When I was about 14/15 I wanted to make my self some soup. In a microwave. So put the soup in a bowl and put it in the microwave. When it pinged, i went to take it out. Soup everywhere. What was left in the bowl was welded onto it, i had to throw the bowl away too. Apparently 11 minutes is too long to cook soup in a microwave.
What's yours?
My first roasted Celeriac.
The recipe said “coat with olive oil”
I drowned it.
Jeeze, it was vile and was booted far and wide into the undergrowth.
Setting fire to oven chips.
The risks of coming home from the pub and deciding to cook food....
Kitchen fire in Hotel frejus (Serre Che). On Christmas Day. 120 covers, evacuated the hotel, people outside in dressing gowns and towels in the snow at 1400 m. Never had a Christmas like it since! Luckily we didn’t ruin the turkey, just filled the kitchen with thick black smoke.
Bolognese and forgetting to add any tinned tomatoes. It was still nice, just not bolognese.
And some half hearted attempts to baked bread and cake on a cobb BBQ, could have anchored a boat with the results.
I had a near miss when I worked in a supermarket coffee shop. We had an 800ml aerosol of cooking oil that we used in the egg fryer. I took a basket out of the deep fat fryer and then a few moments later knocked the aerosol off the egg fryer, it fell across the chip fryer bouncing off the rim several times before I managed to bat it onto the floor. Because I'd taken the basket out there is no way I could have fished it out and was already heading for the fire alarm and the power cutoff for all the kitchen equipment! Coffee shopped opened directly onto the checkouts and there were fire exits either side of the kitchen and I can't imagine the mess that 20 litres of boiling chip vat being vaporised across the front of the shop and evacuating shoppers would have made 😲
Pancake recipe without eggs!
Cooking pre made pizza in the oven forgetting to take the (olden days) polystyrene disc off the bottom.
It would have been closer to Bolognese without the tinned tomatoes!
For me it was by far and away trying to refresh a stale popodum in the toaster. On fire bigly within 20 seconds.
In my early teens I decided to make fried rice. Assumed you could cook rice just by frying it without having boiled it first (google was not a thing in those days). Was a bit crunchy 😂
Cooking pre made pizza in the oven forgetting to take the (olden days) polystyrene disc off the bottom.
Was at a friend's and he did that, he still ate most of it. He'll never be allowed to forget that.
My worst was probably at uni making toast in the grill with a housemate, it was after a night out. We decided to both have a little lie down whilst we waited, luckily woke up to a different housemate kicking me and a kitchen full of black smoke. That could have ended a lot worse!
Cooking related I wanted to dry some tea towels in a hurry so put them in the microwave. All was going well but still a bit damp so but then in for longer and set them on fire. So I ran over and opened the door and put them all in the sink. Still it solved the drying problem.
using a tube of harissa instead of a tube of tomato puree in a bolognese sauce
spicy
Microwaving ski gloves to dry them or a chilli that was so hot I just couldn't eat it
Trying to impress a girlfriend when the folks were out I thought I would cook some burgers. I defrosted a gerbil instead. It didn't go down well
My mother was a biology teacher and used to keep dead animals in the freezer until they were going to be used in her classes for dissection or until she got round to preparing the skins or skeletons for her collection
I don’t use tinned toms in Bolognese either 😄
My worst was second degree burns after lifting the cling film off a bowl of microwaved new potatoes. Ironically the allergic reaction to the plaster tape the hospital used was even worse than the burn itself.
My biggest cooking mistake was letting the wife know that I can...
The time I made pancakes and wanted to put a little cinnamon on them, instead I grabbed ground nutmeg, being the same colour and not knowing I had any, and the top fell off coating them in it. Fine I thought I will just brush the excess off, and then I took a bite, always checked the bottle after that.
Using a jar of sliced Jalapeños in a chilli many years ago, I didn’t realise they were in brine and just tipped the jar in 🤮 totally inedible
.... straight in the bin and always used fresh chillis since that “ learning experience “
I made an apple crumble at school in home economics. Measured everything out at home the night before, but a pinch of salt was hard to measure into a bag, so I poured a load in and thought I'd remember to just take a pinch out! Obviously I didn't so we ended up with the world's saltiest crumble.
I also made peanut cookies but blitzed the peanuts until they were the consistency of sand. They were truly grim!!
