Kitchen Disasters

Found this the other day and thought it amusing.

http://boards.live.com/Lifestyleboards/thread.aspx?ThreadID=24911&BoardsParam

Of course, I have to add my own disaster stories ...

Even though I'm a pretty good cook now, I haven't always been. Mom's brillant in the kitchen, so ... for the first 20+ years of my life, I really didn't have a NEED to learn how to cook ... even though I sometimes have to urge to do so.

Chinese New Year day. I was probably about 19 or so. I decided to make something traditional. What could be easier than a simple chicken soup? I proceeded to add my ingredients (with some water) into a pot. Turned it on. Family wanted to go do dimsum. Who am I to turn down food? So off we went. When we finally came home, there was a thick dense layer of smoke all over the house. The smoke alarm was screaming its head off. I had left the pot on the stove on "high" and it had boiled itself dry. I went and got some pot holders and took it off the stove (I 'aint no dummy, didn't want to get burnt, you see). The entire bottom of the pot fell off and all I had in my hand was the handle with the outside portion of the pot. You can see right through the bottom (or where it used to be, at least). I was forbidden to use the kitchen for many years after that incident.

My family tend to be a bit of a coffee and tea snob. We like our tea from leaves and we like our coffee freshly grinded. When I got my first office job, my boss had somebody over for a meeting. She told me to go make some coffee for everybody. So off I went to the kitchen area. Unfortunately, all I found was this can of old instant coffee. The directions were fuzzy enough that I can't make out much of anything. I figure how different could it be than fresh ground, right? So I carefully measured out about a tablespoonful of the powder for each cup, and since I like them strong, I added another tablespoonful in the pot for good measure. When the meeting was finally over, I noticed that nobody touched their cup of coffee. My boss pulled me aside and told me to ask (my co-worker) to show me how to make coffee. Heehee, I didn't do it on purpose, but she has never asked me to make coffee for her again.

Two other incidents happened where I wasn't the direct contributor, but was a witness in the whole thing and probably, maybe a participant ...

Went to a friend's (mom's, actually) place for dinner with a group of people. We were all cooking in the kitchen. Some were chopping, some were washing, some were stirring something on the stove ... We needed to use the oven too, so somebody turned it on to pre-heat. What we didn't know was that her mom uses the oven to store stuff. There were mixing bowls, boiler pans, cookie sheets, and ... plastic boxes! We started smelling something awful and found that the plastic had melted in the hot oven. We were never invited to go back there to cook again.

The same friend bought a house and we were back to prepare another meal. Everything was pretty much set, except for a frozen lasagne which took forever to heat. So we were sitting around, bored and hungry. One guy found this lever thing on her oven door and said ... hey! This oven's really cool! It even has a lock on it so impatient folks like us wouldn't just keep opening it to check while it's cooking. What else to do? Of course we had to go and "lock" the oven! Well ... we found out the hard way that it wasn't just a lock. The thing activates the self-cleaning feature of her oven. As it got hotter and hotter and we couldn't unlock it to get the lasagne out, we realized the error of our ways and the oven was just in self-clean mode. There seem to be no way out of ruining our dinner. It took an electrical engineer (that's one of the friends present at the time) to turn off the oven's circuit at the breaker panel. Atlas our lasagna was saved.

Less I forget my baking disaster ... I decided to bake a cake one day. I was adding ingridents into the mixer. One by one they went. Everything was working out wonderfully when I realized that I didn't have enough sugar. I grew up in a house full of sugar-fiends, so having a complete lack of sugar is pretty much unheard of. There just must be some somewhere. Off I went to look ... none in the kitchen ... nope, not the garage shelves either. I finally found a jar in the pantry (not just for food, but for general storage ... just mostly food-stuff) of some granulated while stuff. I was overjoyed that I didn't have to make a special trip to the store to pick up more sugar in the middle of my cake-making project. I added the proper amount in my batter and baked it. It came out golden brown and looking wonderful. I sliced a piece and popped into my mouth and spit the thing right out. It was god-awful! Turns out the jar of while stuff I found was laundry detergent!

Then there was the drunken cake. Desserts have always been my favorites and my forte. Of course, looking at these stories, one must have their reservations about my claim. I decided to "wing" a cheesecake recipe and added some special flavors to it. As I was whipping up the mixture, I started pouring some Kalua liquor into my cheesecake mixture. I poured some, tasted it ... not enough Kalua taste. Poured some more, tasted it ... still the same. Repeat ... When I was finally satisfied of the way it smelled and tasted, I placed the cake carefully into a box and took it to a gathering I had with my friends. We had a nice dinner at their house and decided to have my dessert before we went off to see the movie. I sliced it up and put them on plates. One bite later, one of my friends apologized and told me that while it must have been good, but since he planned on being able to drive, he couldn't have any more of it. I finally tasted it. There was so much alcohol in it that smelling it burnt my nose! I think I must have used up about half a large bottle of the stuff for it. To this date, my friends still make fun of me and my alcoholic cake.