[Closed] Kitchen mishap(s)

My earliest memory is my dad on a stepladder digging a bit of pressure cooker out of the kitchen ceiling and stewed rhubarb on every axis of every surface.

Later in childhood - with two families crammed into a static caravan on holiday my mum took a tray of baked potatoes out of the oven and prodded on with a fork to see if it was done. It exploded which as kids we thought was hilarious (we weren't really thinking about what a face full of scalding potato might feel like) but what really cracked us up was when she took her glasses off.

My biggest error was cooked salt and pepper cod while my student house mates were all still in bed pissed / hung over from the night before. I let the pan get much too hot and when I put the chillis in a column of chilli smoke went straight up to the ceiling. Worried I'd set the smoke alarm off and wake everyone I opened the window... and the wind blew the smoke straight up the stairs. One by one I heard each of my housemates get a rude awakening.

My daughter showed me a picture last night of one of her student flat mates and little sister's sponge cake. They had no butter, so substituted milk instead. Looked like a brown cowpat on a big plate.

We have a composite worktop and one Mother's Day I had the slow cooker on and temporarily put it in a place right over an invisible join whist me and the kids made her breakfast in bed.

Two hours later I had forgotten to put it back in it's normal place (on a cutting board on the hob) and I heard an almighty bang as the heat had expanded the joint so much all the adhesive gave way and split it into two pieces 🙁 We have had it professionally repaired but the fix (although very good) isn't quite perfect and I can see the join. It annoys the hell out of me, but at around £4,000 for a replacement (it's a very large worktop in an open-plan kitchen) we are having to live with it.

Mine, or rather my sisters was one of those you had to be there moments. Let’s just say it involved pies accidentally being grilled instead of oven baked, an electric oven and grill, oven on fire and water used to put it out 😳.

If you learn one thing during this crisis, learn this and learn it good.

Never, never, keep a glass jar of turmeric on the top shelf of the cupboard.

My sister once put on some peas for a meal she was cooking. I think she forgot about them because they ended up welded to the bottom of the saucepan. I think that is what spurred her on to be a chef. She's excellent at cooking now.

The worst I have had so far was a batch of homebrew exploding out of the airlock and over a worktop. Porter everywhere. Not exactly an unpleasant smell...

The worst I have had so far was a batch of homebrew exploding out of the airlock and over a worktop.

I had that happen inside my wardrobe - my first and last foray into home-brew when I was 14. Made my school uniform smell interesting.

I boiled some eggs once and forgot all about them... the pan boiled dry and just as I leant over to look inside several of them exploded at once, nearly gave me a heart attack.

It was several months before I got around to cleaning the solidified yolk off the ceiling 😊

The worst I have had so far was a batch of homebrew exploding out of the airlock and over a worktop.

Oh and that! I made a large batch of ginger beer and stupidly stored it in a load of screwtop bottles on top of the kitchen cupboards to ferment. In hot weather as well.
After coming home one day to find several had exploded it was then necessary to open the caps of the rest to release the (extremely) high pressure. The kitchen (and me) was entirely coated in sticky ginger beer after that.
It did taste nice though.

A friend came back from a festival with heat stroke and the after effects of too much social lubricant. I made the mistake of letting him recuperate on our sofa while I went to work.

In his befuddled state he decided to forage for something in the kitchen. Finding a tin of new potatoes he noted that according to the label you're not supposed to microwave them (not the tin itself but the potatoes). That struck him as odd so he decided to microwave them until something happened. They eventually popped and filled the oven with desiccated mash. 'Hmmm' he thought 'what else are you not supposed to microwave?'. He spent the rest of the afternoon conducting exhaustive research.

As a kid I once took a still dripping wet, used tea bag and proceeded to windmill it dry.

Que a distinct tea brown line across the (light coloured) carpet, up one wall, across the white artex ceiling and down the other wall to rejoin the line back on the carpet. I seem to remember getting grounded for that effort!

As an apprentice I learnt about steam and super heated steam at college, but only really understood it when I blew the door off my mums microwave.

The Tupperware container of fluid had a good lid, so I eased it of at the edge and stuck it in the microwave.

