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 😉

I was once sitting at work about an hour after my shift started and realised I had left a pan of lentils simmering on the hob. A very rapid drive home which was perhaps the longest twenty minutes of my life, which didn’t get any better when I heard the smoke alarm as I came down the drive.

I opened the door into the kitchen and saw a layer of smoke three feet down from the ceiling, but fortunately no flames. The lentils had become a black solid mass in the bottom of the pan, and were smouldering.

The smell of burnt lentils took several weeks to completely dissipate.

Eating daffodil bulbs wins

Stayed in a rented cottage with some friends, found a big non stick pan, made a load of porridge for breakfast. Had a slight chickeny tang. Particularly unlucky for my veggie GF. Turns out the pan wasn’t non stick just covered in a welded on layer of chicken soup left by the previous guests. Bleargh

Many moons ago at my girlfriend’s uni’ digs in Selly Oak. It was a sub-zero night with a few inches of the white stuff stuck. We decided a chilli would be a perfect dinner for such a cold evening. Mince sealed, onion and garlic softened. It was time to add the cumin, mixed herbs, tinned tom’s, tom’ puree and of course the chilli. The latter was missing. We scoured the cupboards to no avail. We had to face facts. We had no chilli for our chilli. We joked about what such a dish would be called. “I’ll nip out and get some.” I said. So, three cans of Tennants Extra* in, I jumped on a lady’s bike, complete with basket and headed out into the snow on a quest for spicy powder. Damn – the food store was in darkness. I passed a booze shop and saw that the chap behind the counter was Asian. Lightbulb moment – he won’t sell chilli powder but he’ll have some “in the back.” And  yes, I walked in and asked him that very question! He didn’t have any so I pedalled and skidded my way back to Gleave Road.

The solution? Well – we decided we could use cinnamon instead of chilli. They were basically the same thing.

The cinnamon con carne ended up in the bin and we spent twenty minutes cleaning our teeth. It was bloody vile.

*NOT Super. Extra was about 5%.

Some quality stories! Its a wonder many from STW have not died a fiery death at some point…

Mate of mine is a very good cook. We like to do wilderness canoeing trips, during which he produces the most amazing food even many days in. Day eight, somewhere in deepest Sweden. Slaving over a campfire, he spends a couple of hours making an amazing suet jam roly-poly pudding from fresh ingredients, slow cooked over embers, the smell permeating the campsite making the rest of us drool.

I made the (instant) custard. Which was immediately disposed off into the heather, and a second batch produced. He hasn’t let me forget that one.

My dad managed to make a tin of Heinz Chocolate pudding explode in our kitchen. Couldn’t get the results off the ceiling, so painted it brown. Fortunately it was the 70s so you could get away with such colour schemes…

People over dinner and we decide to use the chiminea. Can’t get the Git started so decide to use some 30% nitro race fuel to get things going……

quick squirt of that from the bottle, Chuck in a match and things start to get going.

another big squirt and the flame gets sucked back into the bottle which detonates throwing blue liquid fireballs at my guests, all over me and in my hair.

no one likes the smell of burning hair before dinner 🙂

Was at my folks’ place with the wife once, decided to make us some toasties for lunch.  Mum said there were some chopped onions in a tub in the fridge that I could use.  Found a tub of onions, they smelled like like balsamic vinegar.  Bit odd, I thought, but we both like balsamic vinegar and it’d go nicely with the rest of the ingredients…  About 30 minutes after eating my wife had the raging two-bob bits, and was really quite ill for about three days.  I was fine though, despite having eaten exactly the same meal  🙂   My mum later admitted that the onions could have been there for a few weeks.

Then there was the time my wife decided to make a chilli paste from fresh chillies.  We freeze it flat in bags, so you can just chop a bit off as needed.  Anyway, she put a pile of chillies in the blender along with some other ingredients, and switched it on.  After not very long the aerosolised capsaicin spread through the house and we had to blindly stumble our way outside whilst not being able to breathe very well.  Turns out that as well as regular chillies she’d grown some ghost peppers and had put half a dozen into the mix…  The blender was still going inside, I had to get goggles from the garage, a wet rag over my mouth and nose (with breath held just for good measure), dash back inside and take the blender outside.  Then repeat to open all the windows and doors.  Then have a shower.  The chilli paste was awesome, though, in small enough doses.

