Disaster zone
It’s not all about happy endings and pretty pictures.
There was the time when I dropped the roasting pan down my legs and got 2nd degree burns.
And the time when my fava beans were so tough and mealy that I felt a bit sorry for the guests who had to put on smiley faces and at least try them.
There was that incident with the burned stock pots (Ok, all 3 incidents with burned stock pots, if I’m being completely honest.), when I left them overnight with the heat up too high, only to wake up at 4am to that sickly smell of burning chicken bone. The smell is so bad that you’d *think* I’d have learned the first time.
There were moldy pickles.
And the kettle… oy vey, the kettle. One time I put the kettle on for a cup of tea in the afternoon. And then I remembered some errands I had to run, so I just ran out, forgot about the kettle completely, and came back 5 hours later to a copper kettle that was burned BLACK. It was so soft that I dented it when I dropped it in the sink.
The soup that I cooked the burdock root in for way too long, thus rendering it unpalatably bitter for all guests except me (who happens to love burdock).
And the best of all… the one I laugh about to this day: when I tried to lacto-ferment some orange marmalade. I couldn’t figure out what the hissing sound was coming from my kitchen. Three days into my experiment, I picked up a marmalade jar to see how it was doing. And it exploded. Violently. With the loudest bang imaginable. With the biggest explosion of orange marmalade possible. All over the kitchen, all over my hair, and my face, and my shirt, and the windows. Jamie came running downstairs to see what happened and I was laughing hysterically while pulling chunks of fizzy-fermented marmalade out of my hair and off my shirt. So he grabbed a camera before I could get rid of all of the evidence completely…
Maybe not my most painful, or most punishable, but definitely my funniest disaster so far.
How about you? Any kitchen disasters? I won’t laugh, promise :).
cauldrons and crockpots 
Um, I recently had a tightly capped bottle of second ferment water kefir explode EVERYWHERE in my kitchen. It was grape flavored and I was wiping purple sticky stuff off everything from the ceiling to the floor. Oh, and it was first thing in the morning!
Ok, I lied, I’m laughing 🙂
Bek! I love the picture and you are such a cutie patotie little pixie~! I adore putting a face to a written voice! I gave you a versatile blogger award so come visit and pick it up! http://amoderatelife.com/?p=344 Hugs! Alex
I boiled over a pot of grape jelly. It got everywhere, down below the hobs, in between the stove and shelving, on my favorite pink shirt (hooray internet, pour boiling water over grape stains and watch them disappear). I think it’s been 6-7 yrs since that incident, and I’m still finding sticky purple bits to clean up.
This summer, I picked a lovely oyster mushroom after a big rain storm. For whatever reason, I put it in a paper bag and left it on the counter. One night while I was making my tea, I kept hearing tiny little rattles. It probably took me an hour to realize that the sound was coming from the bag. Tiny little maggot/worms were dropping out of my mushroom, and they were crawling out of the bag and all over my counter. Ick! If it weren’t for the bag, I hate to think how far they would have roamed, and made flies…? I squished ’em. Is it wrong to admit I took the opportunity to taste them, even fried a few in bacon grease?
I had a leg of a roadkill elk in a cooler, ready to process, but sticking out quite a bit. My cat found it, and pulled the whole darned thing out and munched away. How is it possible for a cat to perform such a feat, he only weighs 12 pounds! I was proud of him, though, despite the ruined meat.
I’ve had a substitute salt for sugar moment. I’m constantly hiding things from the cat, and then forgetting about them until the stench finds me. Burned a crock pot to charcoal. Small fires. Really, too many disasters to name.
Thank you for shattering images of kitchen perfection.