It seemed to be taking longer than expected to finish (the days of clockwork timers on microwaves) so I looked down just in time to see the lid (which had probably partially resealed) pop off.

The microwave then filled with steam and I could no longer see the container, I was just about to tell mum to come and have a look at the microwave full of steam when the steam 'went' superheated and the door flew open/off.

Mum seemed less enthusiastic about my practical lesson that I was.

When George Forman grills first came out, chap i knew put his in the sink to clean it without unplugging it, tripped the RCD luckily.

Mum put a boil in the tin Sponge pudding in the pan of water, which boiled dry and exploded all over the ceiling, sponge and very burnt golden syrup, what a mess.

Place i worked at brand new kitchen, the electric kettle had a dodgy foot, so got sent to electricians for replacement, they just took off the other feet,for a joke and returned it lady plugged it in and boiled it it melted the new worktop.

Customer screwed chipboard bedroom floor down to be woken up in the night by all the wall cupboard sin kitchen falling off in slow motion as the water pipe had been hit, and soaked the plasterboard wall of kitchen to which the wall unit support brackets had been fixed to instead of the noggins.

Neighbour came in drunk on a Sunday put his deep fat fryer on and chucked a chicken leg or 2 into it didnt close the lid,so it over heated the oil,it was nest to the fridge small fridge freezer, which had a microwave on top, his words fell asleep smelt burning, ran into kitchen to see side of freezer on fire, only for microwave to slide into, deep fat fryer, and throw hot burning fat around kitchen, burnt out his flat, and he ended up in hospital.

project - some great ones there.

A colleague went on holiday leaving a chicken roasting in the oven. Fortunately he also forgot to shut the window so the neighbours saw the smoke and climbed in to turn it off.

I once briefed my team and got halfway through the first batch of emails and tasks before I realised I had left a pan of lentils on the stove.

It was a half hour drive home, spent in total panic, with visions of the house going up in flames and killing the dog.

As I opened the door there was a thick pall of smoke, perhaps six inches thick on the kitchen ceiling. Given that they had been on for more than three hours by this point, the lentils themselves had formed a molten mass in the pan, and were smouldering.

I stuck the pan out in the garden to cool, and did what I could to get rid of the smoke. I wouldn't recommend burnt lentils as a room fragrance, it hung around as a background note for weeks.

Left a stock pot / chicken carcass on the hob to cool while we went out. Our juvenile collie was left in the house and felt the pan of nice smells needed investigating. In his attempts to reach it he turned on all the gas taps.

Early 80s I was a young teenage space cadet🙄 put some fish fingers under the grill and forgot about them... smoke alarm reminded me so ran into kitchen and grabbed the (up in flames) grill pan, flipping hot so put it down on the floor! Floor consisted of checkered brown and cream carpet tiles. I grabbed an oven glove and picked it up only to discover the brown tile welded to the bottom 😥 no worries I thought theres a pile of spares in the garage except they were all cream... bit of rearranging and all was well.... mum kept saying something looks different! Finally confessed a good few years later

when i moved into my first house I did a big shop for all the essentials including herbs and spices. While choosing chilli powder, the choice was between chilli powder or hot chilli powder and being essentially broke (what changes!) I thought I'd get the hot and just use less.

Few weeks later I decide to make chilli and as suggested by my mum, at that point I was making large batches and freezing some for future. At this point I realise the standard grade had the recipe on it but the hot I'd picked up was a competition pack, and the recipe / instructions were instead a chance to win a trip in a hot air balloon or something like that. No worries, I'll add it slowly and taste frequently......

I didn't realise that the heat developed quite so much on cooking, so the add, stir, taste to the desired heat level resulted in something that after an hour of simmering was eye wateringly hot (with expected side effects later). I'm almost sweating at the thought of it now.

Best of all - 3 further meal's worth in the freezer that thriftyness meant I had the pleasure of at future dates. You know like women after childbirth say never again, but eventually the memory fades enough......

To this day I'm still not sure of the physics of it, but it involved a stovetop espresso maker, something not set up quite right and a very brown kitchen (which was originally white).