A friend once had us round for dinner, as we arrived there a key lime pie cooling on the side.  It smelled fantastic.  After dinner it was brought out and served.  My wife, pregnant with our first child, had the first slice and started eating before anyone else.  She thought it was grim, but sort of figured it could be her taste buds which were all over the place due to pregnancy.  Whilst trying not to be rude by spitting it out, she looked around and caught the eye of our friend’s husband.  He was clearly not enjoying his either, and they both spat it out.  Our friend had used salt instead of sugar, the whole lot went in the bin.

Fast-forward four years and we were at another friend’s for dinner. The key lime pie friend had brought dessert.  As it was being served she was regaling our host with the story of the key lime pie debacle, and how she’d never lived it down.  By chance, my wife was first to tuck in.  And she was again pregnant.  And out friend had done it again, a huge cheesecake that went in the bin.  We make her taste all desserts first now, and have also put massive labels on her salt and sugar containers.

Amazing (or not!) how many involve alcohol… As a student I once came back from the pub to my shared 1st floor flat and feeling peckish put a pizza in the oven. Was awoken some time later by my flatmate – there was a layer of smoke half way down all the rooms in the flat and on opening the oven door the now on-fire pizza was rapidly thrown out of the kitchen window. On inspection of the remnants the following morning, all that was left had turned to carbon…

Also, one day put on an egg in the morning to hard boil for my lunch, forgot about it and went to work, then came home at lunchtime to find an acrid smell in the house and nothing but a blackened shell in the pan.

Cooking a savoury mince in the pressure cooker day after boxing day, the safety valve let go and covered the ceiling of the kitchen with savoury mince, took an awful long time to clean up lol

I’ve had a fair few… Last Christmas it was just me and my son, I said lets do something different and was recommended a goose…. also saw Ostrich in Lidl, though yeah! Ostrich.

Well the ostrich was a proper Christmas cliche – get it out of the freezer to cook on Christmas day and find it should’ve been thawed for 24 hours.

The goose just wouldn’t cook… turned out as a hard greasy lump of brown stuff, which we threw in the garden. Christmas dinner was veg, with pigs in blankets.

Years ago, when I lived in a shared house, I decided I wanted to cook a sausage and bacon pie of my own invention.

I assembled this thing with pastry and meat … I believe (it was a long time ago) I dropped it on the floor upon attempting to put it in the oven. As it landed, out of annoyance I half volleyed the baking tin, which firmly hit the kitchen wall and sprayed soggy pastry, bits of sausage and bacon EVERYWHERE. Oh how much fun was cleaning the kitchen up before any of my housemates could find out what a psycho I was.

Same as a few others, cooked a pizza, tasted funny and pizza tray was impossible to clean. Mate I was living with worked out the polystyrene disc was missing and I’d eaten it. Wasn’t even the worst pizza I’d eaten. Unfortunately there was no alcohol involved to blame.

When I was a teenager I made tomato sauce (for pasta) using lots of fresh tomatoes and basil. Basil, I thought. Mum’s got loads of that growing outside. The recipe called for some. Lots in fact. Spent ages diligently chopping the basil in to lots of small pointy pieces.

Cut my mouth to pieces, that basil did. As it would transpire, it was Bay.

You lot put the to shame, though.

Couple of student ones:

Really stoned at a party.  Microwave popcorn got 30mins instead of 30seconds.  New microwave needed.

First time I made a beef chilli – managed to cook the bit of paper that sits under the mince in the packet.  That didn’t go down well with my flatmates :0)

I’ve done a few similar to others here.

