My mom decided to make a batch of hotwings from scratch. She heated a whole pot full of oil, and then proceeded to dump in 5 pounds of frozen chicken wings. The grease fire was almost instantaneous – she froze about 3 feet from the stove with her eyes glued to the blaze, and started yelling, “Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!” I rushed in from the office, grabbed the box of baking soda from the pantry and smothered the flames.

Later I asked her why she was just standing there watching the kitchen burn down, she said, “It felt like if I stopped watching, then the fire would spread.”

lol.

I loaded too much sweet potato soup into my blender, and when I turned it on, it wen EVERYWHERE. Months later, I would still find little orange dribbles in unexpected places around my kitchen.

I also had a potato soup disaster! Actually, it was potato leek. Put it into a Magic Bullet, still hot. Incase you're not familiar, magic bullets seal, theres no vent. The whole thing exploded, and when you're in a 200 sqft bachelor suite, a kitchen mess becomes an EVERYWHERE mess. I had to launder my pillows...

I had one of those!! Dad was out of town in Mexico for vacation, and I had just gotten back from Mexico as well for my own vacation and was babysitting my younger brother. We decided we wanted spaghetti for dinner, and some Pillsbury dough boy croissants in the pop can in the fridge, We opened them and there was a huge explosion!! well the explosion was followed by a huge mess!! The dough was stuck on the ceiling of the kitchen!!!!!LMAO the our croissants were stuck on the ceiling!! (well the dough was) It was quite the mess to remember, my little brother and I just died laughing!! we tried to clean, but we are pretty short I would say about 5"!! We just hoped dad wouldn't notice!! :D (he didn't for a while, but when he did there was definitely some explaining to do!! I felt like a 5 year old that spilled milk on the floor!!!! Definitely a MEMORY!!!! LOL :D

We had an accident with a pumpkin milkshake - we were cleaning that up for days too

The spaghetti was still good!! and our bread was on the ceiling!! I guess it saved us from eating more calories!!

Thanks Pillsbury dough boy :D

my friend and i were baking an orange honey tea loaf. somehow, we accidentally doubled (or maybe tripled) the amount of butter. had a blobby orange-honey-butter mess in the oven when the batter bubbled out of the pan.

Made two lovely pumpkin pies, homemade crust and everything, and put them on a cookie sheet (to avoid overspills) to cook. When pulling them out, they fell off the sheet and onto the oven door face first. No pie for us. (And they smelled SO GOOD, too!)

There were also a couple of mishaps when I was first learning how to use an immersion blender.

Most recently made pasta and instead of the yolks staying nice and center, it decide to go past it's safety net, beyond the mounds of flour surrounding it, onto the table and then onto the floor. YUM!

fried shrimp- oil *everywhere.*

and learning to use an immersion blender... zucchini soup, HOT zucchini soup, all across the kitchen, and me!

I stuck a can of condensed milk in a pot of boiling water to make caramel. I then fell asleep, after working a long day in landscaping. The water evaporated and the can exploded, sending burning caramel over the entire kitchen. It was a mess.

My mother still tells the story of the time when my year and a half old brother decided to stand at the fridge and drop eggs, one by one, onto the floor. I was five at the time. I went to tell my mom, who was still asleep. She mumbled "so clean it up".

When she woke up, I was on my hands and knees spreading raw eggs all over the kitchen floor.

I myself had a mung-beans-and-olive-oil-on-the-ceiling situation because my pressure cooker valve got dirty. It's nothing as dramatic as causing a kitchen fire, but it was a pain to clean nonetheless.

My family is also prone to lighting tables (or tablecloths) on fire when we make cheese fondue. We've all made the switch to electric fondue pots.

My first attempt at making "monkey bread" resulted in a brown suger/maple syrupy mess in the bottom of the oven. Turns out a 2-piece tube pan isn't the best choice for oozy things. Even worse was attempting to remove the burning hot ooey-gooey pan from the oven without making a bigger mess on the floor, right before our brunch guests started arriving. The house sure smelled good, though!

We also had a pyrex dish explode into 100 million bits in our oven. THAT was a pain to clean up, and we had to serve pizza to our guests instead of pork roast.

Maybe my family is accident prone...

um, every time I cook? Just last night I left an onion on the counter while throwing something in the trash, which then rolled off, hit the cat and her water and food dishes, sending those all over the kitchen floor. I'm just really not a coordinated person...

This occurred in the generation before mine, but the attempt of a relative to "toast" marshmallows (in the toaster) remains a famous story in my family.

