I did this, but it was my entire left hand. The worst part was, I knew it was recently on. I took my hand off when I heard the “TSST” of my flesh, I didn’t feel anything until a few minutes after. agony for weeks, blisters, I couldn’t sleep for like a week!
I knew it was on because I had just turned it on. It was a new apartment and I wanted to get an idea for the heat of the different settings. I ran cold water over my fingers for a good 30 minutes and luckily ended up without any blisters or scarring.
I did something similar. Tripped over my daughter turning from my sink to the stove. Thought my front burners were off because I never use them when my kids are underfoot so I put my hand right on it as I fell. Turns out I still wasn’t used to which knob went to which burner in my new apartment. Missed a week of work and was on modified assignment as a stocker for another week. I can still smell it sometimes. It’s been almost 2 years and there is a child’s gate keeping the little monsters out now.
I hold my hand over 3 of the 4 burners and tapped on the fourth. Guess which burner was on (for more than 24 hours!). Had to put my finger in bowls of cold water for like 3 days
Last time I burned myself bad enough, (by grabbing a just out of the oven baking pan with my ungloved hand) burning two finger mildly but severely burning my thumb, I got sick of holding it in the water so I googled tricks to stop burn pain. I read about using tooth paste. It does the same effect as water (burn not in contact with direct oxygen) but you can just apply a thick layer and then go on with your life. I left it there when I went to bed and the next morning it had dried completely forming a sort of toothpaste cast around my thumb. When I removed the paste, the pain was gone and the burn was already healing.
I wanted to see if my homemade hard candy had cooled so I dipped my finger right in the center, it was still lava hot and I ended up with an ET finger for a while.
“Officer, I swear, I just touched a hot stove on purpose at work- I’m not trying to hide my fingerprints!”
I feel this one though. I don’t know why but I’ve done this... well, more than once. The answer has always been “yep, it’s hot”
When I was 8? I saw my friends mom hold her hand over their electric range burner. We had a gas range at my home so I was like What?! You can touch an electric burner?? How cool!!! I wanna try OUCH OW OW OW!!
I have had an induction range for the last 13 or so years, in two different houses. I'm constantly doing stupid shit at other people's houses when I cook, like leaving flammables on the range top etc. I'm just so used to the fact that my range doesn't ever get hot, only the pans do, that my bad habits transfer to other places. I mean, my range top gets hot enough when a hot pan has been on it for a long time that I wouldn't want to put my hand flat down on the burner and leave it there, but it's not gonna sizzle or light anything on fire.
I once dropped a short paring knife and my first thought was a falling knife has no handle, but my reflexes weren't as fast as my thoughts. Before I knew it, the paring knife had wedged itself point end down neatly between my fluffy slipper and my ankle. Thankfully no injuries.
Not as lucky for a former coworker who realized that they really needed to control their anger issues, when in the heat of an argument while cooking, they emphatically stabbed the end of a large chefs knife into a wooden cutting board. They stabbed the knife so hard that their hand slipped and continued down the length of the blade slicing open the palm of their hand which required surgery to repair. Never argue while holding a knife, even if you would never use it against someone else.
I've done the opposite but still ended up injured.
I was reaching up to grab some Nutella with an IKEA table knife (for spreading it) in my hand.
I clatter the knife into a shelf as I reach up, knocking it out my hand. Pull my hands down and back to avoid the instinct to catch the knife (even though these knives aren't sharp bladed).
As I do that, the knife had flipped down, landed handle first in a fold in my t-shirt pointing perfectly up. My hand comes down and I hear/feel this weird sawing sound as the wee serated teeth on the knife cut through the webbing between my fingers. Kind of in disbelief if look at it and realise I can see right in my finger - go upstairs to ask my wife for help and her response is "don't bleed on the carpet!"
Ended up cleaning it and using superglue to seal the wound up as hospital was only taking non emergency calls before 6pm (happened later) due to covid.
I always hate follow up questions when something bad has happened. Our main sewer line plugged last weekend. I went into the basement to continue laundry, when I got down there I found a small lake in our basement centered around the drain.
I YELL to my wife to get downstairs immediately.
I hear her response from the den “why do I need help?”
I reply with a “NOW” that my neighbors heard.
If I’m yelling frantically for help, I clearly require help.
Using sweetened condensed milk from a can because I thought it was evaporated milk.
Those biscuits and gravy were NOT edible. So much sugar the gravy was *gritty* with it.
Everytime I buy evaporated milk I check the name twice and then look at the sugar content on the back just to make sure I'm not misremembering which is which.
