Kitchen Blunders

[cjsmith]

OK, what's your worst, your funniest, your most obvious, your cleverest recovered, etc... kitchen blunder?

I have three to offer. You all know the brisket story already.

1) Carrot cake without the flour. OOPS. I remembered shortly after putting it in the oven, and fixed it. Took a while to live it down though.

2) I can't take credit for this: Bouillabaisse without shelling the shrimp. That was Amit, a guy known in our living group for... creative... cooking explorations. (Favorite quote: "Does it need more oregano?")

3) Fig bars from a mix, when I was something like seven. I added two cups of water to the light brown stuff and three tablespoons of water to the dark brown stuff. OOPS. I tried a couple of creative (for a seven-year-old) solutions to the gloppy crust mix. I set it on the warm spot on the counter above the dishwasher. Nope, it didn't get any drier. I put it in the oven. The bottom of the (plastic!) bowl started to mold itself to the rack and I got it out of there. Then I mixed the light brown stuff and the dark brown stuff together and made drop cookies.

OK, what are yours?

Comments

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

I was going to tell the story about how I almost set the house on fire trying to make cookies when I was 10, but that story isn't nearly as dramatic as some of the stories here. If my mother were here to tell the story of how she was sleeping peacefully when her 10-year-old woke her up yelling "Mommy! Mommy! It's on fire!" I'm sure it would be, though!

I also have an old-enough-to-know better story. A little less than 20 years ago -- I moved into this house 20 years ago and I know I hadn't been living here very long -- I somehow managed to let the oil in a frying pan catch fire. The range in this house is a double-oven one with the upper oven overhanging most of the cooking surface, so the entire space above the 12" pan was engulfed in flames. What's worse, the range is stupidly designed with the controls next to the upper oven, directly above the front large burner -- which of course is where the frying pan was. I couldn't turn off the burner till I got the flames down, but I couldn't get near the fire to throw anything on it because the upper oven was in the way! (At least I had the presence of mind to remember to throw flour, not water, on a grease fire.) Meanwhile the flames were licking out from underneath the upper oven and heading for the cabinets on either side.

I had to get the frying pan out from under there so I could put out the fire and turn off the burner, so I grabbed the handle and pulled it out, then turned off the burner with the other hand. Whew! The flames were in the middle of the room now, away from contact with anything ... except me! I suddenly realized I was standing there holding a foot-wide circle of flame. I couldn't put it in the sink because I was afraid of setting the cabinets above that on fire. I thought of running outside with it but I couldn't get the locked and charlie-barred sliding glass doors open with one hand, and the front door was too far away past too many flammable objects. So I set the pan down in the middle of the vinyl floor, grabbed the canister of flour and dumped it on the pan.

The fire went out immediately and I was greatly relieved that my fast thinking had let me get away scot free. It wasn't until I lifted up the frying pan and saw the charred, melted vinyl that I realized that, even though there were no flames underneath the frying pan, the bottom of it was still extremely hot and a vinyl floor was not a great place to set it down.

Fortunately the damage was just cosmetic. The vinyl was patterned in brown and beige (the house was built in the late 1970s!) and I tried to tell myself the burned area didn't show too badly. And it was much smaller than the diameter of the pan -- the extreme heat had warped it enough so that only a few inches of it were actually in contact with the floor. I wanted to do something about it for the longest time, but there was always something more important that needed to be replaced, and eventually the burn became part of the normal surroundings and I stopped seeing it.

Which is good, because it's still there, and most first-time visitors are polite enough to pretend they don't see it.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. My mom made an oil-in-the-frying-pan fire once too. She smothered it with a pot lid and wound up dropping the whole thing into a snowbank. (Lucky. Winter.) I think we got McDonald's that day.

Oil-in-the-frying-pan makes for a REALLY IMPRESSIVE fire, doesn't it? :-/

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

She smothered it with a pot lid

I would have given anything for a lid that day! I actually thought of it at the time, but it was a sauté pan and it didn't have one, and I wasn't about to start trying other lids to see what might fit closely enough to smother the flames!

Oil-in-the-frying-pan makes for a REALLY IMPRESSIVE fire, doesn't it? :-/

And how!!! I was really afraid those cabinets (or the pot holders hanging on the side of the upper oven on their magnet hooks) were going to catch and my new house would burn down! After the huge losses I'd had in the past couple of years, I was so relieved that all I lost was a few inches of flooring that I didn't even care that much about it.



OT: I can't get over how cute you look with this haircut!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think my mom's pot lid didn't fit all too closely either, but at least it got the flames from all-the-way-up-to-the-range-hood down to just-up-to-the-lid size. My mom was also lucky that the stove controls were in front, by her hip.

I'm so glad your house wasn't damaged! Ours wasn't either, but the smoke was fierce for a while.

OT: Awwwww, thanks!! :-)