Not really a kitchen accident per se, but interesting and dramatic: I dropped a full glass of milk on the floor of my parents' dining room. The glass hit bottom first and didn't break, but the milk shot out of the top of the glass and across the room! The spatter was amazing. My dad, who normally gets really upset about messes, was fascinated at how the milk shot all over the place.

It made me want to try with a can of paint... but not in a house, of course! ;)

I had one funny one, and one that could have been really expensive.

The funny one was back in the early 80's. My parents had bought our first ever microwave oven, and we had found just how well it heated up leftovers. I was in my early teens and decided to heat up a peeled boiled egg. I put the microwave on for about a minute and then took out the egg. I noticed there was a weird soft spot on the bottom, so I pushed on it to see if it was soggy or gross or something. The egg exploded in my hand, sending yolky bits all over the kitchen walls, counters, ceilings, windows, everywhere.

Other one wasn't so messy as it made my heart stop - I had just had hardwood flooring installed in my very first house, when I accidentally dropped a plastic pitcher of water. I jumped on it with a dishtowel and tried to soak up what I could, but I knew that a good amount had poured through the gaps in the flooring. I set up a fan and cranked the air conditioning to help dry it out, and crossed my fingers. The next morning all the wood was swollen at the seams. I left the fan and AC on for a week and everything dried out and the swelling settled back to normal.

my mom was making espresso in our little stovetop espresso maker... but she forgot about it and it exploded ALL over the kitchen. the ceiling was covered in coffee for about a week before she finally finished cleaning the rest of the kitchen.

MY messiest kitchen accident was college. just the whole thing in general.

ok i have to say I love your friends tile backspash... would love to know where they found those tiles, they look like beveled subway tiles?

Hmm biggest kitchen mess... I would say It was a bottle of wine ontop of the fridge, which fell, shattered, and splattered everywhere. Smelled like alcohol and later rotten fruit until I found the time to wipe down every exposed surface and under the appliances etc.

Earlier this summer, I was pureeing frozen strawberries with an immersion blender and they were clumping to the blades. I went to wipe off some of the larger hunks and accidentally turned the blender ON. Blood (and skin) went everywhere — counter, floor, walls, ceiling, clothes, hair — necessitating a trip to the ER and a bunch of stitches. It's been months and I'm still not using all my fingers to type (I did keep all my fingers though, so that's the good news!).

My boyfriend and I had just made a delicious pan of baked gnocchi with gooey fresh mozz. all over the top. We set it on the electric range to serve ourselves and sat down to eat. As we were finishing up eating, my roommate came in, filled a pot of water, and set it on the stove to boil.
We all sat down to watch TV and eventually smelled something burning. My room mate had turned on the burner under the gnocchi instead of the burner under her water, and as my boyfriend was moving it carefully from the stove to the counter, it exploded.
Thankfully he did not get hurt, but we found bits of blue pyrex and crusty marinara right up to the day we handed our keys back to the landlord.

A few summers ago, I was at my family's cottage. I had just bought the drip coffee maker so we wouldn't have to keep making single cup servings. I filled the machine with water, measured out the grinds, pressed start & walked away. A few minutes later, my aunt called me to the kitchen- "Sarah, um. You've made a big mistake here."

Brilliantly, I forgot to put the carafe back into the machine. Coffee was brewing all over the floor, under the stove & cabinets. Since it's a camp cottage, the floors are very sloped. And several years later, there's still a coffee smell when the oven gets turned on.

I've also had the pyrex dish explosion-- I found shards even years later! This summer I made mango juice in my juicer, but when I went to clean it I couldn't get the blade unscrewed. I didn't have the proper tool to unscrew it so I had to order it and in the meantime the juicer was getting grosser and grosser and fruit flies were converging. I had to move the whole thing to the porch until the tool arrived and then, voila! I was finally able to clean it.

One morning my 2 year old son decided to open the fridge, take out the vegetable stock and pour it all on my couch. Not on the kitchen floor where it would be easier to clean but on my couch. I know it's not a kitchen mess but it started from the kitchen.

I also have a pyrex explosion after roasting a chicken in the oven. I guess it was my fault since I'm not very good at science/physics, I thought I could roast my chicken and then make a pan sauce with the drippings. I took out the chicken and proceeded to whisk wine into the pan over a low heat. After a minute or so, the pan exploded into a hundred pieces all over the kitchen, sauce going everywhere. I'm lucky I didn't lose an eye. My mom keeps telling me to throw my pyrex out because they aren't safe, but I still foolishly use them- although for baking, not roasting. I now use a steel pan for roasting.