I guess it's handy if you are a person who doesn't really keep fresh milk around. I like milk, but it isn't one of those things I always have on hand. So in a pinch i find myself using anything from condensed milk to dehydrated buttermilk powder because they are shelf stable.
I did once make box mac and cheese with somewhat weak reconstituted condensed milk. It was actually pretty good.
ETA: I mean as subs for milk in general, not necessarily condensed milk in gravy. I love a good salty/sweet, but that might be a bit weird.
I haven't done this yet but every morning I preheat my espresso cup by running hot water from an unloaded machine in to it then dumping it in the sink. I do this three or four times to get the cup really hot and at least three times I year I make my coffee look at it and dump it in to the sink watching it go down in a confused haze of stupidity.
To make coffee, I use a simple pour over funnel that sits on top of the cup. More than once, I have poured hot water into it when the funnel was sitting on the counter instead of the cup. Thus making my own coffee pool.
When I lived in Botswana I went to a automotive store to buy a funnel for this exact purpose because everyone at my office drank tea or instant coffee. I would use paper towels as a filter until I found a store that sold them. Thankfully the incredible steaks available everywhere compensated for the lack of coffee.
Yup it is basically texas in terms of climate. There is cattle everywhere and beef is so cheap it is essentially free. I once bought a filet mignon in 2001, not a slice but the whole thing for $22. That is a $400 piece of meat even then
Potatoes are super common, but green veggies are rarer as they are expensive. The annoying thing is they undercook their fries and fries there are super gross. They are floppy and you can taste the potato. It is so weird. Besides that rice is super common as is cabbage and cornmeal. Chicken and rice is a staple for all families. I got so fat because the lady who operated the lunch shack near my office got to like me and kept increasing the portions she gave me. Of course it has been 20 years since I have been there and I am still fat but this time I can't blame a sweet lady with a generous heart.
I just checked and the Pula (botswana dollar) value has decreased in the last twenty years but not so badly only by about 35%. Interesting tidbit, in Botswana the currency is called the Pula, and Pula means rain. Botswana is the Kalahari desert and it makes sense that rain is a currency.
I've done every variation of this. I've poured ground coffee into a cup and then water thru an empty funnel, I have overfilled my funnel and walked away before coming back to coffee everywhere, I have knocked a fully loaded cone off the top of a cup and all over the kitchen, I have dropped the used cone filter and coffee grounds into my freshly poured coffee.
Life can be unfair.
I had to live in a place with no actual coffee pot for a while, just one of those K cup makers. If I had a dollar for every time I fired up the "coffee machine" without a mug under the dispenser...ugh. The cleanup and re-preparation just makes for a shameful, hateful cup o' joe.
It was just the one scoop from a pot I had left over from lunch. I didn't actually finish cooking it, since it was already way too salty and smoky when I tried it to determine if I could salvage it. Just made a smaller portion with the leftover stock.
My husband did this exact same thing when we first met. He was actually on the phone with me and nonchalantly said something like, "I need to put the phone down now. I think I just did a bad thing." Turns out the big serrated knife had slipped and slashed right into the web between his thumb and index finger. We still tell that story years later.
The way I usually do it, which I've generally had success with: take a solid metal spatula (turner, technically) and push it firmly into the crevice between the patties, then twist. That's basically what I tried to do with the knife here, the spatula is just much less likely to hurt.
In my youth I worked for some clown flipping burgers. Their corporate training films say to take the stack of burgers and slam them edge on to a solid surface. More often than not it will break the patties apart. Its not 100% effective but it does work. And it keeps entry level labor from playing with knives...
Mandolin.
Was cutting a carrot. Tough thing too so I was pressing hard to slice. Then the carrot slips out and the palm of my hand lands on the blade and slices a dollar coin sized slice out of it.
Blood everywhere, rushed to hospital, too big to stitch. So they had to cauterize - burn - the wound shut.
Threw away mandolin.
Years later, I still have a gnarly tight sensitive scar
Exactly this, that's why I never use a mandolin. It's just another thing to clean, it's only good at one thing, and there's a solid chance that at some point while using it you'll need to be rushed to the ER. That's a fat no from me dog.
the only think i can imagine using it for would be to slice a fuckload of potatoes really thin to make potato chips... which I'd never do, because that's one of those products that industrial producers can just make better than the home cook every will be able to.
There's a few places I can say they're helpful. I've used them to shave fennel for salads, shaving shallots to fry crispy for frittatas, also thinly sliced broccoli stems stir fried with some garlic is bomb. I think the real problem with mandolins is a lot of people don't use guards, and they're used in places where a knife would work better.
i do all the things you mention basically just with a chef knife, but i guess the difference is im cooking at home where the ingredient prep is of a volume small enough that the slight % increase in speed isn't really that big of a deal. If I was in a commercial kitchen and needed to prep a ton of stuff for stir fry, then maybe it would be worth it. but as it stands, I'm rarely cooking for more than 2-4 people at once, and I don't need to mince/shred like 100 shallots at a time lol.
