beans, flies, and cooking disasters

[KristyHall]

so i am cooking a big pot of beans and I saw a fly heading right for the pot. I managed to slam the lid down in time, but in the past I have gotten flies suicide right into my darn pot more than once.

over the years I have done a lot of cooking (haven't we all) and a lot of crazy stories have developed from my days in the kitchen.

SO I figured we could all share our crazy kitchen/cooking/food experiences

 

[Happy Chooks]

Does leaving the bag of giblets in the turkey count? I found it when I was carving it. Gave my family quite the laugh.

 

[booker81]

When I was pregnant, I had a tendency to start stove and oven fires on a very regular basis. I went through a lot of baking soda at that time.

Strangely, the pyrotechnics stopped after I had DD. I think I was running about two fires a month for the pregnancy....and they weren't little ones. I'm talking good sized flames. About drove me mad!

We'd like to have another baby, but I have a secret concern that pregnancy bring out the firebug in me for some reason

 

[weimarmama]

I've left the giblets in a couple of times, once with a turkey & once with a hen for chicken & dumplings

But this is one that happened last year:

I was beating the egg whites to go into a cake batter. When I got through, but before I could fold the whites into the batter I was distracted by something, so I set them down. Came back a minute later & poured the cake batter into the pan & popped it into the oven. After the cake was done, I kept wondering what had gone wrong with it. It wasn't until later that night when I found the bowl of whites that I realized I had completely fogot about them.

 

[benjoycei]

When I first got married, I wanted to impress my husband with my cooking skills. I made some yeast bread, smelled SOOOO good. It was as hard as a brick. We threw it outside in the yard, in the rain, It took it a week to disentegrate.

 

[KristyHall]

I went to school for culinary arts, which I wanted to use as a stepping stone to another degree. at the time I wasn't sure what.

The first day I stated in class I ruined about 120 dollars worth of food, i kept burning, dropping and slipping pans of chicken Parmigiana.

Some of the older year students had a habit of trying to convince the younger students that the walk in freezer would lock if you shut the door behind you.

I knew that was against regulations so I ignored it. I went into teh freezer one morning and someone shut the door behind me. She gathered what I needed and when I pressed on the door it wouldn't budge.

Someone was holding it on the other side but I didn't know it. I figured it was stuck. I pushes harder, then harder. then I sat the items down backed up and charged, intending to ram it open.

about this time the other student had let up on the door.

The door flew open, hit the student , sent them flying and I landed face first on the floor. My hat went flying and landed right in front of someone who was slicing vegetables.

it had caused such a racket people came from all over to peer in to see what was going on.

Needless to say we both ended up in the instructor's office for roughhousing.

 

[hennyannie]

When I first got married I dumped beans in our airvent(I mean who puts a vent right in the middle of dining room floor anyway?)Then a couple nights later I dumped a salad in there! Apparently I had a problem holding on to bowls. Thats one cooking lesson you wouldnt think you would need, how not to drop serving bowls.

 

[bigmike&nan]

I too went to chef school, I was the oldest person there (45 at the start of the program). Most of the kids had flunked outta college and their families sent them to the CCA to "get them a profession" - wild group of kids in general - now they're living on their own in San Francisco and don't have anyone watching their every move. OH MY !! There was this one kid that had quite a rep - he was working full time in restaurants and going to school full time and partying hard as hell too. Henry. A little bit of a rebel without a cause, he'd get himself suspended from school for some shenanigans all the time - we joked he was on the 5 Year Plan. Well one day we were in French Regional in the upstairs demo kitchen with this huge glass wall facing the main dining room. The rest of the day students are filing into the main dining room for some promotional speech by the head executive... Henry's up there assisting Chef Herve with some dish and he's got a big pan of something and he was getting ready to flambe it - the pan was getting screaming hot... he gets distracted seeing his girlfriend and her friends and she's lipping some message of love to him - he goes on and on not paying attention. FINALLY he turns to add the brandy to the pan and forgot to take the pan OFF THE FLAME (like you're always supposed to do) and douses the pan with this Henry sized hit of brandy. WHOOSH in front of the entire student body below the GIANT FLAME comes scorching up all the way to the ceiling and is so hot the sprinkler system in the ceiling lets loose - everyone including yours truly gets soaked by the sprinklers and the whole school got a great laugh. And yeah, Henry got suspended for a week... I hear he graduated about 2 1/2 years after me - I think CCA decided they couldn't afford to keep that kind of liability around. I am sure he became quite successful - he was an awesome cook, just very wet behind the ears.

 

[2DogsFarm]

I love my crockpot.
I discovered a whole chicken cooks to perfect fall-off-the-bone-goodness if you skin it and set it on top of stuffing.
The juices from the chicken mix with the stuffing and Mmmmmm, Mmmmm GOOD!

This is back in The Day when I went directly from work to aerobics class.
So I invite aerobic friends to dinner and setup my chicken that morning.
Of course we are all health & diet conscious, so I used skinless, boneless chicken breasts.
Cooked all day on Low on top of cubed bread stuffing......

We came home, ravenous from exercising, to bone-dry chicken and rock-hard stuffing.
There is not enough "juice" in a boneless, skinless breast of chicken to hydrate a single cube of bread...let alone a crockpot full.

This was over 20 years ago & friends still kid me about my Crockpot Chicken & Stuffing : }

 

[MeatKing]

When I first moved in with an Ex, years ago.. I was just learning too cook. Well, I was cooking a pork tenderloin in a glass thingy.. And since a few days previous, I served him pink pork.(and he freaked) I was gonna make sure this was cooked.
Well since I never added any fluids, it was drying out

Much to my dismay, so I thought well "I'll just take some cold water from fridge and add it to my hot glass cassrole dish.. Bad Idea, could you believe it blew up, smashed everywhere.. I jumped back and landed on glass. Cut my foot up and had to go to the ER.
Could you believe he came home and yelled at me for bleeding on the floor? And wrecking a few towels to soak up the blood? (I wasn't really good at laundry either) lol
There's a reason he's my Ex

So I drove myself to the ER, 30 min. away. We broke up a few months later.. I just never went home one night after work. Couldn't bear the thought of waking up on a Saterday to his grumpiness