I was finishing a jar of extremely hot peppers (7 pot primos) that I had fermenting on Thanksgiving day. I made a hot sauce with them and cantaloupe. I had them in a pan at a low simmer to meld the flavors. The problem was the steam coming off was potent as hell. It filled the house when everyone was arriving and coughing from the hot sauce in the air, me included. We had to open all the windows, dig out the fans to get it out of the house, freezing everyone in the process.
I was heating oil to deep fry some jalapeños. I put the cover on the pan so it would heat faster.
After a few minutes I took the cover off… and the oil instantly burst into flame.
I was fast enough to just drop the lid back on the pan, which killed the fire before it got worse… but yeah, don’t heat oil with a cover on. And have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen, one that’s properly rated for grease fires. Know how to use your fire extinguisher. Do not store it right next to the stove - you need to be able to reach it if there’s a fire.
You can also smother a grease fire by dumping baking soda on it. Do not dump flour on it, flour is flammable.
Flour isn’t just flammable; if it’s dispersed in the air like a cloud, like it probably would be if you hastily threw it into a grease fire, it can even explode.
Specifically, anything that is even slightly flammable (flour is starch, of course) can be violently explosive if it’s dispersed into air in the right (wrong?) way. That’s partly why water is such a terrible idea in grease fires.
Oxygen starvation seems like the safest bet. Like a huge, metal lid on a pot. I’d personally be skeptical of dumping anything into it at all, because of splashing.
You can also smother a grease fire by dumping baking soda on it. Do not dump flour on it, flour is flammable.
From personal experience, salt also works. I keep a big box of salt with a big spout on my counter for more that just brining briskets.
Fire blankets are good, too.
I left a pot of beer, onion, and butter on the stove to boil with the intention of making beer brats, then stepped away to do something and thought I’d turned off the burners. I had not. I did not realize I had not until I re-emerged 40+ minutes later and the entire room was filled with smoke. The weird part was that despite the smoke being choking thick none of the smoke detectors had gone off, and we had tested them recently. Anyway, took a good few hours to air out the house and two days of scrubbing to clean the burnt onion remains off the bottom of the pan, which had somehow managed to burn while still being submerged in beer. Damndest thing.
If I might make a suggestion: https://www.amazon.com/Holikme-Attachments-Scrubber-Attachment-Automobile/dp/B07P7NFV1F (or any appropriate analogue) makes “cleaning my mistakes up” way easier.
Oh yeah, got one of those later. This was years ago though and I had to do it by hand. Got it all though!
yeah, I saw some guy on reddit break out of his depression nest through a herculean effort one time and he was cleaning shit with the scotch brite pad and I felt like I just unlocked the path to earthly enlightenment
Test function on smoke alarms only test if it makes a sound. i.e. if it has battery left. All smoke alarms expire in about 10 years, after which they should be replaced because their sensor gets too insensitive.
Oh we’d also “tested” not that long before by burning some other food. Worked fine then.
There are two main types of smoke detectors, and one works better for smoldering fires (photoelectric), while the other works better for rapidly growing fires (ionization). IDK how different the two food-burning incidents are, but there is a Technology Connections video on youtube that goes into more detail on the subject. Fun fact: smoke alarms with photoelectric detectors have been growing in popularity, as has making everything in our homes out of plastic and other synthetic materials, which burn much more quickly than older materials, thus lessening the chance of house fires smoldering long enough for the smoke alarm to react before everything is engulfed in flames. Hurray for progress! Although, ionization-type detectors are much more likely to give false positives, which increases the likelihood that they will get disabled by the homeowner/tenant, and you definitely don’t want that.
I was making tomato sauce and put in about half a tube of tomato paste. Went to taste it and could barely eat it, because it was so spicy. Turns out, tomato paste with chili is a thing…
I was trying to make guacamole for lunch once. I decided I wanted a little bit of spice and dumped in some chili powder without looking at the bottle, but it turned out to be cinnamon. I ate the guace anyways with some toast because who what’s to waste perfectly good avocado?
3/10, Would not recommend.
3/10 would be my guess for that mix. Maybe 2.5/10.
You should have tried it with rice. I heard its like a 5/7.
Ah a perfect score.
i melted a plastic spatula
I once decided to make myself an elaborate vegetable omelette for breakfast, and didn’t realize until the very final step that I had forgotten the cheese.
Was making an alfredo a few weeks ago. Wanted it really cheesy. I’m there with my thing of cream and my shredded parm. Got greedy and added way more parm than I had cream to counteract. When it cooled it was basically rubberized.
I just had the same experience. Gotta tell you, parm mac and cheese is not good. Ended up adding a whole extra bag of noodles and tomato sauce for sweetness and acidity. It’s edible now but I went overboard cause I can’t even taste the parm.
I’ve been experimenting with different cheeses in my stovetop mac and to be honest, America/cheddar is still the best combo I’ve found. Was disappointed when a batch of smoked Gouda was still good, but not as good as the sauce made from “milk-product” slices and any old block of mild cheddar.
I’m sure parm would be good in breadcrumbs on top or a little in the sauce but this was a mistake sauce that was just parm and cream. Live and learn.
For mac and cheese, have you tried hot sauce? Just a little makes the cheese pop. It’s like coffee and chocolate.
Cat food pasta.
I often buy wet cat food, as a treat for my cats. I blend it with some water (they like it this way), freeze it into cubes, and put them in an old ice cream container. Everyday 18:00 I unfreeze two of those cubes for their dinner.
I also buy tomato paste in 1kg cartons, and freeze it into ice cubes. It goes to another ice cream container in the freezer.