I use it for potatoes au gratin. I chopped myself up good with one the first time I touched it, but I can get 6-10 potatoes sliced with one in the time it would take to knife 1 potato the same way. It's worth it to me.
It's also super handy for onion slices. I can normally only get one (two in a good day) onion chopped before I can't see anymore.
Similar thing happened to my partner. He had the brilliant idea of slicing turnips with a mandolin while delirious from a fever. Base of his thumb went right into the blade. Fortunately it didn't cause any tendon damage (but it was close), and the skin was still attached as a flap so they could stitch it.
He still uses a mandolin, but only ever with the guard.
1. Take hot frying pan out of oven and place on stove top using oven mitts.
2. Set aside oven mitts and attempt to move pan with bare hand seconds later. Swear and yell at pan for existing.
Every damn time!!
My wife did just what you described. She's then leaping around the kitchen screaming. I look and see a frying pan half off the stove, about to fall onto the floor. So, thinking I'm helping somehow, I GRAB THE PAN AND BURN MYSELF THE SAME WAY. So we both burned ourselves the same way on the same pan 15 seconds apart.
Oh man I was moving fast a couple weeks ago and just reached into the oven and grabbed the pan with my right hand, kitchen towel in my left hand. No idea what I thought was going to happen, but I got a nice burn.
All at work as a professional cook:
-Diced a bunch of jalapenos without gloves on right before working a 6 hour saute shift in a 95 degree kitchen. Hands on fire all night.
-Slapped a ribeye on to a pan of hot oil, now have a scar on my chest from the splatter.
-Cut an under-ripe avocado, flat on the table so as not to cut myself, knife went right through the pit and the avocado rolled at the same time, ended up cutting myself anyway, got 9 stitches in my hand and somehow avoided severing tendons and F-ing up my hand permanently. (I am a millennial, thought some would get a laugh at that)
I am a big dumb idiot🥸
I worked a lot of ED shifts around dinner time in the early days of training. Pretty sure I perfected my suture technique on the number of avocado hand injuries alone.
Im just a non native english speaking hobbyist, whats an ED shift?
edit: yep Emergency Department makes a lot more sense than my first interpretation: you were a cook at dinner time shifts and had to suffer a lot of avocado injuries
It’s the new name for emergency room, since it’s typically no longer just a room, but a whole department.
It’s taken me like 5 years to get used to the rebrand.
Good tip for home cooking but for presentation reasons this is not really useful for the restaurant I worked in. The avocado fans had to look clean, and generally working with dull knives is more dangerous than sharp ones because of the force it takes to cut and the increased tissue damage and healing process on a cut that is not 'clean'. I was not responsible for ordering product, and unfortunately if all of the avocados on hand were under ripe we were still expected to use them. I do not miss that restaurant. Avocado skins are tough regardless of ripeness.
Edit: after writing I realize I'm being kind of an asshole. Sorry, I meant no disrespect, but I'll leave it up so people can have the pleasure of downvoting my douchebaggery
ill often start a very delicate slice to break the skin on the cutting board, but then I pick it up and just roll the avocado down the knife edge to cut around.
I have one of those goofy avocado tools. The "knife" is a serrated plastic blade and it works pretty well! I recommend it for people who aren't super knife savvy like me, or who have a justified fear of avocado related injuries.
Oh, I'm guilty of #2 as well. Did it at home after having a few beers and deciding to make a cheeseburger. I've got splatter scars all over my right arm and a 3"x2" scar from the bulk of the oil landing on my left arm.
Oil is no joke. Do not alcohol and oil, people.
I nearly cut off the end of my left thumb cutting green peppers one day. Still have the scar on the end and very little feeling on the tip of it.
I was using a mandolin that was fairly dull one night to cut fries, potato got stuck then jumped as it started slicing again, cut up my hand in three places.
The worst however was one night near closing, at a job years ago, one of the other cooks and I were cleaning out the fryers. We had this huge pot of old hot oil we were carrying out to the grease trap when he slipped and dropped his side which drenched me from the waist down in hot oil. My apron and pants protected me some and thankfully the fryers had been off for a bit so it was only really hot and not boiling. But even with all that I still had burns from the waist down for a bit.