Once I was baking a shortbread cookie called Meltaways and I opened the oven door to check on them and found a cookie sheet with a bunch of little puddles and butter melting down off all of the sides. It wasn't a mess all over the kitchen but by then butter had seeped into the inner crevices of the oven. It took months for the smell to fully burn off.

I was making chocolate bowls. You inflate small balloons, dip the round end in chocolate, then let it cool on wax paper. Once the chocolate hardens, you deflate the balloon slowly and you have a nice bowl made of thin chocolate.

Well, I either filled the balloon too much or had the chocolate too hot, because right after I'd given the balloon a good coating it burst. Chocolate *everywhere.* Ceiling, cabinets, floors, appliances, you name it. And it was almost impossible to clean once the chocolate hardened.

Making green tea frozen yogurt. All of the ingredients were in the bowl except for the yogurt. The matcha powder was on top. When I went to pour the yogurt into the bowl, it all dropped out in one big clump, and matcha powder went everywhere. My arms were green, the counter was green, the floor was green.... BTW, matcha powder by itself, definitely not tasty, imho.

2 things come to my mind when I read all your funny stories...

First one is that once, when I was young, I wanted to hardboil an egg and after I peeled it I realized it was still too soft for my taste. Having never had a microwave before, I asked my boyfriend if he thought it would be a good idea to finish cooking the egg with it. He answered that I should try and see what would happen. I should have known it was a trick and he knew exactly what would happen.... but I did not, I went ahead and the egg *exploded* in a million little pieces. It took weeks to completely clean the microwave.

My other little "accident" was when I bought a new kettle, it was written on the product notice that it could be used to boil up to 1 cup of milk. Of course I thought it was very handy, and I tried, with the required 1 cup of milk.... let's just say that the result wasn't pretty (another messy explosion)

Does setting your parents' kitchen on fire while adding rum to nuclear-hot caramelized sugar count as an "accident"?

If so, please call them at (516) 555-1212...

I had just blended some pea soup in my brand new blender. Not being quite used to it, I unscrewed the whole thing, lifted it up, and pea soup came pouring out of the bottom all over me, the floor and my dog (who is white)!

It's hard to pick just one. Of late, the messiest has been the day I dropped the blender full of my ice cream mix:
http://backseatgourmet.blogspot.com/2009/08/perfect-first-date.html

My mom was making black beans in a pressure cooker and, somehow, the whole pot exploded with a huge BAM. The entire kitchen's walls were black and the black went all through the dining room and onto the back wall of the living room. I was 10 and thought it was an amazing display but my mother started making beans in regular pots after that.

Thank goodness you got the fire out.

My biggest mess wasn't so dangerous. I was making candied ginger, which I've made a thousand times before. I lost track of time, and it boiled over. I had ginger syrup all over everything.

My friends referred to it as the sugar apocalypse. It took me months to get the floors clean, because every time I mopped, and thought it was clean, we'd walk on it, and feel that it wasn't. I had to pull the stove out, and scrape hardened sugar syrup off the sides of the stove. I never did get it all out of the top of the range, despite pulling the top off the stove. It had hardened too much.

Now I can't make candied ginger without a heavy round of mocking from everyone.

My wife tried to cut a coupon of a unopened 2 liter bottle of Sprite. She pushed a little too hard and the bottle exploded. Soda sprayed all over the kitchen, dining room, and living room. We found sticky spots 2 years later when we moved out of that apartment.

Eggplant exploding in the oven. Raw fish juice all over the fridge. Took months for the smell to dissipate.

I made pesto last week with a little blender, that decided it preferred to walk towards the sink. holding it relatively in place was not easy, slowly pouring in the olive oil, my hands shock so much there oil everywhere. Taking the opportunity of no longer having a sealed feeding tube it spit and spat in every direction. Fortunately it was a new recipe, and a huge hit.
My mother once went to work having left hard boiled eggs to boil. I got home first and encountered a weird smell, one egg looked like it had caught on fire, and the other had exploded, there was yolk on our ceiling. Amazingly the pot didnt have a scratch on it.

Just two nights ago, I was shaking a bourbon- and maple-syrup-based cocktail (quite good, actually). Just as I was shaking the last shake, my hand slipped on the now-condensing shaker, and the lid popped off. Sweet, delicious, cold cocktail went everywhere, including all over me. The floor still feels sticky.