Most sad I’ve seen my wife re cooking was when I made apple crumble... it took longer to go golden brown and caramelised on top then usual. In fact it didn’t brown at all...
when I gave up waiting and served it anyway, it turned out I’d grabbed the salt instead of sugar to add to the mix...
crumble bin interface straight away.
edit: seconds! At least I’m not the only idiot!
My girlfriend made nachos under the grill.
One vary large flame spewing black smoke everywhere and had to empty a powder extinguisher into the oven.
I still remember back in the early 70's my mum shouting at us to get out of the house as the chip pan was on fire. Made rather a mess of the kitchen especially some of the polystyrene ceiling tiles. The only thing though to be totally destroyed was that years fire prevention calendar. Most important thing though was that mum put it out and dad didn't have to come home to find one of his own brigades fire engines parked outside!
Catering work experience in a big office kitchen when I was 16 - first job on first day the guys tells me and a mate to gently put 40 eggs in a (big, obvs) saucepan and put them on to boil so we gently crack 40 eggs into the saucepan, add water and bring to the boil.
For the rest of the week said mate and I played elastic band shootouts in the store room.
True story
We borrowed an idyllic but tiny cottage near Daymer Bay for Christmas. Prepared lunch for her and me, everything ready to serve in the tiny kitchen and I manage to slide the whole lot into a sink full of washing up.
D’Oh!
Cooking steaks, whilst making a sauce to go with them, I added a glug of whisky to the pan to flambe. Used too much and the extractor fan above sucked all the flames up through it. The resulting fireball was about a third of the size of my kitchen!
I learned for future to do it safely, turn of extractor and gas hob, use a long lighter to ignite, do not tip the pan over to let the gas flame get it.
I once sliced a pizza and then used a fork.
When I was a chef working at Walton Heath golf club in Surrey I made an entire sweet trolley using sugar that had somehow become contaminated with salt resulting in everything , which was about 15 desserts , being totally inedible .
Put some eggs on to hard boil for sandwiches then decided to go set the VCR up (it was a while ago) to watch the World Superbikes ..... got totally into it and a while later wondered what the bang was! The whole kitchen was peppered with bits of hardboiled exploded egg ..... had to pretty much deep clean the whole kitchen and even then we were finding bits for weeks afterwards!
First day living in my own house and confused F and C on the cooker / frozen pizza box - turned up the oven as hot as it would go (not realising it was shown C only) and then went for a shower.
15 minutes later the pizza looked like a cookie and the kitchen was full of dark smoke - with my mum and dad stood outside (having just come round to see how I was doing) watch me run around half naked trying to sort the chaos out.
Came back from pub, drinking more beer with mate, hungry, put pizza in oven, cooked at correct temp for correct time. Pizza removed from oven, smelt odd, was a bugger to get off mums best non stick tray. Pizza tasted odd. Drank more beer.
Next day Mother was not impressed as pizza polystyrene base was welded to her best non stick tray.......
Killing two pans within weeks of each other around 2002, trying to make custard from the non-instant Birds tins, but creating a concrete lattice instead!
Trip to pub.
Beer, crisps.
I'm home and a bit peckish.
Beans on toast is safe after beer isn't it?
Toast in, half a can of beans into the pyrex jug. Pyrex jug in the fridge.
Can and fork...in the microwave.
Switch on, what's that bang bang bang noise?
Sparks, flames out the back. Beer head slowly clearing, I can switch the microwave off at the wall. Stumble over switch off. Flames go out. Sparks stopped.
Toast pops and I'm wondering how I'm going to heat the beans.
When I was a student I lived in shared house which had a toaster that didn’t turn itself off. I can remember one weekend I put bread in the toaster to make some breakfast and then getting sidetracked by a housemate to smoke a splif. A little while later ( and as it happened luckily) a guy from the gas board came to read the meter and rang the doorbell. I went downstairs to find the whole ground floor enveloped in thick black smoke and the kitchen units on fire from the burning toaster.
Nice Casserole made. Popped in caravan oven for journey to last trip of season, weekend away. Ended up eating out every night.
Caravan smelled fresh when we opened it up in March.
Chap at work set the microwave for 2 mins to roast some chestnuts. Chestnuts well aflame after 40 mins of 2 hour setting. Office of 50 evacuated. Oh, and the manufacturing plant of 300. 🙂
MSG ... know your MSG ...
Don't do this ...
As an aside (given the amount of microwave stories) had anyone had a microwave blow up? Jeez - that stinks.
Chopped a load of chilli to make fajitas for a girl. Got randy and started having a play with her lady bits. Not the emotions I was looking for ..