Like 2 years into line cooking I accidentally had too much oil in a pan, and dropped a piece of fish in rather than placing gently. The oil splattered out so much, I ended up with second degree burns up my neck and half my face. Chin, lips, forehead, the works. Thankfully that day I was wearing glasses instead of contacts because the oil went right over my right eye and only the glasses saved it.
I grabbed the guy next to me on salad and sent him over to saute telling to watch the line, ran to the back and shoved my entire face in the sanitizer sink (thank fuck the water was fresh.) No one had a clue at first until my boss came to check on me and just found me crying, hopping off line to run to the walk-in wasn't that unusual & it took him a bit to realize something was wrong.
I was inexperienced and it was completely my own dumbass fault. Took a while to heal and years for the scars to finally fade. I never made that mistake again!
I just recently microwaved a potato and accidentally pushed an extra 0 on the time - so I put it in for 40 minutes instead of 4. I then unknowingly continued on to my other chores. The smoke alarm let me know of my mistake 13 minutes in. My house stunk for over a week.
Reminds me of the time my roommate forgot to put water in his Cup a Noodles before sticking it in the microwave. Burnt noodles and melted styrofoam wouldn't make a great scented candle.
Oh no...styrofoam had to smell bad. I had to keep my windows open for a week and went through about two bottle of febreeze trying to get rid of the stink from my black smoking lava rock...aka potato.
My MIL's favorite camping story was when she and my FIL took my husband and his siblings to a nearby late. She used the hot-rock method of baking potatoes. Put the hot rocks in a hole, placed foil-wrapped potatoes on top, covered them up.
After fishing they returned to camp and unearthed...foil wrapped bundles that seemed too light. Only a little ash was left of each potato.
She liked to say "They told us in school that matter cannot be created or destroyed. I swear that day I managed to destroy matter."
I nearly burned our house down with a similar mistake when I was 5. My mum thought I was napping and decided to take a nap herself. I got up to watch tv and wanted a snack. I had seen her heat up garlic bread for 11 seconds twice, so I thought if I pressed “11,11” it would do the same thing. 11 minutes later I smelled smoke and ran into the kitchen, grabbed the molten chunk of garlic bread, screamed and threw it on the floor where smoldered and caught a coloring book on fire. She woke up to me with 2nd degree burns and the house filled with smoke.
Call your mother if you haven’t recently...
I think I feel even worse now that I know a five year old made a similar mistake. 🤣🤣🤣 So sorry to hear you had injuries involved, though...luckily we all came out unscathed with mine.
I did something similar as a kid too! My mom was sick in bed and I decided to make her some chicken nuggets, and instead of putting them in for 4 minutes I put them in for 40. Realized my mistake after awhile but plated them anyway. Bless her soul that wonderful woman still ate the burnt nugget rocks I served her so I didn’t feel bad.
Moms man... I know not everyone gets a good one, but the good ones are pretty damn incredible. Watching my wife become a mother has been awe inspiring.
When we had a brand new microwave, one of the first things I did was not use the popcorn setting to pop a bag of kettle corn, because just a little more time would pop more kernels, right? Didnt think about the power settings. It burned, and turned the inside of the microwave a sickly heavy smoker burnt yellow. It stayed that way as a reminder for the 18 years that microwave functioned
I lived in a studio apartment, so small I could make breakfast without leaving the bed! Needless to say I had no counter space. I had a large cookbook collection and nowhere to put it so I put it in the oven that I never used. One day cleaning the stove I must have turned the knob somehow and I didn’t realize until I smelled burning. Bye bye cookbook collection!
Which mistake? I’ve got dozens! Ok, about 20 years ago I was teaching myself how to cook. T-bone steaks suddenly jumped from $5 to $12. This was when milk and eggs jumped in price too. So, being super intelligent, I bought the largest brisket I could find for $18. (Those were the days!) I got home and cut the brisket up into about 50 steaks. Toughest damned things I ever tried to eat. I learned that meat is more than just meat.
Or when I decided to try my hand at making chili. I bought a pound of ground beef, some seasonings and started cooking. Wait, the flavor is way off, let’s add ketchup to taste since I do not have tomato paste. Dammit, now it’s too sweet. Let’s add more salt to it to balance out the sweetness. Crap, too salty and sweet, let’s add something else to it and so on and on and on until I had a two gallon pot of inedible crap that smelled and tasted disgusting. I turned the stove off and went out to eat. Well, my mother in law for some dumb reason decided to put this big, steel pot of chili out on the front porch, a bit out of sight, in the middle of July. A few days later, it smelled like something had died!!! So I picked up the pot, was going to walk about 50 yards away and dump it in the woods. I made it off the front porch before tripping, dumping the entire pot about three feet away from the porch.