This one at least wasn’t my fault.  Nuking a tin of soup at work like I’d done a thousand times before.  The microwave had been going for about a minute when there was an almighty **** bang, I was in the centre on Manchester and I genuinely thought a bomb had gone off.  Opened the oven door to find an empty soup bowl and the interior of the oven that was totally orange with a few white spots.  Turns out, superheating is a thing, who knew.

Tin of sweetcorn into a huge batch chilli only to find that, as someone else mentioned previously, they were in brine.  Would anyone like some chilli with their salt?

I have a traditional chip pan, and I’ve only ever had two fires. (-:  One was mundane – I’d left it warming up for too long, noticed black smoke wisping out from under the lid, so lifted the lid to look inside with hilarious consequences.  Smoke out, oxygen in, there was a “whump” noise and it went up like a fire safety training video.  I might’ve said a naughty word before chucking it outside.

The other kitchen fire was on one of those old spiral hobs like @rich_s mentioned.  Overfilled a chip pan and had a load of hot oil spill out, down through the element and onto the tray that separates the hobs from the grill.  Thought nothing more about it.  A few days later I was using the cooker and noticed the hobs smoking a little.  “Never mind,” I thought, “it’ll burn itself off.”  Ignored it to smoulder away for a little while and then, of course, it reached flashpoint and ignited.  The entire cooker top went up, foot-high flames pouring up around all four hobs.  Which was nice.

This thread pleases me. 🙂

Me: Made a lemon drizzle cake as a treat for Mrs Pondo – scuttling round for ingredients, I require flour and find some in the pantry. On testing the cake, the consistency is curious – the top is as light and fluffy as the inside of a feather pillow, but as you work your way down it becomes tough in a way not unreminiscent of tarmac. There are, I learn, different kinds of flour, and they are not interchangeable, the corn flour I used was not suitable for a lemon drizzle cake.

Possibly apocryphal: Drunken man hospitalised the morning after with horrendous food poisoning – the investigation reveals that, on returning home in a peckish frame of stomach, he’d cooked himself up some chicken from the freezer. Using the iron.

with horrendous food poisoning

oooh that reminds me of another one – the first time I cooked with dried haricots blancs I didn’t soak them overnight, figuring that they’d be alright with soaking for an hour or so before cooking (maybe just cook for a bit longer). Cue the worst ever stomach cramps and an awful evening pebble dashing the loo. If it wasn’t one end then it was the other, sometimes both at the same time… 😭

Ooh, the chicken/iron one. Not me, but a bloke I used to work with claimed to have a cheap iron that he used solely for bacon. I was never sure if I should believe him as he was a bit of a Ken McKenzie, always going off to elevenerife but on the other hand, it could work.

Nothing too bad, I’ve done toast under the grill, it catches fire quite rapidly, certainly quicker than I anticipated.

Microwaved chistmas pudding, for 20 minutes instead of 5, it smouldered for quite a while.

Late home for dinner, so everyone had eaten apart from me. I think it was pasta and cheese sauce with jam roly poly for pudding. Grabbed the jug on the side with the custard in it and heated it up a little then poured over jam roly poly. Eating jam roly poly thinking “this is slightly odd”, ate probably 2/3rds before the penny dropped that I’d put the cheese sauce on and we didn’t have any custard. Finished it regardless because I hate wasting food, and it wasn’t TOO bad!

Loads over the years, but one stands out:

As a student, decided to make some fish and chips. Knowing that somehow, you put beer into it, I decided to empty a pint bottle of ale into the hot fat, as ‘that must be how they do it in the chip shops’… Cue terrifying explosion which thankfully missed me and any other vital parts of the halls kitchen… When I think of it now it makes my blood go cold.

Then there was the old ‘mistake chili powder for paprika’ when cooking, which was pleasant…

I once got some arrabiata spice mix from Italy, and it was just labelled as that. No “super hot” or anything on the packet. God knows what chillis were in it though, as I only added about half a teaspoon to a big pot of sauce and it was practically inedible, hotter than any curry I’ve ever tried.
I was very hungry though, so chucked in an avocado, big pot of yoghurt and about a kilo of cheese, which made it just about manageable.

