I will never again . . . (Part 3)

[nakji]

Well, I didn't think I had, until the blood started. Funny thing was, it didn't even hurt that much. I ruined a dishtowel, though.

[UnknownCubicle]

I will never again assume that a "hotel" style pan is cool on both ends when it's on the burners, even if it's only been there for 5 seconds.

I thought this would be a good thread to introduce myself. I'm Steve, and I'm new. I'm the second cook at a small conference center in Southern California.

Look forward to getting to meet you all.

-SK

[Smithy]

I will never again assume that a "hotel" style pan is cool on both ends when it's on the burners, even if it's only been there for 5 seconds.

I thought this would be a good thread to introduce myself. I'm Steve, and I'm new. I'm the second cook at a small conference center in Southern California.

Look forward to getting to meet you all.

-SK

Well, that's a fine, unassuming way to introduce yourself! Welcome, Steve! You'll find lots of folks around here who cheerfully admit to mistakes, and others who secretly do the same mistakes but won't admit it. Elsewhere on this site you'll find folks with questions, answers, terrific ideas and great stories. C'mon in and set a spell, look around, make yourself at home, and tell us more about yourself!

Nancy, who has variously burned herself, poured the stock down the drain, dropped sour cream / cucumber dill soup into the galley of a sailboat, and thrown away vintage kitchen equipment.

[fooey]

Welcome to you and your new burn, UnknownCubicle.

Edited September 27, 2009 by fooey (log)

[fooey]

I will never again....

...forget to remove the thyme stalks and bay leaves before smoothing the soup with the immersion blender.

May I introduce my new reputation maker: Potage a la Feuille et la Branche, or Soup with Leaf and Branch.

Edited September 27, 2009 by fooey (log)

[C-Mo]

Oh, boy. This is my kind of thread. Seems like the right place to make my first post.

I think I'll get an early start on my New Year's resolutions. To wit:

I will not cause a stove-top volcano in a swanky hotel suite (that my company is paying for) by putting olive oil into a pan that is far hotter than I realize.

While making organic insect repellent for my herb garden by liquifying a head of garlic and a whole cayenne pepper, I will not stick my face into the blender and take a big whiff to make sure it's "strong enough."

If I chop serrano peppers for dinner without wearing gloves, I will not engage in post-dinner nookie.

I will not reach under the broiler to baste lamb chops (or do anything else). If, as a result of some temporary mental incapacitation, I do this, I will not touch the red-hot heating element with the back of my hand.

I will not leave any of the following unattended, even for "just a second," with two curious kittens who know the rules but have no willpower:

- Bacon

- Pizza

- Flour ("Wait a minute, only one of them is supposed to have white feet...")

- Scrambled egg

- Duck giblets (I was going to give them the heart anyways. Greedy little piglets.)

- Buttercrisp lettuce

- Porterhouse steaks

[prasantrin]

I will not reach under the broiler to baste lamb chops (or do anything else). If, as a result of some temporary mental incapacitation, I do this, I will not touch the red-hot heating element with the back of my hand.

I've done that, too!

In my case, just before I burned myself, I thought, "Gee, I hope I don't burn myself."

Then I heard the hssstttt of the hot element burning through my flesh.

[John Rosevear]

As for me: I will never again grab, potholder-less, the handle of my Sitram stainless steel saute pan after I've roasted potatoes at 450F for an hour, nor will I then hold it for two seconds, while it sears the interior of my hand and I shriek, looking for a place to set it down without spilling the precious spuds.

If I look carefully at the palm of my left hand, I can still see the shape of an All-Clad handle.

In my case it was chicken legs, pan-roasted at 450 for about 15 min -- I had the pan on top of the stove, out of the oven for maybe 30 sec, and had just added stock and was about to start making the sauce, when it slipped a bit and I grabbed it. Barehanded. Ow. And yes, holding it while shrieking so as not to spill the contents.

I ended up wrapping ice and paper towels around the burn and made a passable sauce one-handed, served it, and then went off with a glass of absinthe to whimper. It was a good 18 hours before the pain receded. Ow ow ow.

[MomOfLittleFoodies]

I will never again make a pot of rice (in a rice cooker), forget to empty out the leftover stuff, and then go on vacation for 4 days, while the temperatures inside the house reach 85 degrees.

Needless to say, there was some funky, slimy stuff brewing in the rice cooker when we got home.

[rooftop1000]

This is more funny than disasterous to be sure....

After starting 2 new prescriptions today I thought a roast chicken would be a nice easy dinner to make. I seasoned it up dropped it in the roasting pan with a breif thought that it looked odd, but it was a small chicken..

It came out beautiful with nice golden, crispy, skin. Then I started carving it, well it turned into hacking at it...then I eventually realized I cooked it upside down. So, I pulled all the crispy skin off the bottom and flipped her over. Damn tasty chicken but I am glad we didn't have company.

tracey

[maggiethecat]

I will remember to make sure that I'm filling the pepper grinder with peppercorns, not juniper berries. (Well, a couple of lights were out in the kitchen.)

[Jacquester]

I will never come home after a night of drinking to cut up a half frozen chicken with a carving knife.....and end up in the ER for some stitches

and, my wife will never again take an electric kettle and put it on the stove

[sazji]

I swear on a stack of bibles that I'm not making this up.

I will never try and make Thai curry and wash dishes at the same time, and in moment of almost Alzheimeristic autopilot, add a healthy squirt of dishwashing liquid (apple-scented) to the curry.

(But I have to admit that as soon as I did it, and managed luckily to grab the piece of chicken that it came down on and wash it off - I hope - the first thing that came to mind was "Oh Lordy, gotta write send this one in to eGullet right now!")