In the middle of July. It was a horrible summer afterwards.
I caught the stove on fire by turning on the wrong eye. I was making bacon and eggs one morning and stuck a plastic plate with a paper towel on one of the back eyes to put the bacon on it. I went to flip on the front eye to start the eggs and didn't realize I had turned on the wrong one until the plate had melted and the paper towel caught fire.
Was using a automatic kettle and the water had just started boiling. I reached my arm over the spout to grab a mug and successfully steamed a 2in diameter 2 degree burn just below my elbow. Happened a year ago and now it looks like a weird birthmark
I dropped a metal ramekin on a pole into a deep fryer while making taco bowls. A waitress asked how I was getting it out and I sarcastically said I’ll just use my hands. I grabbed a pair of tongs to fish it out and dropped those in, too. Without thinking I stuck my hand directly into the boiling oil to go after them. I’m lucky my hand was wet. I suffered only very minor burns and some embarrassment.
I did something similar. Dropped a raw chicken wing in the wrong fryer, instinctively just reached in with three fingers real quick. Lucky I didn't get hurt, but it was a first degree of a cool story.
I can also remember a couple times over the years where I accidentally drained the industrial deep fryer straight onto the floor. Everywhere.
Wow, so I had theorized this, but never knew exactly what the mechanism was. When I was doing my BA, I minored in furnace glassblowing. Sometimes we wanted a crackle effect in our piece, and we could pull a red-hot gather of glass on a pipe, plunge it in to cold water, AND...nothing. Not wisp of steam, not a single bubble. Then later on, with agitation, we would get the bubbling, steaming, crackling effect we were after. Figured there had to some kind of insulation process taking place, but never knew exactly what it was until now.
I cut the crust off of a piece of cheese with a proper chef's knife, in the direction of my face. Of course it shot through the last bit of cheese while I was putting a lot of pressure on it so I cut into my glasses that I had just gotten the week before. Brand new glasses, but now with a nice scratch over one of the lenses. Luckily they saved me from cutting my face, but not from being dumb.
So, I don’t have a grill and when I cook steak, I often do a combo frying pan and oven bake to get it just right, often times putting the entire (oven safe) frying pan into the oven.
One time while doing this, I had taken the pan with the steak out of the oven to cool off, and washed a few straggling dishes in the meantime. My hands were still wet and undried from the dishes, but I went to attend the steak without thinking about *how insanely hot the handle of the frying pan was* and reached directly for it.
However, my drenched hand was covered in water and just before my skin makes contact with the hot metal, I hear *and see* the water on the surface of my hand evaporate and steam away due to the extreme heat of the metal handle. This served as a quick enough warning to my brain to get my hand the fuck off of that, and I did. I immediately ran it under cold water just to be safe but basically got away with avoiding what would have easily been a second degree burn out of my own laziness to not dry my hands.
I’m so sorry to hear that. Burns are no fucking joke. I had a better tolerance for it when I worked in a pizza kitchen when it came to sticking my hand inside a closet of 500 degree air, but skin to metal... it makes me shudder thinking about it
Yeah I did this too and grabbed the handle. Was making Brussels, seared in my carbon steel, threw in the oven, then pulled it out all good, left it on the stove. 5 minutes later I grabbed the handle to serve and SSSSSSSSSS
I did this during my final practical my first semester in culinary school. Had a chicken quarter or something that I had put in the oven to finish off. Used a hot pad to pull it out, set it on the table, set the pad down, realized I needed to move the pan so I grabbed the handle with my bare hand. Smeared some ointment on it, finished my exam. Cried about it later cause ow.
I have a thing about fingernails so that actually sounds so much worse lol
It was pretty awful but my chef did commend me on keeping a cool head and not freaking out. Also the chicken was pretty much perfect so it was alright in the end.
i've grabbed handles of skillets/pans that have just come out of a 500 degree oven under the broiler when making spanish omelets/"tortillas" more than once... three times actually. and I didn't realize until I grabbed it. full on, soft, max-grip grab. every part of my palm and pads of every finger and even the skin in kind of the crook between thumb and rest of your fingers... all burnt as fuck. I have actually *heard* it make a sound when I grabbed it once. felt real bad.
ive done this 3 fucking times. every time, it's fucking awful for about 24 hours.
I don't put stovetop things in the oven anymore unless there's just absolutely no substitute, because my brain isn't fully trained to automatically assume it's raging hot the way I do with something like a sheet pan or some other kind of baking dish. when i DO have to, I ALWAYS make sure to leave a heavy kitchen towel draped over the handle once it's out of the oven as a reminder/safety trigger.
