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@cybercita, I know the feeling. Once I opened the door to the oven to pull out my cast iron skillet that had been finishing a steak in the oven. Grabbed it WITHOUT a mitt. But my all time favorite in sheer mindlessness was holding a chef's knife BY THE BLADE, sharp end, and slicing onions. I scare the crap out of me sometimes.

@cybercita - I'm sorry to laugh at your expense but what the hell do you expect when you type stuff like this:

i was running around looking for it while hot flying missiles continued to bomb me...

You poor thing... I don't know what I envy less, the "hot missles" or cleaning up popcorn from God knows where.

The worst "absent minded" thing I ever did was burn while reheating beautiful root chips which my friends spent all afternoon frying. I felt terrible. The acrid smell throughout the apartment only served to add insult to injury. Luckily, they forgave me.

My inlaws had given me 4 Cuban coffee makers over the years and I left them on the stove and burnt the hell out of them and my stove top. Never burnt a pot or pan or even a tea kettle, but for some reason just would fix it up and WALK AWAY. Last year they gave me an electric one....problem solved.

I have a paring knife that for some reason, every now and then, I try to cut with the dull side instead of the sharp side.

I've been known to have things boiling and forget about them. This was much worse when we first moved here, because I wasn't used to the altitude. So, I'd get tired of waiting for the water to start boiling, and I'd leave the kitchen. But of course, water also evaporates faster here, so as soon as I'd turn my back, the water would boil out and I'd come back to a dry pot at the best, or a smoking pot, if something was in there. You know. Like RICE.

The popcorn thing is funny. I can remember one time when I was making popcorn and I lifted the lid to look inside. What the heck did I expect to see? Popcorn genies?

The stupidest was when I was dating my now-husband, and I made dinner for him and after I took the rolls out of the oven, I left the oven on. We went out and a huge blizzard hit, and we couldn't get back to my apartment for three days. I got back home and the DOORKNOB was hot. What the heck?

So I turn off the oven, and it's like a hundred degrees in the apartment, and I open the balcony door in the living room, and the bedroom window to get the temp down to something humanly habitable. Not wide open, but cracked open.

We go out for dinner and again, a huge storm rolls in with gusting winds and freezing cold. Again, I don't go home that night. Next day, we go back to my apartment, and now the doorknob is like ice. We go in and there's snow on the bed and we're sweeping snow off the living room floor. It's so cold, we can see our breath.

Neighbors on either side of me must have thought they were living next door to the exorcist, with the walls going from blazing hot to freezing cold. Why they didn't report me to the management, I have no idea.

Long ago, very pregnant, I was cooking breakfast. Broke my egg into my orange juice and then wondered where the egg was when I saw that there was only brown butter in the pan!

The only good thing was I didn't take a drink of the yucky juice.

That was probably the same day I caught my maternity top on the turning signal and blew out every fuse under the dashboard.

@brooke29 - "kitchen don't like your arse" is going to become my mantra!
How true - it seems like every time the kitchen sees my arse, something happens!

Many many times, I have grabbed the handle of a saute pan after pulling it out of a 400 + degree oven. Usually, as I am mindlessly reaching for the handle, I am thinking 'I really need to put the oven mitt on that handle before I grab it' then half a second later; "AGGHHHHHFUUU*KSONNOVAB*&#HMUTHAFER!!!"

When I first got my immersion blender, my first order of kitchen business was pumpkin soup. I was so excited with how pretty the soup looked while I was blending. I just HAD to bend down and steal a whiff. I didn't want to bump the blender so I picked it up. It was still running. It was a horrible mess!

Once over the course of about 30 seconds I burned the surface of half my palm, burned a hicky-sized spot on my neck, and bashed my forehead open. To this day I can't explain the sequence of events; all I know is that an oven, a pot, and my own klutziness were involved. Naturally, I had to see all of my extended family the next day, and I looked like I'd just gotten back from battle. Battle with myself. In my own kitchen.

