Kitchen Mishaps

[Deleted User]

Over the past few days we have had family staying with us and I prepared lots of food for a small party on Sunday. There were children, too. I whipped some cream to fill ice cream cones for Klondike treats…. easy as pie. in theory.

I was whipping with one beater only in a small high glass container when I let go of the glass to reach for some more sugar with one hand…. that’s when the power of centrifuge took over. In a matter of seconds the glass container started spinning crazy and tumbling at the same time, faster and faster — too fast for me trying to grab it. I should have just turned the beater off but my reaction was to grab the silly glass.

So by the time I realized I couldn’t grab the glass and shut off the beater, sugary cream had gone flying e v e r y w h e r e. –Gobs of it on everything. Cabinets, counter, in the soup, on the stove, on my rugs, on me, some more on me, my dogs, the ceiling… all the cream was stuck somewhere other than inside of the cones where it was supposed to go…. It was such a mess.

I had to do a big clean up before starting over, but I laughed. It was such a nasty cream chaos.

I am a messy cook anyways… any other klutzy cooks on here?

[Sarita]

Yikes! I think next time, just go out for ice cream :~)

[Elrohwen]

Hahaha. I would’ve loved to see that! I’m generally pretty good in the kitchen – my worst is probably any time something has bubbled over in the oven and then left a smoking burned mess on the bottom. Ugh. I actually did this last Thanksgiving at a friends’ house – there was way more liquid in that stuffing than I thought and after baking it for 45 minutes it had bubbled all over their perfectly clean oven. Now I put a cookie sheet under almost everything just in case.

I had a whipped cream issue in college. My housemates and I were making Thanksgiving dinner and one of the guys said he would help me with the pie. I gave him some cream and told him to beat it until it was whipped cream. I came back a few minutes later and he says “Can I stop beating now?” I look in the bowl and it has completely separated into butter and whey. Lol. I don’t know why he didn’t just stop when it was whipped …. I also told another boy that he had to make the cranberry sauce because he couldn’t make anything else. He just had to measure water, measure sugar, and add the cranberries once it was boiling. This was more than he could’ve handled on his own, but once it was done he was so proud of himself. Haha. Luckily the rest of us were much more handy in the kitchen than those two.

[Lintini]

Hahaha that’s awesome!!

[bunnytowne]

OH the beaters.   I had just done that recently.   Last week I was mixing some homemade frosting for the cake.  I ran the beaters a little to get all the stuff off.   As I was putting the beater down I hit the button on accident and it went all over.   Wasn’t real real bad cuz I had just whizzed it over the bowl and took most of it off.    \

But yes it went all over.  

[Monkeybun]

Me just walking into a kitchen is a mishap.

lol

[wiseleyd]

I can’t even make coffee without getting grounds all over, and I have a super automatic that does everything for me! Once I get a cup, I spill it all over me, the counters,a nd the floor. I don’t even want to discuss anything that involves flour.

[bunnytowne]

OH my coffee.     The coffee maker has expresso on it.  The gasket came off.   So making it I put a towel over the top holding it down.   I moved my hand to adjust the towell adn hot water splashed on my uh umm chest.   OUCH

I told hubby we won’t be having expresso anymore.   Not until we get a new machine/

And 2 days ago the blender thingy my Mom sent me a few years ago a knockoff of the bullett form QVC  doggone it quit working.  I blended my drink put fouads on and  nothing…. I tried different plus ins nothing….  I tapped it agianst the counter still nothing

[MimzMum]

Well if you want to be poisoned for sure, come to my kitchen…we have that saying tacked up here somewhere, “Dinner is ready when the smoke alarm goes off…” ‘Cept it doesn’t, we disconnected it long ago because we wore out so many batteries with my mad culinary skills…lol!

Tsk, tsk, Petzy…Chef Ramsey would NOT be pleased. xD but I got a good laugh out of it, thank you! ^_^ What a great mental picture! You poor thing! *pats you on the back*

[Sage Cat]

One time I learned why you are NOT supposed to make coffee with hot watter: it took about 30 seconds for the all coffee to come poring out of the top of the maker.

The one time I burnt toast at work – in the Kitchen of the cooking school (yea, I’m a trained chef, who burnt toast) I heard about it for months!!!!!

[Deleted User]

Sage Cat: — that’s it? You cook for a living and the only mishap you produced is burnt toast? I guess, the more you do things the safer you get… However, I cook daily and yet, I have mishaps that people keep bringing up for laughs. Like when I blew up my plug-in kettle and appeared to be electrocuting myself as sparks rained down on me in front of my guests. Or, when I proudly made cream of carrot soup from scratch and left it uncovered to simmer down; when I checked on it again, I noticed the ceiling above my stove was leaking melted snow from off my roof… right into my soup.