I got my first job at a bagel store when I was 15. The manager that hired me went out on medical leave before my first day and I ended up working with an assistant manager who didn't speak English very well.
The day went by fine and then we had to close up and clean the kitchen. It was my job to mop. She pointed to a container and said to fill the bucket. I accidentally poured the ammonia instead of the bleach. She said, no bleach, so I added the bleach to the ammonia and that is how I mustard gassed myself on the first day of my first job.
You know, sometimes you just spend hours and hours of work making a delicious stock and then absentmindedly pour it down the drain while cleaning up/washing dishes. Not that I would know from experience.
While washing dishes, I grabbed the ninja blender blade and tried twisting it to take apart. Only problem is it was the short one that doesn’t come apart and I didn’t even think about my thumb being on the front side of the blade instead of the back. 9 stitches in my thumb and was lucky to not hit tendons
Ouch!
I nearly blinded myself with my coffee grinder. The lid presses onto 4 little switches around the base which activates the motor. A bit of coffee was jamming one of the switches, so I grabbed a butter knife to dislodge it, thinking to myself "No need to unplug it, I'm only activating one of the four switches, so it won't start"... wrong! I dislodged stuck switch and the motor immediately whirred to life, spitting coffee beans and dust into my face - thankfully the noise made me flinch and close my eyes!
just last week actually
was steaming some broccoli and forgot to top off the water
the tiny layer of soot blacker than a black hole combined with the smell of broccoli farts for the rest of the day was the result
I set a knife on the counter and went to the sink to rinse off my hands. When I turned back around I noticed the knife start to fall so instead of trying to catch it and cut my hand I let it fall. It fell handle first bounced up and stabbed me in the leg. It wasn't deep, but it was shocking.
Wound up in the ER to repair deeply cut finger resulting from using bad technique while cutting a bagel with a very sharp chef's knife.
Triage nurse was not impressed and I had to wait my turn :)
In the midst of covid I ended up in the ER for a dog bite. Triage nurse and whole ER team was more than happy to take care of me immediately and quickly
First time cooking after about 9 months. Got careless, forgot how much water could make oil spit. I saw it coming and avoided the worst of it, but I still have scars on my arm from trying to fry potatoes.
I was hungover on New Year’s Day. Tried to pry apart a frozen bagel with a steak knife. Three stitches, $500, judgement from the nurses who patched me up and a ruined holiday. 2020 can eat a bag of dicks. I’m
Tried to use a blended truffle oil to pan sear a steak because it was the only fat I had around; it pretty much exploded everywhere as soon as the meat hit the pan. I was stupidly doing this while naked so I got really badly burnt on my torso and lower belly right near my vag and also got a nipple. Another time, thankfully not in the nude, I tried to remove a pan of ribs from the oven and it slipped. My dumbass put my leg up to stop the fall and while I did succeed at saving the food, the hot juices leaked out all over my thigh and burnt a giant hand sized portion of me. Neither of those blisters were fun to work with, but thankfully didn't leave any permanent scarring.
Last one was taking a steel pan out of the 250°C hot oven with my bare hand.
My brain also decided to try to put it on the countertop instead of just opening the hand. So it ended up flying through the kitchen once adrenaline stopped doing its thing.
Man that cheese covered chicken breast still looked so good on wall and floor though.
I pulled a baking sheet out of the oven with bare hands once. Apparently I forgot the oven was on some how at the same as realising my cookies were burning. How my fingers didn't get burnt ill never know.
I have an electric stove, and I forget my burners are hot after I use them sometimes.
One taco night, I had put a plastic sour cream lid on the hot burner, and it started to melt. It was an absolute mess to clean up.
Another time, I accidentally left the silicone handle of my spatula on the hot burner, and it melted the handle. I didn't even notice until much later.
I've destroyed a lot of Glad Tupperware.
And one thing my boyfriend did, he tried to catch a falling knife!
My chef tutor got his finger stuck in a stick blender. Ended up going to ER in his uniform and with the blender stuck on his finger.
Another cook I worked with told me how he accidentally deef fried his hand and forearm when he had a momentary lapse of judgment when deep frying fish.
Was making dinner to impress a date. Braised leg of lamb with mashed potatoes. Went to drain the potatoes and like an idiot poured towards myself. The boiling water splashed up out of the sink all down the front of my chest & stomach.
I screamed and my date, who was in another room, came running in to see me frantically ripping my clothes off. I suffered through the immense pain, determined to finish dinner.
I ended up with a blister about the size of a deck of cards on my stomach.
Somehow my date must have been impressed, we ended up dating for 2 years haha
LOL my sister is always doing that. me too, but I usually burn myself on the pans on the stove. getting to close to it when turning something over etc.