Ooof, my latest kitchen mishap involved a sautee pan filled with browned butter sauce to which I added a ladle full of water (to think it a bit) from the nearby pasta pot. For some reason, I thought the butter sauce burner had been turned off--I ended up with a nasty butter-water explosion all over the kitchen. Still not sure how I didn't suffer any serious burns.

And then there was the day I dumped a pot of boiling elbow macaroni onto my foot. And somewhere in the midst of the hopping around and trying to back away from the river of hot water and swimming noodles that were coming after me, I had the most irrational thought: It would be worse if I was at sea level, because the water would be hotter.

I had a lot of thoughts. Many, many thoughts. Because time does slow down. Thoughts like, "Gee, I hope the dogs don't try eating these boiling hot noodles that are swimming towards me on this sea of boiling salty water." Hop. Hop-hop. Hoppity-hop-hop-hop.

And thoughts like, "It's funny that it doesn't hurt at all." Yet.

And thoughts like, "I wonder if it's a good thing that I'm wearing socks?"

That was not one of my better days.

i've enjoyed reading about all of your kitchen disasters..... i have to wonder what you're all smoking???? and i don't mean bacon!

(ha ha, i've had a few of my own...... not tellin')

I usually end up losing track of toasting nuts... I might as well burn money with the amount of pine nuts and walnuts that i've burnt beyond recognition.

You all are hysterical. I've had my share, believe me, and I have the scars to prove it! You'd think after all these years I'd figure out the oven racks are hot. I'm always reaching in there and bumping my forearms on either the racks or (ewww this really hurts) the top element. How about the time I was browning lamb shanks for stew and accidentally dropped one from above the pot instead of placing it nicely in the bottom and that hot oil jumped out and got all over my arms. All i can say is thank the lord I keep tons of aloe plants growing all over the back porch. it's a lifesaver. really.

Once in a while i just get so clumsey it's just a cacophony of mini catastrophies, one after the other, that I think I should not be in the kitchen at all that day.

A couple of years ago, my husband, like hammondcheese (and others!), did the grab-the-handle-of-the-hot-skillet-straight-from-the-oven thing and somehow managed to break the glass front of our stove. My son captured the aftermath on video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIFaz8t0MQM&feature=channel_page

(As you can tell, I was more concerned about the lamb shanks than the oven door or huge mess.)

When I was 15 I was making some sort of fruit smoothie with my mom's immersion blender. After I was done, I went to clean it under the sink with running water. Like an idiot, I left it plugged in as I ran my finger around the blade to get out the rest of the fruit smoothie.

I managed to hit the "On" button while my finger was in there poking at the blade and took off the tip of my left index finger.

Never again will I clean a plugged in appliance.

Ouches all over the place! I'm glad you're all in one (or more) piece (or pieces) and recovered, for the most part.

I have many disasters and most involve fire (I know, I know), but never serious injury. Lately, I don't dare turn my back on anything on the stove or in the oven - I totally forget. I have been reminded by foul odors, black and white smoke, and rarely - the smoke alarm. I don't think that thing was too reliable. (I just moved out.) My sister, on the other hand, uses her smoke alarm as her dinner bell, since it goes off everytime she cooks.

I have a heavy brushed steel pepper mill that I inexplicably keep on the back of my stove top. When I use the oven it heats everything up there past the point of handling. Despite the fact I have burned my hands reaching for that thing more times than I care to remember and have thusly thrown the mill into the freezer whilst yelling "HOT!" I still keep it up there. I am a creature of habit if nothing else.

I had just taken out a pan from the oven. I was cooking a steak so the oven was set at 450. I used my left hand (thick glove on) to take the pan out, placed it on the stove top, turned to the opposite counter to grab an ingredient and proceed to grap the handle of the pan with my right hand (gloveless). The sizzle was instant, as was the pain.

I immediately turned on the faucet and ran cold water on my hand for about ten minutes straight. This kept me from developing blisters. I still managed to finish preparing my meal but cutting the streak was a bit painful.

