What Are Your Kitchen Nightmares?
Many of my friends--swimmers and rowers--had hard sports practices this morning, so I decided to treat them by making breakfast. We were having french toast from my homemade cinnamon bread, bacon, and scrambled eggs...yum....right?
NO.
I set off the fire alarm in the dorm...the WHOLE dorm...with the smoke from the pan. To say the least, I am still HORRIFIED. We were standing outside for 20 minutes as the Boston Fire department raided the building...yikes!
So friends, what are your kitchen nightmares?
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18 Comments:
In my early cooking years... I learned the hard way about the difference between a clove of garlic and a head of garlic.
I decided to make garlic pasta and proceeded to use a whole head of garlic instead of one clove.
Suffice to say, the pasta was good, but the house smelled of garlic for days! My mom was NOT happy, but hey, I learned my lesson!
mcanna at 6:55PM on 01/24/09
A few summers ago I was living at my aunt's and she was making roast chicken legs in the oven. She had put the chicken in one of those disposable aluminum pans. After about twenty minutes, the entire kitchen was filled with smoke, and the smoke alarm goes off. I see my aunt rushing to the kitchen to investigate and muttering and cursing loudly in russian.
It turns out she decided to reuse the disposable pan i had made lasagna in a few days before. So the juices and oil from the chicken were escaping on to the heating element of the oven because of the cuts in the pan made from slicing the lasagna. Somehow I was the one held responsible.
midnightsnack at 7:48PM on 01/24/09
I was roasting a whole chicken the other night and my entire apartment filled ith smoke. I usually only use my oven for up to thirty mins.(which still causes smoke problems) but an hour was too much. Fortunately I had disbaled my alarm in anticipation of this but I had to leaves all my windows open for awhile to clear the place out. And no I won't clean my oven!
sailordave at 8:25PM on 01/24/09
The day I decided to make Blackened Redfish on my stove. The pan flared up, caught fire - luckily it was contained to the pan only. Fish actually came out tasting pretty good, but it took a few hours to get the house ventilated. When I reread the recipe there was a disclaimer stating 'don't ry this on your stove'.
Ribster at 8:47PM on 01/24/09
When I was about 18 and still living at home, my mom dang near set the house on fire. I had been at work and headed home. Turning onto our street I saw several fire trucks, and firefighters running in and out of our house with huge hoses...turns out my mom had been hard boiling a dozen eggs when she got a phone call from a friend who had a heart attack! She raced out the door and forgot about the eggs! It mostly ruined the kitchen, but the burned egg smell was horrible!! Have you ever smelled eggs burned so bad they were just black dust? ACK! We remodeled the kitchen...
mhurst826 at 8:56PM on 01/24/09
Ouch, I bet most of your dormmates, notably the hungover ones, weren't thrilled about being stuck out in the cold in the morning! Hope the food at least tasted good!
During Homecoming weekend in college, back in my mostly hamburger helper, pizza, and beer days. My roommate and I had 6 weekend guests in our 2 bedroom apartment in a 3 apartment "house". Everyone was getting ready for a night of partying, my roommate and I were making taco dinner to grease up our stomachs. I put a potholder on a hot burner, it caught fire, and blew a fuse causing all 3 apartments to lose electricity.
At least the guys with the fuse box were home, otherwise it would've been a long dark night! The apartment didn't smell too great either. Luckily the copius amounts of beer took all the embarrassment away!
bobcatsteph3 at 10:08PM on 01/24/09
My latest kitchen nightmare is only a couple days old. I was making the Lemon Mousse in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, only it was going to be orange, with xylitol replacing half the sugar. And I'd never before made a mousse where whole eggs were beaten; usually it's whipped egg whites and whipped cream, with the yolks mixed with the juice and gelatin, or not used at all.
Everything was going just fine, actually, until I took it out of the icebox several hours later and saw that it had begun to separate. (My darling husband insisted that it made a lovely dessert sauce for fruit.) Even the next morning it hadn't solidified.
Then I realized that I'd forgotten to heat the gelatin and juice before mixing it with the beaten eggs.
So I removed the separated liquid with a turkey baster, heated it and stirred it back in. It separated again before gelling nicely at the bottom of the dish.
Well, there weren't any witnesses, so it wasn't so much a nightmare as a minor embarrassment. (I've only been cooking for forty years, after all.) The flavor was delightful and the texture of the remaining floofiness was perfect. So I will make it again, properly.
gentlyferal at 11:37PM on 01/24/09
The shoe leather that comes out of my crock pot!
LearP at 12:59AM on 01/25/09
Oh and I forgot to mention the time I picked up the corn syrup instead of the corn oil to make popcorn. That was a big nightmare !