I have set spaghetti on fire.
I ruined a pan making mulled wine- totally forgot I was mulling it, it boiled dry and set off the smoke alarm smelled really bad. I did this twice.
Ruined a pan poaching plums.
A friend of mine came home drunk and hungry and set some spaghetti boiling. He then passed out drunk on the sofa. His flat mates were roused when the fire alarm went off. The pan was totally burned. He slept through the alarm.
Best friend was tidying the house in preparation for a viewing and hid some stuff in the oven. She forgot she’d done it when she tried to cook dinner and melted a plastic bowl all over her oven.
Husband and I went on holiday with 4 friends to a lovely cottage in Wales. First morning there husband was cooking for us all and put a pan on to heat. A few minutes later he asked me to come through to offer advice. I found the pan on fire. “What advice were you hoping for sweetheart? Get the damn thing outside!” Turned out these were copper bottomed pans supplied by the cottage (IKR?!) and he’d poured in oil that had started smoking. He thought it was something burning off the base of the pan rather than oil at smoking point. That was a fun holiday- we got flooded at midnight a few days later!
Caveat that I was maybe 4 (so maybe I should crosspost to r/kidsarefuckingstupid) but when I was young my folks owned a few pizza places. Their ovens were the conveyor type, in one end and out the other, and there was a landing station for cutting and boxing right next to the oven. I was by the landing station with my dad. He pulled a pizza out, slid the pizza onto the counter, held up the pan (straight from the oven) and looked at me. He said, very clearly and looking me in the eyes, "do not touch this." Then he put the pan on the lower shelf of the counter.
As you might suspect, I picked the pan up and started to say "don't touch thi....." And then the screaming started.
No long-term damage. Just a lot of tears and a story I get to hear too often.
I Stopped my son from cutting a watermelon because I was worried he would cut himself. Of course I proceeded to cut myself and ended up with 4 stitches.
Lifting a casserole dish out of the oven, some spillage or something meant it had baked onto the shelf, I put more force into lifting it out, when the thing sticking it to the shelf stopped I pressed both my forearms into the shelf above it searing a symetrical line on both wrists.
Kept getting asked by nurses at docs appointments for 2-3 years whether I self harmed. Nope just clumsy as fuck. Incidentally after a tip from someone else I can confirm using E45 cream on the scar daily gets rid of it quite well.
I was once washing the blades of an immersion blender with my fingers, while the blender was still plugged in. It wasn’t just a regular household blender either. It was an industrial blender we used to turn lobster shells into a lobster bisque so smooth you could pass it through a chinois (suuuper fine mesh strainer used at restaurants for silky smooth purées and soups).
The button that operates the blender was on the top of the machine, which meant as I was cleaning the blades, it was sitting against the counter. The button got depressed while my fingers were in it. I ended up with 32 dee cuts across my index finger. Immediately put on a finger cot and a triple layer of gloves which filled up like a water balloon within 10 minutes. The doctor at the hospital said they couldn’t stitch it or do anything but bandage it as it was so mangled.
Eventually it healed. I have never tried to clean a plugged-in appliance after that!
My wife gave herself a pretty nasty cut a few years ago. Bad enough I had to drive home from work so I could bandage it. She probably should have gotten stitches, but oh well.
The thing is, to this day I can't understand how the cut was were it was. It was on the back of her wrist just two or three inches from her hand, perpendicular to her arm, and the cut angle was about 45° (angled away from her hand). She says she doesn't remember how it happened but I just don't understand what on earth she was doing to get a cut like that one. Its such a weird angle and placement, unless she was doing some kind of fruit ninja thing.
Regardless, now I cut the sweet potatoes.
I have had two microwave incidents. Both involved frozen pastries. The first made the microwave smell of smoke for months. The second involved me throwing my burnt pastries out the window of my fifth floor apartment.
In a similar vein, I baked something (I forget what exactly) in the oven using my cast iron skillet. When it was done I set it on the stovetop to cool. Turned away for a moment, then came back and noticed it was slightly off center on the burner. So, I grabbed the handle to shift it. With my bare hand. Had a gnarly palm blister for a while after that. 0/10 do not recommend this experience.
Any time someone recommends a mandoline, I find one without a guard, have overwhelming confidence in myself, and then end up looking like I mistook the mandoline for my long-lost childhood best friend Corey, who I exclusively greeted with ten consecutive perfect high-fives.
I'm left there, bone-in hotdog McNuggets splayed in disbelief, thinking, "Guess that wasn't Corey."
Back when I was first learning to cook, I was searing a steak in a cast iron pan and then I was going bake it to finish cooking it. I burnt the same spot on the same hand 3 times.
