apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I once was chopping some veggies and trying to be all chef-like and I sliced the tip of my nail and a little of my finger off....ouch!!

I've always stressed the importance of pulsing a blender when filled with hot liquids. The steam that builds up inside the pitcher can blow the lid off leading to serious burns. I think every young cook starting out learned this lesson the hard way. Some quick pulses should be enough to let the steam out before you put the blender on full speed.

I remember the same situation as above happened to me at my parents house. I was bummed but now I always make sure everything is tightened up on equipment I've never used before.

i was once making milkshakes and turned the blender on without the lid.

i was twelve. it was awesome.

This morning, I knocked some plastic containers out of the freezer and they shattered. meep. I had to quickly move the roast tomato puree, which I spent all of yesterday making, into a new container.

Chocolate on the ceiling.

My mother has a bad habit of moving stuff and throwing things away when she comes to visit me in an (unsolicited, mind you) attempt to help me clean up . The last time she came she threw away the rubber ring that sealed my (cute Michael Graves for Target) blender). I called Target and Black and Decker and I could not find the right replacement so I had to junk the whole thing. I was heart-broken, my mother is no longer allowed to be in my house unsupervised.

I wish I had a photo of the day the kids met the milkman at the door (yes we have one, yippee!!!) and they so kindly brought in the 3 gallons of milk.....then proceeded to pour them on the kitchen floor and have a slip'n'slide party.....what a mess!!! Lesson learned: I once thought I would be the kind of nice mother who never raised her voice at her children and always spoke in a reasonable manner when explaining things...I was wrong.

Or the day I opened the pressure cooker full of potatoes only to have hot potatoes explode all over the ceiling, walls, cabinets and me! I let the steam out, but then answered the phone, and when I got back to the cooker the steam had built up again. That was a painful lesson to learn.

I accidentally overfilled the food processor trying to make pureed beet soup. There was beet everywhere. I still find little red splotches in the drawers.

Before Starbucks was everywhere, I carried a baggie of instant coffee in my purse so I could make iced coffee using water and ice from vending machines. One day, I thought it would be fun to make coffee soda by putting the instant coffee in carbonated water.

No. This is how you make a creeping, frothing puddle of brown goo with huge potential for horror movie stardom but very little drinkability.

Also -- do not use blueberry applesauce to make applesauce cake, unless you have an 8-year-old who will think glowing green cake is way cool.

I once had a very similar blender incident. I was mixing pancake batter in my new blender (I honestly had never done that before but had seen a friend do it and it seemed like a smart way to mix and then pour the batter) which I had not yet used. I was done blending it, so I lifted the pitcher off the base, but did it all wrong. The bottom of the pitcher (the part that holds the blades in it) fell off and pancake batter went EVERYWHERE. My husband came back from buying syrup to find me standing in a puddle of batter holding the now empty pitcher with a startled look on my face :)

These are all such great "burned" happenings. Did anyone take pictures. Wende, got a pic of the green glowing cake for us to post?

I did what I thought was the impossible and burned spaghetti.

I was using a small pot and had to wait a few seconds until the pasta got bendy to fit the top ends in the water. But then I got distracted grating parmesan and those dry ends blistered and scorched on the side of the pot.

I was once left in charge of a pan of soup on the hob, and wandered off for a while to do something more interesting (I was quite young). I came back to find soup everywhere, a lot of smoke, a big black ring on the ceiling, and a rather irate mother! I was henceforth banned from doing anything in the kitchen except peeling mushrooms, which I later found out was something entirely unnecessary that I was given to do so I wouldn't damage anything. Consequently I didn't learn to cook til I was 21!

Alas, gochrisgo, the cake incident took place in 1992, and no photos have survived.

I stupidly opened the espresso pot to investigate why it wasn't working normally and tried to unclog the tube thing with a knife tip. It unclogged and blew steam and grounds all the way to the ceiling. My burn was only a few droplets under the chin and a lot of embarrassment. I was making it for company who then helped climb on chairs and wipe down the kitchen. What was I thinking? I wasn't.
Worse, I actually thought it would be a brilliant idea to defrost my ancient little fridge in my college apartment with an electric iron. I remember thinking This works great, I'll be done in no tiiiiiiiii. I was spared a Darwin Award and lived to reproduce.
Leaking blender happens to us all if we keep blending long enough.

Oh, and if the leak is something really good, like a frozen margarita, and the counter is clean, just pass out some straws to your guests and hoover it up. That gets your dinner party off to the right start.

My blender base is white and it was hot butternut squash on its way to being soup, but yeah, that photo is familiar.

Just a few weeks ago. So even people who've actually been taught to cook sometimes forget about
hot liquid tight lids= disaster. For me it was gravy that was too lumpy to whisk apart and I was dummy enough to think I could do it in the blender really fast.

Once my sister and I decided to roast a goose for Christmas. We'd never roasted one before and "just figured" they'd cook like a turkey. Well, a good many of you know they don't; they're 100 times greasier than turkeys and it makes a huge difference.

Sure enough, halfway through the roasting I noticed a small thin stream of smoke coming from the oven. I opened it up and the damn thing was literally ON FIRE. My sister was standing behind me and started screaming and doing some crazy dance moves, and like a dummy I actually reached in and grabbed the flaming pan. (I had big oven mitts on, but still....) It was too hot even with mitts, and I dropped it on the floor. The pan clattered away and the half-cooked goose, still in flames, exploded on the floor.

My mother came in just in time to see my sister and I stamping on it, trying to put out the last bits of smolder. It was like a moment from a movie, we all just stopped, looked at each other, and looked at the smoking oven. It was right at that moment the ancient smoke alarm with the failing battery started making this feeble, croaky beeping. We all totally collapsed in laughter then and laughed until we were all nearly crying!

The side dishes that were in the oven with the goose were ruined too. We rummaged around in the freezer and fridge and ended up having TACOS for Xmas dinner.

I was making an apricot marmalade-based turkey marinade, and all the liquid ingredients needed to be mixed, then heated up. Our microwave now sits on top of the fridge b/c of limited counterspace. I must have accidentally used a non-microwave safe bowl, b/c it got terribly hot. Not expecting this, I grabbed it with my bare hands and, from fridge height, instinctively flung it away as the burning seeped through the first layer of my skin. I had hot, sticky marinade studded with shards of broken bowl all over the floor, walls, and lower cabinets.

Wende and Bx, your stories made me laugh out loud!

This is one of the best threads in a long time.

V in Boston-


Oh my god! I had a similar thing happen all over my friend's kitchen. My famous beet soup is now also infamous. When they sold their home a few months ago you could still find flecks of pink in odd places if you looked for them.

So, are beets a big Boston thing?


Michele in East Boston