So I was thinking about all the silly things I've done in the kitchen in my life...
The funniest I recall was one day I was starting some red beans and rice...I got distracted and spilled about half a bag of dried smal red beans on the floor...I swept em up into a pile but had no dust pan handy so I decided I' just grab the vacuum which was handy...
Instead of using the hose like a sensible fellow...I just popped up the front and slowly lowered it onto the pile of beans...Which was just fine...until the beater bar hit the pile at which point I was suddenly in the middle of a re-enactment of the charge of the light brigade...beans launched in every direction simultaneously...Beans flying at high velocity ricocheting off of every surface in the kitchen......And at those velocities...Beans hurt!...
So what are y'all's funniest kitchen Fauxs Pas?...
It's mother's day... and I was at my Mom's house where we made a white cake and were going to decorate it with whipped cream. I have one of those whipped cream makers with the Co2 cartridges to make it homemade style. I decided wouldn't it be cool if we pureed some strawberries and put them inside the canister with the cream and sugar before charging it.
So we puree the strawberries, put everything in the canister and charge it up. All ready to go, but no whipped cream comes out. Hmmm, I wonder, maybe this cartridge is bunk?
So my Mom and I are holding the thing, over a bowl, trying to take the lid off, when it was already charged up...
After a long struggle, the lid comes off, and whipped cream sprays everywhere. All over me, my mom, my dog, the cupboards, the floor, the ceiling, the cake - score!
Evidentally it wasn't a bunk cartridge, but a chunk of strawberry that got caught and blocked the cream from coming out.
I remember one time during a raid I was talking on the phone to Kedawen.
And he was making a sandwich and cut it with a big knife. The knife slipped out of his hand and cut his leg. He had to go get stitches and couldn't walk for like 2 weeks.
Kedawen is a real bastard, so it was pretty fitting!
Oh! I still don't know what this fox paws is but one time I decided I did not need a pan to cook things on my electric stove, with the metal heated spirals.
So I tried to cook a quesadilla like that, until it stuck on the stove, burned, and cought on fire. That was fun.
He was acting the fool with a friend after school one day, before we got home from work, and decided it would be cool to twirl a 5 lb sack of flour on his finger like a basketball. Apparently he was at first successful, but eventually his lack of coordination got the best of this experiment. The bag hit the floor and, as he said later, exploded into a mushroom cloud of domestic devastation.
When I got home from work there was a fine white haze over everything in the kitchen, the dining room and half the living room...everywhere except the dining room floor. The boy thought he could clean up the flour from the hardwood floor...with a wet mop. As you know, water plus flour equals paste. White gummy paste gooing together every plank of the newly installed hardwood floor. His mom and I managed him while he used hot water, a toothbrush and a wipe rag to remove every last bit of the evil goo.
setting the George Foreman grill up on the stove top. After a few weeks of grilling, I decided to make spaghetti. well, the grease from the george foreman had apparently splattered/leaked/spilled down into the base of the eye on the stove. I turned on the stove to boil the water for the spaghetti during a raid, waited and then looked to see if the water was boiling. The grease had caught fire.
So yes, I caught the kitchen on fire by boiling water.
I work at a catering business that doubles as a casual lunch and formal dinner restaurant. I was working a lunch shift. It was probably a little after 11, and we hadn't had any customers yet. The kitchen staff had started a food fight which had gotten pretty intense. The chef and one of the assistant chefs were hiding in one corner of the kitchen, and were hurling all sorts of produce at the dishwasher and the other assistant chef who were in the other corner throwing cherry tomatoes. In the middle of this fight, I noticed a customer walk in the door. I went out front to the counter and gave her my best "can I help you" smile. She couldn't see the people involved in the food fight, but she could hear yelling and crashes, and she could probably see food flying back and forth every now and then.
She smiled at me and asked "boss gone today?" I nodded, kind of embarassed, and began taking her order. Suddenly, I heard something flying through the air and felt an impact on my ass. A stray cherry tomato had exited the kitchen and hit me square on the right ass cheek, where it exploded. I hoped the customer hadn't noticed, and I planned to just play it off, when she said "oh dear." I looked up and realized that she had cherry tomato juice on the side of her face and in her hair. She asked for a napkin. I gave it to her.
She was pretty reasonable about it and actually came back in for lunch the next day. But we don't have food fights anymore.
When I worked at a pizza restaurant we had this big Hobart bowl mixer to make dough with. On said device is a lever which goes from power level 1 to power level 5. Said lever is clearly marked DO NOT TOUCH and is intentionally set to power level 1 at all times.
Well one Sunday I was making dough. I poured in the dough pack (mix of yeast, sugar, and other mysterious ingredients that makes the dough yummy), water, and lastly the flour. By now I'm sure you can see where this is going.
I absentmindedly reach around and turn on the mixer, secure in my knowledge that nobody would ever switch the power setting on the mixer because it says not to do so. As soon as the power comes on...
woooooooooooooooooooooooooosh!