Now, when I take a hot pan out of the oven I place opening of the glove over the handle as a reminder.

I feel better about mine now:

Once, I decided to make pasta for a date, but I was rushing around after class and had to multitask. So I showered while it was cooking, etc. I came out of the bathroom and decided to stir the hot, bubbling tomato sauce while NAKED. Did I mention I'm 4'11"? So in the end, I had a huge red welt across my left breast (seriously, OW.), On the upside, the date went so well I ended up having to explain how the welt got there :)

I'm feeling better about my latest mishap too. Three weeks ago I made a pot of really fine stock, and grabbed my largest bowl in which to strain it. The bowl is one of those collapsible silicone numbers. (You see where this is going, right?) The edge of the stockpot clipped the rim of the bowl, which of course collapsed, flooding my right leg with boiling stock. I immediately flushed it with cold water, but still ended up with second degree burns from groin to ankle. I have a fairly high pain threshold but man, did this hurt.

It's healing well. The boy cat has finally stopped sniffing my boiled leg and wondering if it's dinner. But I'm still sad about losing that stock.

I am sure I have one or two of these stories but the one that popped into my head right away was when I stopped up to see my mother and she put an enameled tea kettle on to boil for coffee. She proceeded to forget about it and the whole thing MELTED into the coil of her electric stove. When we saw it she grabbed it, coil embedded and tossed it in to a snowbank. After it cooled we managed to pry the coil out but if you look close you can still see the blue enamel stuck to certain places!

YIPES!

Again, no personal injuries, but I do recall making cupcakes with my sister and stepbrother when we teenagers. We were using a cake mix, and somehow got the oil and water measurements backwards, so that there was 4 times as much oil as we needed. Instead of just throwing it out, we decided it made more sense to just buy 4 more boxes of cake mix to even it out. We were eating (unfrosted) cupcakes for what seemed like forever - I remember putting butter and jam on them like muffins for breakfast!

When I read the title of this thread, I had to tell my story. I was making pasta once in my tiny apartment kitchen. I got everything ready, turned on the burner and went to the living room to wait for the water to boil. A few minutes later I heard the strangest sound coming from the kitchen and I went to investigate. Flames were coming off the stove and literally enveloping the cabinets, which was guiding the fire to the opposite wall. Turns out, I had turned on the wrong burner, which had a plastic colander on it. It lit on fire, which melted the knobs on the stove and basically set the kitchen on fire. Awesome.

Darn, my post didn't go through! Oh well.

A couple of weeks ago, after making delicious, gooey hot fudge sauce for the first time, my extreme pride caught up with me in the form of my roommate. As I was washing the dishes, she came in to model her formal dress, and as I watched her, slit my thumb open on the bread knife -- we're talking and inch-long slice here. Yeah, that was fun.

Because I'm a huge klutz, I am enormously careful with things like hot skillet handles and pots of boiling water. I have a horror of scalding myself. But that didn't stop me from grabbing the meat thermometer probe from a piece of grilling meat with my bare hands. After it had spent some time in a really hot grill.

I'm still cleaning up tomato gravy from random places in the kitchen from the first time I used my immersion blender.

Two or three times lately I've hidden things in the oven and forgotten about them until the next time I used the oven, when I was reminded of their existence by the special aroma coming from the oven. Fortunately, I know I'm an idiot so I never put anything meltable or flammable in there.

I learned my lesson when I almost burned down my mother's kitchen. She had two ovens but rarely used the second one. For whatever reason, we thought it was a good idea to store our extra paper bags in there. Then one day I went to use the oven and turned on the wrong one. Oops.