ABreadADay.com

We were putting groceries away after a shopping trip. Among the items was a new, glass bottle of maple syrup, which was set on the island. Someone was careless and knocked the syrup off the counter, which promptly shattered into millions of pieces strewn all over the kitchen, not to mention the syrup splashed all over the cabinets and floor. I took hours just to clean up that much glass and sticky residue.

My mother in law was boiling a can of condenced milk to make caramel and forgot to keep topping up the water, it burnt inside the can and eventually exploded sticky burnt caramel over the entire kitchen, walls, floor & ceiling. I wasnt there for the cleaning but somehow she got it all, even out of her collection of wicca baskets ontop of the cupboards!

not so much a cooking accident, but one night in college i made two loaded bean burritos for dinner: refried beans, sour cream, cheese sauce, guaramole, salsa, the works. walking to my room my foot caught one of the kitchen chairs, the plate went flying, and the burritos went well, absolutely everywhere. the wall, the couches, the tv, the front door, the light fixture. it looked like a burrito murder had been committed. it seriously took me two hours to clean up lmao.

Similar to spookiefish-- I was making a sauce of tomatoes, bananas, black beans and a hundred more things in the blender (Thanks, Bittman!) and when I took the pitcher off to pour it over rice, the bottom stayed on the base, so I had about a quart of this sauce EVERYWHERE! Plus, I'd used up all my dinner ingredients, which is always the more frustrating part for me.

This isn't mine, but the woman I share my office with told me about a mess so terrible it is almost painful. She was living in her first apartment (this would have been in the 70's) and her fridge was about three inches from the counter on one side. She placed a very large jar of maple syrup on top of the fridge. (it was the old style with the slightly rounded top.) She closed the fridge door just hard enough that the syrup slid off the top of the fridge and crashed between the counter and fridge. It ran everywhere, all over the floor and under the fridge. There was broken glass all stuck in the sticky mess. To this day she questions why she ever bought that maple syrup.

My worst involved a small wash basin I used to supplement my very small sink in my tiny first apt. it was full of dirty water. (think spagetti and pancakes.) as I moved it to dump it into the sink, it tipped towards me and as it spilled i slipped and fell backwards splashing dirty water all over myself, my floor, my kitchen and into my living room. it was so gross i just sat there a cried for a while.

I was about 13, home alone and decided to make toasted marshmallows in the toaster oven. I also decided to make 'taffy' by mushing a couple marshmallows with my fingers while I waited. I got a little distracted and had about 3 marshmallows worth of taffy on my fingers when I looked over and noticed FLAMES shooting out of the top of the toaster oven (precariously close to my parents' kitchen cabinets). I somehow quickly unplugged it and moved it outside. There was sticky marshmallow all over me, the door knob and toaster.

Not technically the kitchen but my worst food mess was when I was unloading the groceries from the trunk of my car. Somehow the prepared sushi that I bought fell out of the bag and was left in the trunk (during the summer) until I found it almost 2 weeks later all over the floor of the trunk. It was almost 10 years ago and still shiver/gag over the smell when I think about it.

Another mess that originated from the kitchen....I was asked to carry a large serving bowl of mashed potatoes to the dining room table. Not surprisingly, I managed to trip over absolutely nothing which sent the bowl in a whirl, emptying its contents onto the walls and ceiling with a Jackson Pollock-esque splatter effect.

A friend of mine told a story about how her sister stayed behind to bake a cake while the rest of the family was on an outing. They returned to find her sitting in front of the oven, scraping burnt cake off the walls of the oven, because somehow, the cake had EXPLODED inside the oven.

This was years ago, and to this date, when they ask her exactly what happened, all she will say is "I DON'T want to talk about it."

My story involves Red Velvet cake batter and a mixer that wandered off the counter. That's pretty much the long and short of it.

I set 1.5 pounds of frozen chicken thighs in the microwave to defrost on the lowest setting for five minutes and left the house to go to the market as I needed one more ingredient. Upon returning to the house 30 minutes later I realized that I had set the microwave on high power for FIFTY minutes (our display panel hasn't worked for years, but I thought I had gotten used to that...). The smoke was billowing out of the house and the thighs had melted, yes MELTED into a black pyroclastic mass. The charred carbon chicken grill smell was in the house for daaaaaays and my microwave will never ever have a neutral smell again. Awful, just awful...

I thought it would be a good idea to use a hand blender to make icing sugar.