I was employed at a catering business when I was younger and one day I had to take the trash out after the chef strained a giant pot of chicken bones for stock. There were enough bones to fill half a large garbage bag. It was very greasy. I couldn’t lift the thing up into the dumpster because it was so heavy. So I decided to swing it a bit to get the momentum, you know. I did get the momentum and it swung up. I had done this many times with success, but on that particularly day the bottom of the bag ripped just as I sent it flying into the dumpster… all the bones hailed down onto the new van parked beside the dumpster, the one that belonged to my boss. The chef loved it, we didn’t like our boss very much.

[Sage Cat]

You see the great thing about working in a kitchen with great chefs is that you learn to fix problems before they become major disasters!

I think my best “fix” was during a cooking party for a bunch of doctors. I was covering 2 stations. I left very clear instructions at one of the stations to only fry a few of the arancini (rice balls filled with cheese and then deep fried) at a time or they will all get squished.
I went to check the other station.
I came back to the fry station to a scared looking guy saying “I did not do it!” A big bunch of the arancini in the cooker. Another guy ran up and said “I was being efficient!”
“That’s okay” I said to the second guy. “You did not ruin my dinner, just yours.” While saying this I pulled up the trash can and started tossing the smuched arancini into the trash. The second guy just walked away.
The first guy said “F’ing surgeons. Think they know everything!”
I managed to save enough of the arancini so that every one got two instead of the three they should have gotten.

But, one batch of burnt toast – NO ONE forgets!

[Elrohwen]

Sage Cat, there’s something so funny about people burning simple things! When I was a freshman, someone in my hall burnt popcorn and set off the smoke alarms in the dorm at 3am. Everyone trudged out in the freezing cold (it was a huuuuge dorm too) while the dorm was checked over. We never let that person forget about it! Haha.

I can’t even count the number of times my housemates and I set of the smoke alarm in our apartment. The thing was located right above the stove (a stove with no hood on it) and the littlest thing would set it off. We ended up taping a grocery bag over it to keep it quiet.  At least our place wasn’t in a big building and no one was forced to evacuate any of the million times we set it off.

[KatnipCrzy]

One of the worst kitchen messes I have had to clean up was when an unopened bottle of Vodka fell off the top of the refrigerator.  Not even sure how it happened- hubby and I were in the living room and no dogs or cats could get up there.  There was shards of glass everywhere and the clear vodka was hard to clean up because it was not really visible- but sticky when dry.

Our worst kitchen equipment failure happened at my Mom’s house- my hubby and I were cooking Christmas dinner there a few years ago- putting in disposable pans and transporting to my Grandparents were my Grandfather was with terminal cancer.  Thank goodness we made ham- as it was already pre-cooked and we were basically just coating it and reheating it (turkey could have been a food poisoning disaster).  We were also making pumpkin pies and they were not setting up, not browning, etc- we left them in 45 minutes longer than instructed!!!  We went out later and bought a manual oven temp gauge and told my Mom to look at it next time she used the oven- she tried to bake a cake and had to crank it up to 550 degrees and it reading at about 300 degrees.  Talk about not safe!  So needless to say- she had to buy a new oven (that one was very old anyway).

[MimzMum]

Okay…I do remember something that stands out now.
We used to live in this little beach house down in Pismo (well just north of there) and this was one of the first years we were there, and of course my first real turn at having to cook for myself and my hubby. I’d found some gorgeous corn on the cob at the store for July 4th and looked forward to having it that evening with some barbecued something or other, can’t recall what it was now… and that was because I put the cobs in hot water and sugar on the stove in a metal pan and, instead of leaving the lid askew for the steam to escape, I allowed it to seat on the pan.
As the water continued to heat, the lid SEALED to the pan and we couldn’t get it off. Had the hubby not noticed that the lid was stuck, the whole thing could’ve been like a pressure cooker and blown up and we would’ve had some serious fireworks then.
As it was it took forever to get the lid off and he constantly told any one who would listen about it. It was like he had put a sign up that said, “C’mere and look at my dumb wife!” I just wanted to crawl under a rock for years.

[Elrohwen]

MM, I can’t even imagine a lid sealing to a pot like that! My engineering brain is trying to figure out how it happened, but I can’t come up with anything :-p Good thing you guys got it off and it didn’t turn into a bomb! That would be pretty scary.

[Author]

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