A distaster in MY kitchen!

[MKSquared]

I made a great little dinner for some friends of mine who are new parents for the first time. Earlier in the day, I made a baked ziti, divided into two foil pans (and one casserole dish for me!). I froze one of the little pans, and I kept one out to bake later today so they could have dinner tonight.

I ran out to put together a salad and get some fresh bread, so I left a note for DBF to preheat the oven to 350 degrees, to uncover the ziti, and then to pop it in the oven on a cookie sheet for 30 minutes.

Just an hour before I was supposed to be on my friends' doorstep bearing dinner, I popped back in my house to find it filled with an acrid smoke. DBF had set the ziti on a flexible plastic cutting board, not a cookie sheet! The plastic had melted onto the oven rack, THROUGH the oven rack, and onto the oven floor, even onto the heating element. DBF claimed he didn't notice the smoke and was fairly unconcerned about the whole ordeal!

In the end, I suppose it worked out okay. I did not offer my friends the toxic-smoke-ziti. Instead, I gave up my casserole dish of it. (It was missing a piece that I ate for a late lunch.) I'm kind of bummed, because 1) I wanted the dinner to be perfect for a new mom & dad and 2) I wanted ziti for dinner and tomorrow's lunch! :(

How can some people have no common sense in the kitchen? He's made cookies before, using cookie sheets. And he's fairly intelligent, and should know that plastic would melt in a hot oven. ARRRRRRGHHHH. Any stories out there to make me feel better?

[funnybone]

Oh, what a mess and stench that must have been (and probably still is!!!!)!!!!

To put it mildly - What do you expect - he is a man!!!!! UGH!!



My DH is not good in the kitchen, nor does he pretend to be. He does clean well, so I will give him credit there. However, years ago, when we had an electric stove, I bought some of those "covers" to place on top of the coil burners. I was lousy at cleaning the silver rings, and the covers made it look better. Well, DH THOUGHT you were supposed to cook on them and turned on the element one day intending to boil some water, with that cover on!!!! Need I say more!

[Luiza]

Well, something like this happened in my kitchen too. The difference is that I did it myself :o

Here is what happened. I was requested to bring to a potluck the next day some of the Romanian bean dip I make, which is topped with caramelized onions. So there is me at 2:00am mixing the bean dip in the food processor while trying to caramelize the onions. Five minutes into the process I smell something funny. After wandering around the kitchen for some time to determine what it was, I discovered that I had been stirring the onions with the plastic spatula for the food processor. I must have been doing that for some time, because the spatula was melted to the handle :eek: This happened 6 years ago and I still consider it my most embarrassing cooking mishap. The only good thing that came out of it is that I made a vow never to cook at 2am again, and kept it.

So, did this story make you feel better? :D

[beacooker]

Hmmmmm. There was the time my DH (who is normally pretty handy in the kitchen) decided to make us some biscuits to go with our dinner. Apparently he did not know that shortening is not supposed to be GREEN and not supposed to smell rancid. I didn't discover that there was any issue with the shortening until I took my first bite of biscuit - EWWWWWWWW. :eek:

[Little Bit]

Then there's the tale of the evening that we decided to run get a carry-out pizza instead of staying in for the dinner we thought we'd wanted. Naturally, by the time we got back, the forgotten pot of lima beans simmering on the back of the stove were a smoking ruin. :o

[Gina O]

Just last year, my mom came over for a day of xmas cookie making. Before she arrived, I was going to whip together a quick batch of microwave peanut brittle (a recipe found on this bb.) As I am doing the microwave, stir, microwave, stir thing, I notice something whitish in the molten lava, I mean, peanut brittle. Continue to microwave and stir, more white stuff.... look at my utensil to find a stick with no spatula attached. :o I decided not to finish the spatula brittle.... those toxins and all. Gina

[Leslie w]

Question for MK Squared: How did you get the melted plastic off the oven? Did you just let it get hard and pick it off or what? Did you make db clean it up?

When I first dated my dh I was so green in the kitchen I needed a recipe for boiling water. Anyway we had take-out pizza one night and I brought it back to his parent's house to reheat it. I threw it in the oven, box and all, turned the oven on to 400 and forgot about it... It was a good thing the fire extinguisher was nearby or we would have all perished. I was banned from the kitchen for several months.

I've come a long way baby!