Months later I was still picking and scraping off hardened bits of icing underneath the countertop, windows, chair rails, and books on the living room shelves.

I was boiling a whole chicken for soup and it boiled over. The chicken fat spread in a thin layer over the entire top of my stove, which then caught on fire. At the time the fire broke out, two Mormon missionaries had just shown up at the door, and they ran in and blew the flames out/ smothered them with pot lids. After their help I felt compelled to listen to the whole spiel about their church. I was grateful, but not grateful enough to convert. :)

I was making a chestnut soup, and after blending it , I picked up the pitcher of the blender, but the bottom of the pitcher stayed on the base and the soup literally sprayed 360 degrees around the kitchen from the bottom. The only good news was that since it sprayed everywhere a little bit of it ended up in my bowl... that spoonful or two were delicious.

I am a constant mess in the kitchen, like a sick cross between Animal and jackson pollock. However, the kitchen mess that made the biggest impression on me wasn't one of my own. Years ago, my mother had decided to make cream of broccoli soup. It was the only way my brother and i would willingly ingest vegetables. The blender we had was a great old industrial blender, lovingly cleaned and salvaged from the labs out at the pulp mill. The only problem was the lid: it was a pain to close all the way. I guess that, once you get to that part, the rest of the story goes without saying. There was cream of broccoli running from the kitchen to the dining room and halfway up the stairs. It was a great mess. I hope some day i can live up to the standard of messes that incident set!

On an early date with my now husband, I made dinner at his place and he brought home a bottle of red wine. We were probably trying to impress eachother, me with the cooking, him with the fancy wine purchase... Only problem was that he realized he didn't have a wine opener.
That didn't stop him though! He decided to break into the bottle by slowly chipping away at the cork with a large butcher knife, of course resulting in a red wine, cork chunk, and splintered glass explosion that we cleaned up for quite some time after! Wasn't the romantic night we'd imagined, but made for a good story later.
It didn't stop him from occasional kitchen experiments though-- last week, he baked for the first time :)
http://ladybakes.blogspot.com/2009/09/good-thing-to-do-before-youre-30.html

I accidentally leaned on the button of my blender while making pina coladas. The lid was off. Sticky mess everywhere.

It's not food related - but clean up related and I felt like Lucille Ball... I put regular dish soap in the dish washer (I didn't know there was a difference). Needless to say 15 minutes later there were bubbles coming out of the washer covering my ex's kitchen floor. I was laughing so hard trying to clean/kill all the bubbles, I tried waking him but he wasn't a morning person. It took FOREVER to clean, but the floors were beautiful and the towels went right into the washer (thank goodness it didn't start a new bubble process)... But man, all those tiny little bubbles were evil.

I grew up on Florida’s Gulf Coast and we had a boat. My dad would go fishing almost every weekend in summer and we had a GIANT (think 4x4x6 feet) chrome and jade green vintage chest deep freezer for the leftover fish to store for winter. The thing seriously looked like a 50’s car, it was beautiful. Aside from the fish filets frozen in Ziploc bags of water and leftover chili, there was a hanging basket full of boxes of frozen bait shrimp. The thing was about at capacity late one august when it got accidentally unplugged. Fortunately, it still sealed really well so we didn’t even notice the smell or three feet of standing rotting fishy water in the bottom until mid-October when someone opened it. We had to throw the entire freezer away.

I was carving a pumpkin and was attempting to separate the seeds out of the gook by floating them in water, in a large vintage pyrex mixing bowl. Of course I was barefoot and the bowl was completely full of water and pumpkin innards when I dropped it. It shattered, I wound up with multiple glass splinters, and midway through the cleanup my cat wandered in through the catdoor with a dead squirrel in her mouth.

I also dropped about half a gallon of milk down a central air vent.

My husband dropped two cans of root beer, which both burst and started spinning around (fired by the carbonation escaping through a small opening in the can), shooting root beer everywhere. Just like a big root beer sprinkler. The whole kitchen was sticky for about 2 weeks despite repeated scrubbings. I still find little brown sticky drops sometimes.

When I was 12 I decided I was going to bake a gingerbread recipe I'd found. Unfortunately, I misread the recipe and used 1/4 cup of baking soda instead of 1/4 teaspoon. Needless to say, it turned into a volcano in the oven. Batter spewed all over the oven just like lava! Thankfully, I believe the oven was self-cleaning.

