lisarea

This past winter, I was baking a whole bunch of carrot cakes for people, and accidentally put in, like, 3x as much oil as I should have in one of them.

It was all weird and squooshy, like wet mossy soil or something. I set it there on the counter for a few days and would stick my finger in it, and it'd make this creepy sucking sound. I finally had to throw it away because I figured it'd get moldy eventually.

I once mixed lye and water in a glass pitcher and had the bottom fall out when I went to pick it up. Aside from a few minor owies here and there, though, all was well.

I once turned on the oven and murdered a ginger plant I'd been tending to--ha ha!--GINGERLY for nigh on a couple of weeks, I think.

Oh! This was pretty good. My mom used to have this apple tree that went crazy every few years, and, good frugal daughter I am, I'd haul myself down there, climb up the tree, pick all the apples, load them into the car (they'd completely fill up the back of my station wagon), drive home, peel and cut them, and make pies, cobblers, applesauce, etc., to freeze and give away. (Once, one of my neighbors, seeing me approaching his house with Yet Another Cobbler, started yelling at me that he had a gun and wasn't afraid to use it.)

ANYhoose, one year that I was doing this, it was shortly after my birthday, and my mom had gotten me a new set of knives that I was breaking in on the apples.

I managed to slice up all ten fingers to the point that I had to have them all bandaged or they'd start gooshing again. I stopped to get a cup of coffee on my way into the office on Monday, and some guy asked me what happened.

"My mom bought me some new knives."

"That was mean of her."

"Yeah, I think she hates me."

"Hmmm. Yeah, probably."

Jimmy Higgins

Aren't you supposed to add alot of oil to a carrot cake recipe? I know its some huge amount, maybe a cup and a half. I almost can't make one after seeing how much I have to add. I'm surprised you could shot over the amount that much. Good show! (I'm assuming you were doing this from scratch)

ImGod

My mother-in-law is a good cook, but has some funny kitchen stories.

She was trying to get something in the oven in between getting ready in the morning and got her fingers stuck in her professional grade mixter once. The sight of blood made her pass out. My father-in-law found her passed out in the kitchen, in her underwear, with a slightly wounded bleeding hand stuck in the blender.

She stored her tupperware dishes in the oven due to lack of storage space. She forgot them once and turned on the oven. It took some time and effort to get the plastic cleaned out of the oven by heating it just hot enough to soften it for removal but not hot enough to make it smell too bad. She didn't have to worry about storage anymore.

lisarea

I don't remember exactly how much it was, but I was completely zoning out, having made like ten of them already, and there were probably a couple hundred thousand people in my house at the time, all nattering away and getting under my feet.

That, combined with some sick confluence of "Did I put the oil in already?" and forgetting that this batch wasn't doubled, added up to BIG LAFFS for all assembled.

(And of COURSE from scratch! Mixes are for sissies.)

BrotherMan

One evening I was quite excited to share my new found cooking skills with a friend of mine. It was a simple recipe, really. All I had to do was flop some chicken breasts in flour and broil them. I thought everything was going fantastic until we started eating the chicken. It wasn't anything so terrible as overcooked or undercooked. No, it was something more subtle. After examing the ingredients I realized that I hadn't used flour to cover the precooked chicken, instead I had used powdered sugar.

Hypatia

Never try to cook brownies in a convection oven unless you really know what you are doing. By the time the smoke smell alterted me , they had a glowing, red-hot patch in the middle, and the house smelled terrible for several days....

Ennazus

My husband still teases me about our first Thanksgiving dinner together 17 years ago. I didn't know about the bag of giblets and so it stayed in the bird as it cooked. That sure was a nasty looking cooked bag of turkey parts! That oversight plus the Stove Stop stuffing made quite a first Thanksgiving Dinner attempt!

Now he asks me every year he asks me if I remembered to take out the giblet bag. I guess I will never live it down.

Mediancat

If you're interested in someone else's Cooking disasters --

Some pretty funny stuff there --

Rob aka Mediancat

MzNeko

I haven't had too many disasters myself. But one did happen to my hubby. I told this one a while ago... Mr. Neko and the Flaming Colander of Death!

He probably thinks I've forgotten about that one...

Hedwig

Well, this wasn't me personally but...

My mother did a frightfully good job attemting to set the kitchen on fire. She turned on the oven in preparation to start baking something and before we knew it, smoke had enveloped the kitchen. When we opened the oven it was on fire. She'd forgotten to take a birthday cake in a box from the bakery out of the oven before she started. I ran into the living room to tell my dad who took off for the kitchen. I then ran to my younger brother's room exclaiming "The kitchen's on fire!!" My brother and I came running back to the kitchen just in time to see my father, the flaming bakery box lifted high above his head as though it were...a flaming bakery box...diving out the back door into the pouring rain.

I've set off the fire alarm a couple of times from smoke...but I've never been able to top that incident.

As far as what I've done personally...I've only ever caused bodily injury to myself. Like dumping a load of bubbling hot marinara sauce on my sneaker while trying to move it from an enormous cooking pot to a cooling container when I was a cook in an Italian restaurant. It shot right through the canvas of my shoe and scalded my foot, resulting in a few blisters. The hell of it was we were in a rush and I didn't have time to stop and tend to my foot for over an hour. That hurt.