Flour exploded instantly and flew through the entire store. The store wasn't very big... maybe 10 feet wide, 40 feet long. EVERYTHING was covered. Big mess. Not fun to clean up! Whoever did it better be glad we never found out who did it. ><
"Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings." - John F Kennedy
1)
My then-girlfriend is drunk. I'm drunker. I'm at the 'don't ask me my name because I most likely won't be able to answer you. She gets a mad craving for popcorn and, drunk gentleperson that I am, I manage to crawl from my chair to the kitchen, pop a bag of popcorn into the microwave and turn it on. I then fall asleep on the kitchen floor. I wake up to the beeps of the smoke detectors and the sensation of cold water sprinklers spraying every square inch of the apartment - including me. 1200W and 15 minutes: burnt popcorn.
2, more recent)
My sister is a horrible cook. No, that's unfair - she can cook, she just can't cook any fancy stuff. Every time she tries anything that goes beyond 'steam for X minutes', the kitchen looks like Hiroshima. On a bad day. So, for New Year's Eve she invites a bunch of people and about 12 hours before people are set to arrive, she asks me to cook for her.
Now I'm no Pherr or Arb but I can use a mandolin without losing a finger, so I pack up my knives and other kitchen essentials, feeling good about myself. There are few things that make you feel as manly as handling good produce, preparing a kick-ass meal and generally twirling knives around. So I did. Aggressively. I had just come out of a relationship that left me feeling like a complete leper towards women, so when a couple of rather good looking females decided to grab a seat near me I figured that this was my chance to prove, to myself and to the world, that I was not a complete dickless wanker (contradiction in terms? You know what I mean!)
It took me all of 8 minutes in the kitchen to cut the tip off my index finger.
The interesting thing was that in my culinary macho-braggadacio I didn't notice. I proceeded to bleed all over the sirloin, the peeled potatoes, into the punch, over the veggies and into the carefully prepared stock for the sauce.
I packed up my knives, called a cab and, once I got home, pretty much cried myself to sleep.
IT'S HARD TO PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT; SOMETHING IS WRONG
I'M LIKE THE UNCLE WHO HUGGED YOU A LITTLE TOO LONG
My wife and I were making Easter dinner at home, just the two of us, a few years ago. I decided to try a new Baked Ham recipe I had read which used Soda and lots of brown sugar (How come you taste so good?). The directions involved covering the ham in brown sugar, and after about an hour, pouring a can of coke over the ham, and cooking a little while longer in the super sweet marinade. I took the ham out of the oven, and was transfering it to a cutting board, holding it over the pan with a knife and cutting fork to let the juices finish dripping when it slipped from my grasp. It splashed into the Very Hot, sugary mixture, and splashed over my arms. I reacted quickly and made a bee-line to the bathroom where I kept cold water on the burns. Luckily, I wasn't in the triage long before they treated my burns. That was a fun day.
Xyphir wrote:My wife and I were making Easter dinner at home, just the two of us, a few years ago. I decided to try a new Baked Ham recipe I had read which used Soda and lots of brown sugar (How come you taste so good?). The directions involved covering the ham in brown sugar, and after about an hour, pouring a can of coke over the ham, and cooking a little while longer in the super sweet marinade. I took the ham out of the oven, and was transfering it to a cutting board, holding it over the pan with a knife and cutting fork to let the juices finish dripping when it slipped from my grasp. It splashed into the Very Hot, sugary mixture, and splashed over my arms. I reacted quickly and made a bee-line to the bathroom where I kept cold water on the burns. Luckily, I wasn't in the triage long before they treated my burns. That was a fun day.
Which brings to mind this sage bit of advice...When using the big eyedropper type basters with very hot liquid...Never turn the baster bulb down...the steam will turn the baster into an instant fountain o' boiling syrup as I recently discovered......made perfect sense as I though about it while nursing my scalded flesh...
I was making tunafish salad for sandwiches when I was younger (about 13-14) and I got some spices confused: so the tunafish ended up getting nutmeg and cinnamon in it (and more than you'd put in eggnog). We ordered pizza that night.
Another night (also around 13-14), I was making spaghetti and the sauce desparately needed oregano. So I went into the cupboard and thought I was putting oregano into it, but it didn't get anymore "Italian." Instead it got more wierd. Turns out that container was where my parents stashed their pot.
Later, when I was in a frat, I'd cook one night a week for some extra $. Being Indiana, all meals had to have meat, potatoes and jello with fruit in it. It turns out that kiwi fruit have an enzyme in them, like fresh pineapple or papaya, that disolves protein (most meat tenderizers are made of papayin, the enzyme from papayas that breaks proteins down, and canning pineapple destroys that similar enzyme). I first thought that I did something wrong with the jello, so it got thrown out (keep in mind, I'm cooking for 40, so it was a lot of jello to get tossed). Another night, I let the jello set, then placed the kiwi fruit slices on it and... holy cow... the tray of set jello turned into a puddle within an hour.
Last one, not sure if it counts as an oops. At that same frat, I'd get tired of making the same boring old spuds for the boys, so one time I decided to use some of the instant spuds and to reconstitute it with french onion soup. They looked like cement that came out of a cement truck, grey (with tiny black specks), rather hard, and almost no one would touch it, until one of the guys asked for the serving bowl back, and poured the whole thing on his plate. A few more tried it, next thing I knew, I used up about 10 meals (for 40 guys, remember) worth of instant spuds in one evening. The guy in charge of ordering food for the house was trying to yell at me while stufffing his face with the french onion spuds, not understanding why everyone was laughing at him.
I've also stabbed myself several times, done the dumb thing with beans vs vacuum, too.
...And at those velocities...Beans hurt!...