I know there's been some messes but I seem to have blocked them all from my memory. Must have been horrific.

first day of class sophomore year of college: i turned the stove burner on to make tea. new apt/new stove/wrong burner. the back burner had a "pyrex" baking dish resting on it. i realized my mistake too late and as i walked over to shut the burner off, molten glass explosion. my roommates were terrified, i was glad to be wearing glasses and a sweatshirt, but the rug in the living room and my pajama pants were ruined with molten glass shards. scary and a total freaking mess.

Ever drop a full, GLASS bottle of olive oil?

Imagine oily shards of glass EVERYwhere, all over the floor. And of course, they're the teeny tiny shards that are impossible to pick up even when they're not covered in oil.

Also, the cat is fascinated for some reason and has to get in on the action while you're trying to clean it up, so you have the added fun of trying to make sure he doesn't hurt himself...

Imagine all this at 2:30 in the morning, after working a shift at the bar.

I guess it wasn't a cooking mess exactly (I opened the pantry and the bottle just tipped out), but it was my worst kitchen mess ever. I was still finding tiny shards of glass for days after it happened. I'm shocked no one got hurt!

We buy plastic bottle of oil now. :|

Heh, I had a friend who used to smoke a lot of weed and as everyone knows weed gives you the munchies. Her particular kink was that she would get really hungry and attempt insanely complex recipes while totally stoned. One time I came downstairs in the morning and from what we could deduce we think she tried to make eclaires from scratch and roast a chicken. There was this burned carcass in the sink, covered in runny chocolate ganache and the cats had been eating it all night. One of them had gotten a drumstick off and had dragged it over to her favorite perch on the (brand new) couch, where she had messily enjoyed it. There is still a chocolate/grease stain on the upholstery.

I have one from when I worked as a sous chef at an Italian restaurant. We had a lunch special with gazpacho. I reached into the cooler to pull out the five gallon bucket my much taller and stronger coworker had put on the top shelf. It was half full. I banged the bottom on the shelf when I brought it down, and up ended 2 gallons of gazpacho on my head.

It was like out of a movie. There I was dripping cold tomato soup all over me. The chef sent me to his house, a block or two away, to go shower up and borrow clothes. It was so bad, I tossed out my shoes because I could not get the soup out of them.

This is a hilarious post! I am staying away from eggs, microwaves, glass/pyrex containers, and any liquid form of sugar...

My messiest kitchen accident is one that I don't even remember, but it's become family legend by now and I have no reason to assume that it's not true. Supposedly, when I was four years old I was asked to go down to the basement pantry and bring back a bottle of orange soda. I got the bottle and handed it to my mother to open, when it promptly exploded all over the question. Why did it explode? Because I vigorously shook it on my way back upstairs. Why did I shake it? Because it was orange, of course, and everyone knows that you're supposed to shake orange-flavored things, i.e., orange juice. Hey, I was four years old. It made sense then.

Oh yes, I had the wine on the fridge incident as well...I'm not really sure why we thought that was a good place to store full bottles of wine, especially considering the not insignificant slope of the floor in our apartment. Well of course I slammed the fridge door one night and wouldn't you know it, one particular bottle of red wine had migrated too close to the edge and fell off exploding and sending glass shards and red wine all over the kitchen, dining room, hallway, my roommate's bedroom, etc. I was on my hands and knees scrubbing red off of white walls and doors forever, and would find little red spots I'd missed for months afterwards. Lesson learned!

Love this post, make me feel better about myself, haha, we're all in this mess together!

I swear the directions said to put oil and water in a microwave safe measuring cup and then heat. It only needed to be warm, but as soon as the contents of the measuring cup was disturbed, the oil raised the temp of the water and the whole thing exploded in my face.

Then there was the one time I decided to make hard boiled eggs in our dorm (townhouse style) and forgot about them on the stove... If a fire alarm goes off, the whole building must be evacuated until the fire department arrives and clears everyone for re-entry. That was not a good day.

Twice I've failed to poke holes in my baking potatoes, resulting in loud, messy explosions. One of the explosions:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/warpedvisions/81282431/

There were small bits of potato baked all over the inside of the oven that took a bit of scrubbing to remove. *Duh*.

Ahhh hahahahah thanks for all of the laughs!!!

My messiest kitchen accident was during jam making season.

I live in a small apartment with your typical tiny, galley kitchen. I had just finished filling several jars with jam and somehow managed to knock two of them over...the jam looked so pretty as it slid through the space between my counter and the fridge...I've never been able to get the floor under the fridge totally unstickified.