Cooking steaks, whilst making a sauce to go with them, I added a glug of whisky to the pan to flambe. Used too much and the extractor fan above sucked all the flames up through it. The resulting fireball was about a third of the size of my kitchen!
I had a similar mishap - extractor filters are highly flammable. I lost my eyebrows, too.
Not me.. Honest.
My bro getting in one night well in drink. After a while I found him asleep at the bottom of the stairs and the smoke alarm going off. I asked him what the hell is he cooking. Pizza. Except he hadn't removed the pizza from the box, just turned the oven on and put the whole thing in, box, plastic, polystyrene tray.
My mishap was a 6 year old me making a summer drink for my mom. Milk and fresh orange juice. Yum?
when I moved into my first house I had to buy a load of essential stuff for the store cupboard, including spices and chilli powder. Of course I opted for the hot, but what i didn't realise was that i'd picked up a pack with a competition on the side, and to make way for the rules / T&C's they'd decided to miss off any use instructions. Of course it was days before google so I guessed and tasted, and as it hadn't had time to develop, added some more. And repeat. A few times. After it had simmered for a while though and the flavour had developed..... **** me, one spoonful and it was full on eyeball sweats. But i was poor, so I ate it.
Worst thing was that i'd done that thing your mum says about making a load and freezing it to reheat......and being poor, I couldn't afford not to eventually go back and eat the three other portions at various dates in the future.
I also made soup in my kettle at University after a mate told me it could be done. But I clearly hadn't listened to the make holes in the tin and stand in the water bit, instead i just put the soup in the kettle. For the rest of the year my tea and coffee tasted slightly of burnt tomato soup. Every cloud though - at the end of a night after the Union had shut and everyone went back to someone's for a brew and to listen to some records no-one ever wanted to come back to mine. Saved a fortune in tea bags........
Now this, this is a thread I can contribute to.
My parents were heading out, and left me to cook dinner for myself. 'Sausages in the fridge, tin of beans here, and there's onions in the shed if you want them'.
Result. Fry up.
Went out to the shed, couldn't find the onions anywhere. 'Ah, there they are, on that table.' thought I, 'Bit small, but whatever'. In hindsight, I should probably have noticed that this was the potting table.
Thought they were a bit slimy as I cut them up. 'Daft parents, these onions are going off'.
Fry up completed, fried onions and sausages added to a a big bowl of baked beans. Something didn't taste *quite* right, but I was a hungry teenager so down the hatch it went.
Within about two minutes I felt decidedly queasy. This soon escalated to weapons-grade vomiting and diarrhoea, BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. It was properly violent. By the time the parentals got home I was basically a hollowed-out, dehydrated husk of a human being. I was still retching until the early hours of the morning, which I spent at the local hospital.
After some minor investigation, it transpired the 'onions' were in fact daffodil bulbs. Errr.... Woops.
3am Christmas morning I wake to the smell of burning, then alarms going off. Head downstairs to find kitchen engulfed in smoke.
My housemate had been making jam for christmas presents, drunk half a bottle of port and passed out on the sofa leaving said jam cooking.
The pan still had spoon in it, which had now been welded on to the pan, we could not remove that spoon. All binned.
Cooking with vegan chorizo. And if that wasn't bad enough I managed to burn it slightly which was about the only thing I could have done to make it taste worse...
Burnt some chillis making salt and pepper cod one lunch time while my student housemates were all still in bed sleeping off the previous night's party. Eyes streaming and lungs exploding I opened the kitchen window to clear the air - sending the smoke up the stairs and and gently rousing people from their slumber one by one.
and a 3rd degree burn while toasting a marshmallow over the bbq
My earliest memory is of toddling into the kitchen from the garden to see my dad on a set of stepladders trying to dig the valve from the top of a pressure cooker from out of the ceiling and stewed rhubarb dripping off every surface.
Once was cooking spaghetti (the heinz type, not organic open-toe sandal friendly quinoa stuff) on one of those '70s electric cookers with "open" rings. The ones where the element was laid out in a spiral and the pan sat on top.
The element(s) touched, almighty bang, blew a hole in the bottom of the pan (mum's favourite saucepan) and sprayed spaghetti on the ceiling.
This was back in the day, so no RCD to reset and I was home alone in the summer holidays so had to wait for dad to come home to fix the fuse, so bread and butter for lunch. Mum got a new cooker out of it and I never had a word of thanks 😉