Well. At night, distracted, preparing tomato sauce for the pasta. Added actual tomato paste cubes into it, got distracted, tasted it, “meh, still too runny”, went back to the freezer, picked the contained that I thought to be tomato paste, didn’t check the contents, added two more cubes to the sauce. And as it dissolves and bubbles I think “wait a minute this is smelling like cat foo… oh shit”.
It isn’t something harmful or contaminated, so I… ate it? 6/10 it didn’t make me go full “bleeeergh” but not doing this again.
Every cat owner should try every food they give their cats at least once.
I do it, and it makes total sense why they jump onto some of it, but only reluctantly eat some of the cheaper stuff.
Smh this site got me contemplating eating 12 different kinds of cat food in a cursed taste test
Sorry, but my cat eats whole mice. I don’t think our tastes have much overlap. I’ll trust her decisions on the wet food varieties without personally experiencing them.
I was curious about her utter devotion to Temptations, though, and can safely say that whatever causes cats to go wild for them is not present in at least this human.
Cats love to kill, but at this point I’ve seen too many dead mice, birds, and lizards, proudly presented by a cat who right next went to eat the tasty food. Seriously, too many… 😳
They don’t have a sweet tooth, so all their food tastes like a variation on beef jerky, steak tartare, sashimi, and ash… but “comparatively”, some of the dry and wet food, have more flavor than others. They also go crazy for the sauce first, I guess that’s like jello.
my friend, sometimes ordering a pizza is a valid life choice
I know. And I did consider redoing the sauce, preparing something else, or simply takeover food. But the taste wasn’t offensive, just… weird. (It was weird for them too. I offered some of the sauce to them, they refused. Probably because the only edible stuff that humans eat, in their PoV, is yoghurt and chicken breast.)
You’re telling me they’d turn down a mouthful of medium rare grilled beef if it was only lightly salted? (because really good grilled beef doesn’t need to be seasoned much or at all)
I tried it once, giving them bits of beef. (Salt and pepper; they don’t mind pepper). Kika smelled it a bit and then went back to her “you’re giving me attention, right? Pet me, pet me!” modus operandi, while Siegfrieda picked it from her bowl and started playing with it. Kind of funny because she used to be a street cat and probably ate all sorts of nasty stuff, but nowadays she’s spoiled enough to be picky on meat.
We even joke at home that the cats bug us every meal - not because they want food, but because the humans dare to gather together without giving them attention.
Eurgh, I can smell that in my brain. You win!
I forgot to turn off the stove with some pork and sauerkraut on low heat, and went out drinking. Many hours later I came back to a smoke filled house, with a pot filled with solid charcoal that ended up in the trash because I just couldn’t get it clean enough. I had to trash a couple things in the cabinets above the stove, because I couldn’t get the smoke taste out.
More recently, I preheated a pan too much to sear a steak. I always wondered what kind of idiot starts a grease fire, now I know. The avocado oil took about 5 seconds to ignite, and it ended up destroying a splatter screen I’d set on the pan from the rapid temperature change. Luckily I remembered to cover the fire to put it out.
Remembered another one.
Friend ask me and another friend, we cook on summer camp together, to cook lunch on his wedding.
He wanted form us to cook meal A we tell him that we didn’t cook it so it will be shtshow, but we could cook meal B, C or D. This didn’t work so we cooked meal A and it was shtshow.
It all started with “fully equipped professional kitchen” whitch wasn’t equipped at all (we were prepared for this). Than few other things go wrong. But the TIFU moment was soup - some miscommunication and bad decisions led to adding the noodles in it too early so you can imagine the porridge it become.
I had a blast afterwards, and too much beer to forget this experience.
My friend then said that it was exactly as he imagined it to be, because his now wife didn’t want another meal.
Was reheating pizza in a pan when I was 12. Touched the metal bit connecting the pan to the handle on accident. Had a nasty blister on my hand for a while.
On the summer camp I cooked there were few as always.
We made halušky (Slovakian national dish) and water didn’t boil enough so first batch was ruined.
Cooking related - we forgot to order bread and noone can deliver it.
One accident with chilly in food.
My whacky experimental oatmeal (it was edible).
added too much salt to my food? does that count and made entire meals inedible.
My favorite fuck up was when I microwaved a hard boiled egg. I stuck the fork in and it promptly exploded. There was an outline of my silhouette where my body blocked the chunks of egg on the couch.
I still laugh my ass off thinking about it to this day 🤣
Incredible image 😂
H… How?!
This is the best I could find on short notice. Basically this but I was sitting on the couch.
Woah!
Sort of.
I was making a gigantic batch of mead. Like 5 gallons of it, boiling away merrily. I carefully prepared my glass carboy ahead of time and poured the must (aka: that-which-will-be-mead-after-yeast-farts-in-it) into my carboy. This was fine. All according to plan.
The bucket of ice and cold water I added to the sink to cool it down faster so that I could throw the pitched yeast into it… also according to plan.
What was not according to plan was a gunshot sound going off, shards of glass shooting through the air like a grenade, and honey water cascading out over the edge of my sink all over my floor.
I’ve never felt more broken.
I think your problem might have been the plan
it was the plan, the vetting of the plan, the sign off of the plan, the execution of the plan.
so I mean yeah, just like generally the plan. I haven’t made mead since, because it represents possibly the most monumental TIFU of my entire god damned life
Fun story though!
My roommate in college brewed alcohols for a class. We came home from class to the gunshot noises happening right as we were entering the room (before, during, and after). Didn’t realize exactly what was going on until we saw the liquid from the top shelves spilling on the ground haha
Similar - I didn’t check valve on my brewery and get 10l of wort on me.
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