I will never again . . . (Part 1)

[Suzanne F]

. . . turn the burner under a pot down to "warm" and then remove the pot from the burner without turning it off.

that's a lie. I know I will do it many, many times more.

[andiesenji]

I will never, ever forget to clean the auxillary vent on a pressure cooker before use.

Big pressure cooker - 20 quart. Cooking turkey backs and necks with rice for dog food.

(great danes back in those days).

Waited till pressure up to 15 pounds, turned burner down to maintain it.

Left kitchen. Twenty minutes later BLAM!

Kitchen now decorated with mangled turkey parts and rice.

Lid of pressure cooker split, half stuck in wall, other half missing, hole in ceiling.

Husband climbed into attick and found it imbedded in roof rafter.

Dogs rushed into kitchen and tried to help with clean up.

One does not get between three great danes and food of any kind.

Actually they did a pretty good job up to 5 feet on the walls. I hired a crew to come in and clean the rest of it while I retired to my bed with a book and an ice pack on my head.

Regarding hot pepper handlling (or how to avoid Hunan-hand, as it is referred to on the Chile-Heads list)

Milk or milk products, yogurt, sour cream or whatever you have available with remove the capsacin. The casein in the milk surrounds the capsacin molecules and renders it inactive.

Try it by touching your tongue with a hot pepper then take a sip of milk and hold it in your mouth. The burn will stop instantly.

That is why sour cream is almost universally served with foods made with hot peppers in Mexican and Central/South American foods. It will kill the burn and leave the flavor.

[andiesenji]

Toddle off to beddy-bye thinking I had hit the off button on the crock pot.

How do you clean beef brisket/garlic/ginger charcoal out of a crock pot?

Fill the crockpot with hot water, turn it to high then dump in a cup of baking soda.

(I buy it in the industrial sized boxes because I use so much for all kinds of things.)

Depending on how thick the crust is, it will take several hours to loosen but will loosen eventually with very little work.

If you have chrome appliances or shiny stainless cookware with burnt-on spots, you can use this trick which I have been using to clean antique appliances.

Take a dry cloth (no terry cloth, no sponge), barely dampen it, have a saucer full of dry baking soda.

Dip the dampened cloth in the dry soda and rub. This does take a little elbow grease but it will remove the spots and polish the metal without scratching or damaging it.

[andiesenji]

That very scenario caused me to change my behavior and let the answering machine do its job. I love answering machines that I can here the message beign left. Most of my friends and family know that I screen my calls.

I DO have an answering machine, but it's far from the kitchen, and I still run like an idiot to see who's leaving a message. It's mostly when I'm expecting an important call, but the important calls seem to come in at more convenient times. Isn't it funny how it's always the telemarketers who call at the most inopportune moments?

After way too much of this, stripping off gloves to pick up call when up to my wrists in dough, or working with sugar, I finally solved the problem. I bit the bullet and bought a VTech 5.8 mhz cordless that I can clip onto my pocket and it has a speakerphone built in to the handheld unit. I can hit the button with my pinky and answer just fine. Sometimes callers are startled by the sounds of chopping, frying, tossing or banging pans but at least I can tell them to call back.

Worth every penny and then some.

[bloviatrix]

I will never again...

...leave a 10" Wusthof carving knife inside the box of leftover pizza, forget that it's in the fridge for a week, then pitch the whole thing on trash day.

Along those lines, Blovie once left a paring knife in dish of noodle kugel and covered it with foil. The next day he decided to re-heat the kugel and put it in the oven.

Voila, noodle kugel served w/a side of melted knife handle.

[JerzyMade]

I will never again think that a $1.99 plastic cutting board can be used as a pizza peel.

[bergerka]

One from my best friend:

She will never again hold her seven-month-old baby while making cookies. Baby, while extraordinarily sweet and adorable, likes to tell little baby stories and sing while mommy makes cookies. Mommy got distracted, and somehow read that "one teaspoon of baking soda" as "one CUP of baking soda."

Ever seen exploding Toll House cookies?

I am ashamed to admit that when she told me this story I laughed until she whacked me one and reminded me of the time I had to call my dad to find out how to boil an egg (yes, I asked slkinsey first, he was laughing too hard at me to answer. Then my dad laughed at me. It was traumatic).

K

[hathor]

I was just thinking that it might be worth moving instead of cleaining the pizza peel from the oven....when I remembered my first apartment. I tried to clean the ice out of the freezer with a hammer and a screwdriver. I punctured the freon tubing, causing a small explosion. The super thought the freezer would be just fine in the morning. It wasn't..