[MKSquared]

Leslie,

I left (in tears!) to deliver the dinner to my friends. I was gone for about an hour. When I got back, the plastic had been chipped away. He used a knife, and I haven't asked which knife, because I don't want to know the answer. I don't see any more plastic in the oven, but I suspect it will be smoky the next time I try to bake anything.:rolleyes:

[tammy/MN]

i was snickering as i read the original post............btw did DEAR BOYFRIEND turn into to DEAD boyfriend????????:D

i keep kicking myself for this one, but i was doing the self cleaning thing on my gas range, when i noticed a nasty smell, i hadn't taken my crockful of cooking utensils off of the stove & my new pastry brush from pampered chef was liguified:eek: :mad: i didn't realize just how hot the stove gets to clean it.

i have learned my lesson.

tammy

[KathrynY]

Hmmm... toxic-smoke-ziti, spatula brittle... I think we've invented several new dishes here! ;) Ok, I'll share my embarrasing story:

Many years ago, I worked in a small branch bank located in a strip mall. There were only 3 of us in the branch, and we had a small microwave in the back for re-heating lunches and so on.

Running too late one morning for breakfast, I stopped at a convenience store on the way to work and picked up one of those cheese danish things in plastic wrap. I decided it would taste better heated, so I popped it into the microwave and spun the dial (not paying attention to the numbers on the dial - my microwave at home had push buttons). My co-workers and I got to talking, and 8 MINUTES LATER we smelled smoke - yep, my cheese danish was a pile of gray ash, and the bank was filled with nasty smelling smoke. :eek: We had to run to the deli next door and beg to use one of their big commercial fans to suck the smoke out the front door. How embarrassing! :o I was not allowed to use the microwave after that! At least the fire sprinklers didn't go off....

[lhall]

Ok, last year I was making peach ice cream. I don't exaclty remember why, but I had the stuff in the blender. Well I was using a wooden spoon. Naturally it got rather chopped up. I tried and thought I'd gotten all the wood chips out. WRONG!
I had to pick little pieces of wood out of my ice cream:eek:

I've melted spatulas.

Now, this is really funny. One Easter Mom had fixed a roast. Well, she didn't think the middle was quite done so she put it back in the oven (we ate the done parts). HOURS, yes HOURS later she opened the oven. Well, there was this very very small black lump left in the pan....

Leigh

[LaraW]

I don't know why, but for some reason I seem to develop short term memory loss when I am toasting nuts in the oven. :rolleyes:

Last week, I was toasting some walnuts to go with my vegetables for dinner. I put them on a cookie sheet and under the broiler, and even said to DH "OK, what are we NOT going to forget". He said " we are not going to forget that the walnuts are in the oven." Well, what do you think we did???

A while later (15 or 20 minutes) I smell something burning. Hmmm, is there something in the oven?? DOH! Its those walnuts! I open the door to find all of the walnuts on FIRE! Actual flames in the oven. :eek:

We put the fire out, but we had to eat our dinner with out those walnuts. Oh well, they were all charcoal anyway. :(

[Julie O]

Another microwave story. My boyfriend decided he wanted to make some popcorn. We were in our school's chemistry department, so he used the faculty microwave. He walked down the hallway to talk to a friend. He started to smell the yummy popcorn so thought he should get back to the faculty lounge. By the time he got there, a distinctive burning smell and smoke was filling the entire floor. One of the professors ran out of his office to see if the freshmen were burning down a lab! BF had to extinguish the bag in the men's restroom!

Turns out that when he made popcorn he would always set the microwave to 5 minutes, then listen for the popping sounds to slow, then stop the microwave manually. This time, though, he didn't stick around to be able to stop it. :o

He also caught Rice a Roni on fire in his dorm microwave.

In spite of these stories, I still married him! ;) Needless to say, I'm the cook in our household.:D

[MKSquared]

tammy/MN originally wrote:
i was snickering as i read the original post............btw did DEAR BOYFRIEND turn into to DEAD boyfriend????????

I did my fair amount of carrying on, but in the end, we both apologized to each other. Funny thing though: the first time I posted it, I noticed I'd typed "DMF" instead of "DBF." :o Now, if that's not a Freudian slip, I'm not sure what is!

Lara W, LOL about your flaming walnuts! Add that to our new culinary collection: toxic-smoke-ziti, spatula brittle, and flaming walnuts! Yum!

[LaraW]

MKSquared , ain't we a pair!

If this happens to people who would consider themselves competent in the kitchen, what happens to people who don't! :eek:

I have a utensil that we can use for our dinner of toxic ziti, spatula brittle, and flaming walnuts. It's a tea kettle that was heated empty and got stuck to the burner. It has (OK, well had - I threw it away) a big hole in the bottom where part of the kettle stuck to the burner. :o

[NydiaC]

Originally posted by lhall
Ok, last year I was making peach ice cream. I don't exaclty remember why, but I had the stuff in the blender. Well I was using a wooden spoon. Naturally it got rather chopped up. I tried and thought I'd gotten all the wood chips out. WRONG!
I had to pick little pieces of wood out of my ice cream:eek:

Leigh

OMG! I did the same thing with mashed potatoes in my mixer. On top of that, it was for a very special dinner for a guy I had just started seeing. :o I think I even had bragged that I was a good cook. :rolleyes:

Glad to know I'm not the only one...