When I make a pot of stock I take it off the burner and let it cool before I empty the stock, bones and veg. into a large collander set in a large bowl which in turn is set in the kitchen sink. Forgot the large bowl part of the operation once

Probably the biggest disaster occurred when my husband was helping me make dessert bowls out of chocolate- they were to hold a coconut sorbet. I used the method of blowing up balloons and dipping them in chocolate, then when dry you pop the balloon. They sure looked good in the picture!! Well I was making the balloons much too big and as I dipped the one end of a balloon in chocolate and held it up- it popped with a bang and chocolate was on me, my husband and everywhere in the kitchen. It took forever to clean.
Needless to say that night no one had chocolate bowels. Just a nice chocolate cookie shoved in the sorbet!

@ porchetta - oooo, I did that once with a lovely seafood stock I had painstakingly simmered and seasoned to perfection for gumbo.

I can't count how many times I've burned things and melted things. I would say I had my lesson in mandoline safety: no matter how inconvenient the hand guard/veggie holder bit might seem, use it anyway. If you think using it slows you down, imagine how slow things go after you cut off the end of your right middle finger.

I also bake a lot, and many times I've put a cake in the oven only to turn and notice something still sitting on the counter (like the oil or the eggs).

One of my favorite mistakes wasn't mine: my mom's friend was making pecan pie and reached into her rack of bottles to get the karo syrup and came out with vinegar instead....didn't notice until she had dumped it in. She managed to get most of it back out of the bowl though and we still ate the pie, it was just a touch tangier than usual.

I was attempting to make a stirfry in a non-stick frying pan, after heating up some oil I tossed in chopped garlic which exploded all over the kitchen. The flying oil and garlic pieces melted my "high tech" athletic shirt and shorts, the fire alarm went off, and I threw the whole pan outside onto the patio. The hot pan landed on a plastic cap which melted/ affixed itself to the bottom of the pan. My favorite pan had to be thrown out and I still wear the outfit, although it has werid gathering where it melted.

Second had nothing to do with me. A freind was in the hospital, so I brought the family some food including a container of washed and packaged greens. When they opened the plastic wrap a large moth flew out!

I must confess I have done ALL of these things. My hands have scars on every finger from mandolins or knives or new rasps. I am super clumsy. This is a true story thou not kitchen related . When I was 8 my ballet teacher told my mother to stop wasting her money and not to bring me back as I would never be coordinated!!!!!! I still remember that like it was yesterday and I am still dead clumsy. I burned my hand the other day because the hole that is in silicone potholders to help hang them up i happened to put my thumb thru.

Living in a very cramped NYC apartment with little closet and even less kitchen space, I am always brainstorming creative storage solutions. I had one that worked well for a few years - I'd store two shoe boxes of small kitchen gizmos (cookie cutters, juicers, etc.) in shoe boxes inside the oven and take them out before I lit it. But I forgot one day when I was in the throes of a baking frenzy - I preheated the oven without removing the boxes. A few minutes later I wondered what the weird burning smell was.

Another was particularly embarrassing as it happened while I was trying to impress hypercritical future in-laws that were never exactly interested in joining my fan club. I prepared one of my all time rave dishes - the family lasagne recipe, which is loaded with meat and cheese. I thought I'd save dishwashing by using a heavy duty disposable pan, which turned out not to be heavy duty enough, and the pan folded when I was bringing it out to serve. The lasagne ended up all over the floor, with me screaming every four letter word in my Bronx vocabulary (the in-laws don't approve of cursing).

@courtguerra;hysterical,thank God you didn't have a full fire on your hands.

When I was a kid, one of my school friends decided she was going to bake something at her house. Back then, her mom had a gas oven that had a pilot light that you had to light manually. With a match. First, you turned on the gas that fed the pilot light and the rest of the stove, then you pulled open the bottom drawer and stuck the match in and waved it at the pilot light.

My friend turned the gas on, but didn't like the pilot light right away. I don't know how long she waited, but the end result was that she opened the drawer, lit the match, and the waiting gas went "WOOPMF" in a ball of flame.

She wasn't seriously hurt, but she singed off her eyelashes and eyebrows and some of her hair, and she looked like she had a pretty good sunburn.