[JerzyMade]

Actually the "plastic pizza peel" didn't make as much mess as the pizza, when I realized what I was doing and spilled most of the topping. Ahh, the smell of mozarella hitting the red hot heating coils

[Mabelline]

.when I remembered my first apartment. I tried to clean the ice out of the freezer with a hammer and a screwdriver. I punctured the freon tubing, causing a small explosion.

Oh my god!! I did that too. For ten minutes our little apartment looked like some rock concert with all the mist-stuff floating around.

But I am proud to list an accomplishment from reading this post. I am making stocks today; do I need to go into detail or can I brag that I remembered my other pot under the strainer?!?! There's no stock in the pipes today!!

[NeroW]

.when I remembered my first apartment. I tried to clean the ice out of the freezer with a hammer and a screwdriver. I punctured the freon tubing, causing a small explosion.                                                                           

Oh my god!! I did that too. For ten minutes our little apartment looked like some rock concert with all the mist-stuff floating around.

But I am proud to list an accomplishment from reading this post. I am making stocks today; do I need to go into detail or can I brag that I remembered my other pot under the strainer?!?! There's no stock in the pipes today!!

Shit, we've done that too. We were trying to chisel a spot in the frozen-solid freezer big enough for the bottle of vodka. We were chiseling away with steak knives. Bam! Freon everywhere.

[Mabelline]

I wonder if there's some graveyard around for all those murdered fridges!!! I see a Steven King novel comin' up...

[Malawry]

Dump a cup or so of pepper on a big bowl of chicken breasts because I opened the "spoon" end instead of the "shaker" end. It took me a while to clean that one up.

BTW, side lesson learned: The membrane on chicken breasts captures those little bits of pepper, bigtime. Simply rinsing doesn't work if the breasts still have some membrane on them.

[Mabelline]

I did that with basil just awhile back. Oven roasting a big packet of potatoes, sweet peppers, mushrooms, and sweet onions in a big foil pouch. Put the butter in, opened a shaker bottle of basil, gave a BIG shake, and realized the shaker top was inside the cap. Lots of basil...it actually came out good. Good thing it hadn't been cayenne!

[JPW]

Add another dead freezer to the list - my weapon of choice was a hammer and a screwdriver........

[col klink]

. . . freeze cream cheese. My cream cheese now has a chalky texture though it doesn't necessarily taste bad, it's nowhere near as good.

Who knew?

[hathor]

Add another dead freezer to the list - my weapon of choice was a hammer and a screwdriver........

Geez, that is a LOT of dead freezers.... does freon have anything to do with the ozone layer???

[NulloModo]

Throw a bunch of any one thing into a deep fryer without first testing out a little bit of it to see how much it foams up....

Tossed in about two cups work of Daikon slices and the resulting volcanic eruption coated my stove top, my counter top, the side of my fridge, and a good portion of my kitchen floor with near boiling peanut oil....

[Mabelline]

I would have dropped everything and run! Gadzooks!

Yeah, why didn't they rivet a plaque on those old fridges saying "Do not defrost with hammers, screwdrivers, or power tools!" ?

[lesfen]

Ugh... I can't tell you how many security deposits I've lost because of those crappy freezers. I've never actually punctured anything important, but I've left some battle scars.

[eunny jang]

Merrily make a delicious-looking souffle base with parmesan and the last bits of the stilton and herbs and perfectly, lovingly hand-whipped egg whites....

And belatedly realize that I have absolutely nothing appropriate to bake it in.

It made for some really good scrambled eggs though.

[dscott]

It made for some really good scrambled eggs though.

YUM.

[Suzanne F]

Merrily make a delicious-looking souffle base with parmesan and the last bits of the stilton and herbs and perfectly, lovingly hand-whipped egg whites....

And belatedly realize that I have absolutely nothing appropriate to bake it in.

It made for some really good scrambled eggs though.

No offense, but:

IDIOCY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

[Smithy]

drop a 20 ltr bucket of mayonnaise from a great height without the lid, what a mess!

Sailboat race. 34' racing boat, wooden interior, clean and luxurious for a racer. About 40 miles into the 80 mile race I go below to start passing up bowls of the excellent cucumber sour cream soup another crewmember has brought. Just as I pull the 2-gallon jug out of the cooler the boat lurches and I drop the jug.. ..and the lid flies off when the jug bounces. There's cucumber sour cream soup through all the lines, down into the bilge, all over the floor. Did I mention that it's my *first* race with this crew, on this boat?

It really was excellent soup. The crew above loved it, and wondered why I stayed below so long - I did my level best to clean it up without anyone knowing about the catastrophe below, but of course I was found out. There was no escaping the smell - and by the next meal nobody who'd been below could face another bowl of that soup.

[Mabelline]

That one gets an award for the goofs you can't get away from!!