Ribster at 5:22AM on 01/25/09
years ago i worked in an italian bakery where we made everything from scratch.... there was this huge oven with revolving shelves .... well, i had brought a freshly caught bluefish to work and we all prepared it with onions, tomatoes, etc.... put it into a frying pan and put it on one of the shelves in the oven.... well the handle got caught and the fish dropped down into the gas flames and not only did the whole bakery smell like fish, but the whole block smelled like fish!
luckily the owner's son was in on it!
pooch at 10:17AM on 01/25/09
This one didn't end in disaster, but it was surely the most stressful kitchen experience I've had to date: I was making my first wedding cake (!) for my father's wedding (!) and my buttercream tried to separate on me. Didn't have the ingredients to start over or the time to go buy another 18 gazillion sticks of butter, so I just kept beating the hell out of it and sooner or later it came together. The cake went over splendidly and looked gorgeous!
annatr at 11:03AM on 01/25/09
I've already told this story but my worst nightmare was putting my head too far into the oven while fast roasting veggies @475 degrees and burning the front of my hair. Didn't realize it was happening so I just kept shoving my head in the oven to rotate the items and continued to singe away more and more hair. What a surprise when I looked in the mirror 2 hours later.
bessfour at 12:31PM on 01/25/09
It was Christmas Eve, 2007, and I was boiling up some chicken giblets for my spoiled rotten dog. I had turned down the heat to maintain a low simmer, covered the pot and set the timer. In the meanwhile, I noticed it was getting late and I needed to get ready to go to church. Well, you can guess where this story is going...With about 30 minutes left to Mass, it hit me like a ton of bricks - - I left the stove on. I rushed home to a house full of smoke and a dog panting at the rear door. The dog went outside, I quickly turned off the stove, opened all the windows, turned on the vent fan and the ceiling fans. The dog was fine (thankfully), after about 30 minutes, the house was cleared of smoke, although the odor was still pretty strong, and the pan with some unidentifiable lumps of black melted to the bottom was soaking in the sink and the batteries in the smoke detector were replaced.
As an aside, I was tempted to toss the pan, but it was calphalon and relatively new so I tried everything to save it including soaking, boiling with dishwasher soap, abrasive cleaners and scouring pads (remember, at this point, I had nothing to loose). After a day or so of stubborn cleaning, I was finally able to get the pot clean, the finish is fine and I'm still using it!
bubbamom at 1:02PM on 01/25/09
Okay, my worst nightmare was while I was working at a five star hotel in my early twenties. I made five gallons of lovely chicken stock. I tasted it, it was awesome and I was proud. We had several functions that week, all requiring the use of chicken stock for various dishes. My head Chef tasted it and loved it. You can't imagine how excited I was as a new chef.
Well, I had to strain it obviously. So, I grabbed a huge colander, put it in the sink and proceeded to strain my chicken stock right down the drain.
In the early years of my marriage I was teaching my wife how to make a good chicken stock because she wanted to learn and we were throwing a dinner party for about 25 guests. I asked her to strain the stock because, it too, was perfect and ready. She grabbed the colander, put it in the sink and proceeded to strain it right down the drain. We were meant to be!
Come to find out, as horrible as I felt when I did it the first time, every chef has done it. Hell, I made another one and it was even better! Thank you to my mentor Rich, who didn't fire me but instead had a good laugh.
noturaveragechef at 6:12PM on 01/25/09
The other day I was making a lovely risotto with lots of veggies and decided to spice it up with a bit of chilli powder. Unfortunately, I was too lazy to get a spoon to do the job as you should and instead I tipped the jar over the risotto confident that I could just get a pinch to come out...yes! you've guessed it! The whole jar fell on my risotto which quickly absorbed it (so no chance to take it out) and the end result (stubborn as I am I still tried to serve it and disguise my gaffe with sugar and milk) was nothing short of explosive! My poor fianceé ended up choking in his meal, his eyes watery and his nose sniffly so I had to admit defeat and fill up on some bread and salad.
HappyMuncher at 7:07PM on 01/25/09
I sauteing sausage for a lovely soup and went to add a pinch of thyme. I dropped the jar and lost it all. I rinsed the sausage but it still tasted strongly of thyme.
Skythe at 6:38PM on 01/26/09
Final project for my college culinary class was to execute a 3 course menu of our own design in two hours. I was in charge of mis en place for the crepe gallete (cake made of about a gazillion layers of crepes). My classmate thought SHE was in charge of mis en place, but after a minute or two of confusion we figured it out. Except for the sugar. Somehow ended up doubling the sugar in the crepes so they totally fell apart once cooked. Had to scrounge for ingredients from other teams as we weren't allowed to hit the pantry more than once. Ended up being delish, although the judges deemed it "too chocolatey". As if such a thing existed!
Embackus at 7:13PM on 01/26/09
My roommate and I were making a grilled pineapple salsa. After grilling, in batches, slices of pineapple, onions, peppers, etc, chopping them all into little pieces, and mixing it all together, it was time to season with a little salt...
...well, apparently our gentle tapping of the salt container was not gentle enough: the lid came off and about a cup of salt got dumped into the salsa.
After staring at it dumbfounded for a minute, we tried seperating the salty top, rinsing the remaining salsa (hey, we were desperate), rinsing it again... No good - we had to toss the whole batch.
fishyswede at 5:26PM on 02/03/09