My most recent disaster was Thanksgiving. I cook everything but the turkey and schlep it 45 minutes to my mother's house. It was all cooked and packed when my husband reminded me of the Gravy Shortage of 2007 so I decided to make a big pan of gravy at the last minute, even though we were . When it was ready, I looked at the pan and decided, "helper handles are for wimps" and proceeded to pick it up and pour at least half a gallon of gravy between the stove and the cabinet.

My first kitchen disaster came when I decided to make Concorde Grape jello at the age of 10. I followed the instructions on the box but I wasn't sure if it was mixed all the way and since it was in a glass dish, the logical thing to do was lift it up over my head to look at it through the light. Crash! the dish comes down on my head and the kitchen and I are bathed in purpley, gelatinous goodness.

@pastalover: your guests probably appreciated not having chocolate bowels, actually.....!

I'm pretty careful in the kitchen, as I used to work doing food demonstrations so acquired fairly good habits. My mother-in-law is another story.

1. Melting:

She has a glass top cooktop and regularly melts things onto the burner areas (and around...the inch or two around the burner gets toasty enough to melt plastic, too). She melted one thing badly enough that she let it cool and tried to use the blade of a knife to remove the melt. It worked...but brought up about 1/8 inch of the cooktop with it.

2. Microwaving:

This one's not entirely her fault. I don't know who designed this microwave. Why would you put a setting on a microwave (or anything other than a crock pot) which turns it on HIGH power and counts time UP (not down, UP) indefinitely??? It's called "Cook 'N' Watch", and presumably the purpose is to do things like melt one pat of butter, melt cheese on top of something, etc. However, the operative word is "WATCH". Guess what she forgets to do???

On Thanksgiving my grandmother bought one of those heavy duty throw away pans to put the turkey in. However it was just a tad too big for the oven. Since it was too late to replace it, she just shoved the sucker in. Later she asked my dad to check on the turkey. What they didn't know was the pan had split and leaked turkey juices all over the inside of the oven. So when my poor unsuspecting Dad opened the oven and put his head in he was greeted with fire. He's very lucky he wasn't badly hurt but he did lose some hair!

@Susque, after you know everyone wasn't seriously injured, it IS funny, though. Not funny that someone was (or could have been) injured, but funny in that pratfall comedy sort of way.

If someone was laughing at me while I was peeling my sock of my burned foot, I would have decked them. Later, it's a good story.

My step mom works in a 40+ story building. One day, she was cold and decided to heat up one of those bean bag thingies that you use for muscle aches. She put it in the microwave on her floor, pressed 40 minutes instead of 4, forgot about it, and managed to get the majority of the building evacuated before anyone figured out what that horrible burning smell was.

I get leaving the water running. One time it ran so long that it flooded the kitchen to a level of about 2 inches and destroyed the ceiling of the apartment below me. Almost every week, I wake up in the middle of the night and say "Did I turn the water off??" and have to get up to check.

Well, honey is messy all right. But it's unlikely to flood the whole building.

Molasses, on the other hand, flooded the whole city of Boston once.

I can not put ANYTHING in the oven without setting a loud timer, because it is guranteed that I will forget about it!!

I am so glad to see that many others forget about their hard boiled eggs!
I have been alerted many times by the loud popping in the kitchen and each time, I can't believe That I have done it again!

But probably the weirdest kitchen mishap was when I was grading Spanish exams. I was sitting at the table with a messy pile of papers and books, when a finicky friend dropped by. I grabbed all the papers and threw them into the oven, to neaten up...then I forgot that they were there. The oven was not turned on, but by the time I remembered my papers, the heat of the pilot light had curled and browned each and every exam. I had a hard time explaining that one to my students!

I need a Depends!!!! These stories are hi-sterical!!

I once bought a bag of frozen plums, and I didn't think to check whether they contained pits. I tried to use them in a smoothie, shattering my blender and making a huge mess. And I couldn't even drink the smoothie, because it had pieces of pit in it :/