean the oven (in a parka) so that I could cook dinner.
I don’t recommend cooking a very beautiful, very expensive, beef tenderloin roast in an oven that recently played host to a fire. Yuck.
Kim on 2.20.2014
I once placed my sister-in-law’s beautiful casserole dish, fresh out of the oven, on the kitchen counter. Unfortunately, I had just set a bag of ice in the same spot prior to putting it in the freezer. The hot dish on the cold counter shattered. No more dinner, no more dish – just one big mess!