Kitchen Disasters- that you can laugh about today.

[Tropicalsenior]

Everybody has had one. Moments when you just want to sit down and cry but you can't because that is the time for action. You have a mess to clean up or an alternative meal to be found to feed the family. You can laugh about it later but you know it's going to happen again sooner or later. It's happened to me a hundred times but I want to hear about yours.

I guess it's only fair that I start out with probably the worst one that ever happened to me. I had an Oster electric pressure cooker that I had had for a couple years and I was making a pork soup base for borsche. Fortunately I was sitting across the kitchen from it when all of a sudden, boom. The whole thing exploded all over my kitchen. My kitchen is about 16x25 and it didn't miss a surface, anywhere! I couldn't move. I just sat there covered in goo. I had a hanging basket with vegetables beside the pressure cooker and all of the pork went up and came down in that basket but the broth was everywhere. I was still sitting there about half an hour later when my housemate came home from work and bless him, he got buckets and a mop and cleaned the whole kitchen for me. That was 7 years ago and I still occasionally find a spot or two that was missed. I swore that I would never have another pressure cooker but a month later I broke down and bought a Chinese version of the instant pot. The directions were so bad that I hadn't clue of how to use it. I got on the internet and found EG. That explosion was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

[lindag]

(One of) mine was the Thanksgiving turkey I decided to cook on convection.

Never having tried that before, the turkey was totally dried out and ruined.

 

[Tropicalsenior]

6 minutes ago, lindag said:

the turkey was totally dried out and ruined.

And no doubt with a whole house full of guests to witness the disaster.

That reminds me of the time when we first moved to Costa Rica and we had two other couples over for dinner. I wasn't familiar with how bad the beef was in Costa Rica and I decided to serve veal cutlets. Instead of nice tender cutlets, it was like trying to eat shoe leather. I don't think that I have tried to cook veal here since. Fortunately there was plenty of other food and a good dessert but even the neighbor's dog wouldn't eat the cutlets.

[Shel_B]

It was a holiday or anniversary of some sort back in the mid-1980s and my GF and I were at her Dad's home along with her aunt and uncle.  I was cooking dinner in Dad's kitchen, and was making a roast of some sort.  I was removing the roast from the pan to put on a platter when, with a resultant loud thud, the roast fell to the floor. I was devastated.  I wanted to make an impression on Dad and the relatives.

I had no idea what to do. Did I feel the tears of my frustration and incompetence?

 

A moment later the aunt walked into the kitchen as a result of hearing the roast fall, and she obviously saw my distress. With many years of cooking behind her, she offered her sage advice: "Pick it up, wipe it off, and serve it. They won't know."

 

As she left the kitchen to go back to the dining room, she turned to me and said, "We'll eat from the other end," smiled, and glided into the dining room.

 

 

Edited June 5 by Shel_B (log)

[Tropicalsenior]

That reminds me of the time years ago when I was first married and we were invited to the home of the parents of friends of ours for Thanksgiving. That was in the days of the first little 8 mm movie cameras and I decided to film the day. I had the camera set up on a tripod in the kitchen and really wasn't paying much attention when his mother carved the turkey. Later when we viewed it, we could see that as she carved it one leg fell off and fell onto the floor. I had also filmed the dinner as we sat down to eat and sure enough there on the platter with all the rest of the turkey, very prominently, were the two legs.