P.S. I never saw him again after that. His loss! :p

[Beth H]

Well, I have to admit, I also have a cooked plastic story. When I was first married, I was making a very nice dinner of stuffed shells for my husband and me -- homemade sauce and everything. I noticed the recipe my mom had given me said "cook covered in the oven for x minutes." Covered? Yes -- I thought, I'll just pop on the plastic lid to my Pyrex portable and bake it that way. Needless to say, the beautfiul shells were covered with thick, blue goo, rendering them inedible and ruining my Pyrex portable. I never have replaced that lid (five years later)! :)

[Gina O]

Oh Lara- the flaming walnuts are too funny. :) Thanks for a giggle this morning! Gina

[BarbaraL]

My husband is handy around the house, but not as handy sometimes as he thinks! He seems to think it's cheating to read directions! Once, when I was out, he decided to use the self-cleaning feature of my brand-new oven! Naturally, he didn't read the directions that had in bold type all over them, REMOVE OVEN RACKS BEFORE CLEANING OVEN. I went ballistic when I came home and saw the racks in the oven. Luckily, they didn't discolor, but I was not a happy camper! For the same reason, he's not allowed to launder my clothes or my daughter's clothes (could this be planned ineptitude?). Everything my daughter owns (she's 14) is wash cold, dry low. He recognizes only "wash and wear" on the washer and dryer. Once, when I stopped him from destroying some of my delicate clothes, he commented that he didn't do the laundry wrong, I just bought the wrong clothes!!!!

[tovie]

LOL. I feel much better after reading all these stories (bg)

I shared a house with my brother for several years. One day while I was at work he cooked something in the broiler. When it was done, he removed it, leaving behind a grease filled pan (never mind that, because he was too lazy to clean the broiler itself, he put his steak one of my cake pans). I came home and decided to bake some cookies. I mixed up the dough, then turned on the oven to preheat and went down in the basement to do a load of laundry. All of a sudden, both smoke alarms went off. I wasn't real concerned, since I figured something had spilled previously in the oven and was setting them off. So I get upstairs and the house is filled with black smoke and flames are shooting out of the top of the oven. I turned the stove off and opened all the windows (it's a good thing my brother wasn't home at this point because he probably wouldn't be alive anymore <bg> ;-) Fortunately, once the gas was off, the flames went out and things were okay except I was also the one that got to clean up the whole mess... scrub out the stove, scrub the wall, the ceiling fan, wipe out all the kitchen cupboards and wash the dishes, wipe down the tops of all the pictures in the house... the black smoke left a greasy gritty covering on everything.

And let's not even think about the time he thought he'd help by putting my load of wash in the dryer... on high... for over an hour... or the time mom and dad told him he could have a Halloween party...

I suppose to be fair, I should tell tales on myself too (g) Well, I melted my plastic 2 cup measure. I'm not real sure why, must have been sleep walking or something, cause I certainly know better. For some unknown reason, I put a stick of butter in it instead of my glass one and put it in the microwave. Where, naturally, it melted all over the place along with the butter.

[vanillaheart]

I don't recall any serious cooking mishaps, but once when I was 12, I put dish washing liquid soap in the dishwasher - major suds. My dad was not pleased. I also recall once putting water in the coffee maker and turing it on, when the pot was ALREADY full! Sometimes, I don't know where my mind is. :rolleyes:

[Ms. Chevious]

These stories are hilarious (although I know we all didn't think so when the disaster was occuring!). I too have put on an empty tea kettle to boil with disastrous results. I'm so glad to know I'm not alone!

[erinl]

I once tried to make microwave fudge...in a Tupperware bowl. The bottom melted out of it. Oops! In my defense, I was only in junior high. I still haven't attempted that again.

More recently, DH and I made pizza one night for dinner. We aren't real good at picking up immediately after we eat, so when DH decided to boil some water for tea, the pizza stone, pot holder and spatula were all still sitting on top of the stove. At the time we had an electric stove and DH was forever turning on the wrong burner. This time he turned on the burner that the pot holder and spatula were sitting on. Luckily, the wall into the kitchen was only half-height, so we could see into it from the couch. We looked over to see flames leaping above the wall. The pot holder had caught fire, melting the spatula all over my well-seasoned PC pizza stone. :(