I once got some arrabiata spice mix from Italy, and it was just labelled as that. No “super hot” or anything on the packet.

Er, ‘arribiata’ means hot or spicy… (literal translation is ‘angry’)…

Not a spectacular house-burning one, but many years ago I thought I’d impress a girlfriend by cooking a Jamie Oliver curry recipe. It was (for my abilities then) a seemingly complicated list of processes and techniques and then a long, slow cook. The last part required the addition of fresh coriander and a small amount of lemon juice. I added too much lemon juice and ruined the whole thing – curry that tastes like jif lemon is not great. The whole lot went in the bin and I think we probably ended up having beans on toast.

student halls – far too many to list, but the ones that stand out most were…

putting the christmas pudding in to the steamer for the apartment christmas dinner. then letting it boil dry. then letting it “steam” for a significant amount of time longer.  then using a carving knife to whittle the melted plastic off the pudding and reshaping the remaining parts to be the right shape, just smaller.

putting the chip pan on to warm up. then going to one of the rooms to play Revenge of the Mutant Camels (or something of that era) for a bit… and a bit more, and then spotting the smoke coming under the bedroom door. and then finding out that (a) the fireblanket was mounted on the wall above the cooker! and (b) after 3 guys throwing the fridge freezer out of the way to get access to the fire blanket, finding out that fireblankets (made of glass fibre I thought) melt!

flames licking the ceiling, smoke billowing out the windows and nobody raised any alarm.  in the UK’s largest student hall complex too.

we then went down the chippy.

Er, ‘arribiata’ means hot or spicy… (literal translation is ‘angry’)…

I know that, and I’ve had plenty of lovely hot arrabiata sauces. It’s just that this one had such a startling heat, only similar to that from products with loads of warnings and pictures of nuclear explosions on the bottle. I don’t know if the heat itself was more intense or it was just the surprise of it, but this stuff seemed hotter than Blair’s Mega Death sauce (550,000 scoville units), which I once tried a teaspoon of while pissed.

The heatmat incident:

After cooking up a big batch of curry in a huge cast iron pot, I took it off the hob and placed it on a heat mat. Few hours later it when in the fridge. Next day I took it out the fridge and onto the hob to reheat the whole thing.

I checked on it half an hour later and it didnt really heat up but there was an odd smell, so turned up the heat and left it. I came back another 20 minutes later to smoke and burning plastic smell coming from under the pot. Took it off the hob and into the sink. Turns out that some of the curry juice had caused the heat mat to weld itself to the pot whilst cooling. I then lifted the whole thing as a one into the firdge and then onto the hob. Oops!

Eggsploding eggs:

I was lodging at the time and decided to patch boil some hard boiled eggs. 6 go in the pan, then onto the gas hob. I go upstairs for 5 minutes to do some admin, except I got disrtacted by the xbox.. I played a few games and then I smell burning and the dog barking. I forgot the bloddy eggs! I ran downstairs and the water had completly gone and eggs had exploded and started burning. Open all the windows and scrub the pot before landlady arrives back. That was pretty close.

Drunk pasta:
After a night out decided to make pasta whilst working a summer job in Cornwall. Pasta in pan and onto a small camping hob in a tiny 10ft caravan. Collapse on bed only to be woken a couple hours later by about a foot of black smoke in the roof of the caravan and burning pasta. Also a close call.

Tuna cunundrum:

As a lad I wanted to make tuna pasta. We were in the cornish caravana agin and didn’t have a tin opener, so got the pocketknife and started making an absolute mess of opening the tin. I ended up deeply slicing two fingers but got the can open finished making the tuna pasta with a big helping of blood. Fingers ducktaped up and still bleeding. Still have the deep scars 15 years later.

Inky floor:

A mate bought a Squid from the local fisherman when we lived in cornwall. He wasn’t sure what to do with it so left it on the counter until he sourced a recipe. It was a hot day and the squid started to go off and the thing leaked ink everywhere, including the new cream carpet they’d just fitted. Ink stain never came out.