[rooftop1000]

Turning on a gas oven for a few min to get up some heat for proofing dough is an easy cheat....forgetting your oven is on with doughballs covered in plastic wrap is not so good. Oh well who needs a second rise, I did manage to get the plastic off

tracey

[David A. Goldfarb]

my wife will never again take an electric kettle and put it on the stove

Oy, did that recently and caught it before doing too much damage. I think I need a cup of coffee before I try to make a pot of tea in the morning.

[Darienne]

A new and stupid mistake. Using the Kevlar oven mitts when the fingers were wet. Guess what? They don't work when they are wet.

I was taking out of the oven something wet and sloppy...mind, and so I held on and wailed and got it up onto the stove top before rushing over to the cold water tap.

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

[Special K]

I will never try and make Thai curry and wash dishes at the same time, and in moment of almost Alzheimeristic autopilot, add a healthy squirt of dishwashing liquid (apple-scented) to the curry.

Yipes! I have tried to make bit pots of chili and spaghetti sauces at the same time, and added the cumin to the wrong pot, pretty much giving me two big pots of chili sauce . . . multitasking in the kitchen is just not good a good idea for some of us!

[C. sapidus]

I will never again use a nonstick pan for high-heat cooking. While frying a paste of pureed shallots, garlic, and chiles in a non-stick saute pan, I noticed two rather disturbing developments:

- the spice paste turning a sickly grayish-green, and

- the industrial-strength stench of burning plastic

Needless to say, the nonstick coating on the Circulon Premier Professional pan had failed spectacularly. Even more needless to say, I used a stainless steel-lined pan to prepare a new batch of spice paste. Good thing we don’t have a parrot.

I should have taken a picture of the revolting mess before tossing everything in the trash.

[angevin]

Marinate shrimp with fresh pineapple before grilling. The acids turned my shrimp to mush!

[Anna N]

Marinate shrimp with fresh pineapple before grilling. The acids turned my shrimp to mush!

Yep - found out the hard way when it did the same to my pork tenderloin.

[xxchef]

I will never again candy-coat my finger...

When I'm cooking sugar and need to check if is "thread", Soft ball", firm Ball", "crack" etc, I always dip my finger in a little ice water then right into the pot of sugar then rub the sugar to see what stage it is at. It's the fastest and most reliable method I know. Once I was flying around the kitchen with about half a dozen things in the works and the sugar was getting very close. I wanted to check it every few seconds but still had to be doing other things. Dip-Check...stir a pot, Dip-Check...check the oven, Dip-Check...deglaze a pan, Dip...OUCH!! I'd dipped my finger well into the molten sugar BEFORE the ice water. Yup, it was a perfect firm-ball and when some skin came off my finger with the hardened sugar I swore I would never again be so careless (and haven't been).

I will never again fry in a broiling pan...

When I was a kid I'd watch my mom make hamburgers on her electric range. Sometimes she'd pan-fry them on top of the stove and sometimes she'd broil them in the oven. One day I decided to "help" with lunch and started cooking the burgers on the range for her. Unfortunately I'd gotten my signals crossed and had put the burgers on a rack and fit it into the aluminum broiler pan before setting that on the burner. It seemed to be going slowly so I cranked up the burner to high. My mom walked in just as the aluminum pan began melting and dripping down around the burner coils. GAWD what a smell and mess!

I will never again leave a tallow sculpture unattended...

I was working as the pastry chef at a hotel but it was slow and the catering dept was preparing for a big buffet function so I helped out by taking on one of the centerpiece sculptures for the table. We made our own tallow mixes with beef fat, lard and shortening and for one part of the sculpture I whipped a bunch of it and applied it to a base, knifing it to look like swirls of water. Well the waitrons (ah, I mean valued service staff) were always coming into my pastry room looking to snag a snack. One of their favorite things to do was steal frosting from a bowl or even off a finished cake. So, sure enough, as I was coming back from the walk-in, I was just in time to see one of my favorite waiters take a big finger-full of my sculpture and pop it into his mouth. It was precious! On second thought... maybe I WILL leave my tallow unattended more often!

I will never again bake sweet potatoes without piercing them...

[Pierogi]

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY:

By: Pierogi

Dried chilies are, in fact, still chilies. They’re just dried. Not…de-chilied.

Therefore, they still have capsaicin in them, and when you use your acrylic-faux nails to scrape out the ribs and seeds (the BEST, non-unitasker tool for this, btw) before you toast them for Rick Bayless’ red chile enchilada sauce (which is most excellent, btw), that capsaicin WILL stay under the acrylic-faux nails for a loooooong time.

And, also therefore, you should *not* then rub your eyes with said fingers after said scraping, WHEN you’re wearing your CONTACTS, (or prolly even when you’re not wearing contacts) unless you want your eyes to be smarting like 5 hours later.

I have done this experiment for you all, and am blearily reporting the consequences, so you don’t have to suffer in the name of science as I have.

Thenkyew. Thenkyewvermush. Where are the eyedrops?

[Darienne]

I have done this experiment for you all, and am blearily reporting the consequences, so you don’t have to suffer in the name of science as I have.

Too kind...

[Kouign Aman]

And they are still dried chilis even if you are deseeding them to plant the seeds, and not for cooking. And its still a bad idea to use those same unwashed fingers to put one's contacts in. In this case, intention has no impact on outcome.

[Darienne]

OK. I have a new one for me. Probably the rest of you knew, but I was too stupid to figure it out. You cannot freeze the rest of an opened can of condensed milk in an ice cube tray. It won't freeze. Of course. Duh...

So, if said ice cube tray is somehow tipped on its side while someone is jamming just one more thing into the fridge freezer, its contents will rapidly drip onto everything else in the freezer...except that no one is there to notice...making a monumental and sticky mess which you will have to clean up.

So, I'll never try that again.

The condensed milk was down the drain...