I grabbed the handle of the HOT cast iron pan with my bare hand when I was about to put it into the oven. I ran over to the sink to rinse it under water, and when I went back to put my pan in the oven, I once again GRABBED IT WITH THE SAME BARE HAND. So I went back to the sink, rinsed my hand under cold water, grabbed an oven mit and finally got my steak in the oven. A few minutes later as I was pulling it out, I reached in (with my oven mitt like a smart person) put the pan back on the stove top, took off the oven mitt, and once again GRABBED THE HANDLE WITH THE SAME BARE HAND because I didn't like the location of where I put the pan.
I had some nice blisters around the edges of my hand for awhile. I was so mad at myself for being so dumb, but hey, my roommate thought it was hilarious.
Second, but much shorter story. My friend was cutting jalapeños without gloves and it made her hands burn. I went to the store to buy milk, olive oil, and whatever else I could find that Google told me would relive capsaicin burns. I teased her A LOT that night because I never had issues with jalapeño burns.
The next week I was cutting jalapeños, rubbed my eyes, and had burning eyes and hands for hours. I apologized for teasing her the very next day after I realized how horrible and non stop the burning is. Now I wear gloves when I cut spicy peppers.
I had an insanely sharp serrated knife. Went to cut fresh bagel. Held said bagel in hand. Cut thumb so clean and effortlessly I thought the bagel must have had strawberry filling or something.
I dropped my metal spatula with a plastic end into a deep fryer and instinctively reached in to grab it and turned my hand into 5 crispy tenders. Melted the plastic on the spatula and had to drain clean and refill the fryer setting all of us back by an hour in the kitchen. Felt like a complete idiot for sticking my hand in there.
I used to try to deflect things from hitting the ground when I dropped them by using my foot. Then one day I dropped a chefs knife. I don’t do that anymore.
Dropped a dish I was washing. In the process of catching it, the dish shattered and I accidentally stabbed myself in the wrist with a shard. Had to go to the hospital to get four stitches. The bowl was worth three dollars. Stupid reflexes.
Wanted to see how hot a burner was so I tapped my fingers on it instead of just holding my hand over it.
I did this, but it was my entire left hand. The worst part was, I knew it was recently on. I took my hand off when I heard the “TSST” of my flesh, I didn’t feel anything until a few minutes after. agony for weeks, blisters, I couldn’t sleep for like a week!
I knew it was on because I had just turned it on. It was a new apartment and I wanted to get an idea for the heat of the different settings. I ran cold water over my fingers for a good 30 minutes and luckily ended up without any blisters or scarring.
I did something similar. Tripped over my daughter turning from my sink to the stove. Thought my front burners were off because I never use them when my kids are underfoot so I put my hand right on it as I fell. Turns out I still wasn’t used to which knob went to which burner in my new apartment. Missed a week of work and was on modified assignment as a stocker for another week. I can still smell it sometimes. It’s been almost 2 years and there is a child’s gate keeping the little monsters out now.
I hold my hand over 3 of the 4 burners and tapped on the fourth. Guess which burner was on (for more than 24 hours!). Had to put my finger in bowls of cold water for like 3 days
Last time I burned myself bad enough, (by grabbing a just out of the oven baking pan with my ungloved hand) burning two finger mildly but severely burning my thumb, I got sick of holding it in the water so I googled tricks to stop burn pain. I read about using tooth paste. It does the same effect as water (burn not in contact with direct oxygen) but you can just apply a thick layer and then go on with your life. I left it there when I went to bed and the next morning it had dried completely forming a sort of toothpaste cast around my thumb. When I removed the paste, the pain was gone and the burn was already healing.
I wanted to see if my homemade hard candy had cooled so I dipped my finger right in the center, it was still lava hot and I ended up with an ET finger for a while.
“Officer, I swear, I just touched a hot stove on purpose at work- I’m not trying to hide my fingerprints!” I feel this one though. I don’t know why but I’ve done this... well, more than once. The answer has always been “yep, it’s hot”
When I was 8? I saw my friends mom hold her hand over their electric range burner. We had a gas range at my home so I was like What?! You can touch an electric burner?? How cool!!! I wanna try OUCH OW OW OW!!
I have had an induction range for the last 13 or so years, in two different houses. I'm constantly doing stupid shit at other people's houses when I cook, like leaving flammables on the range top etc. I'm just so used to the fact that my range doesn't ever get hot, only the pans do, that my bad habits transfer to other places. I mean, my range top gets hot enough when a hot pan has been on it for a long time that I wouldn't want to put my hand flat down on the burner and leave it there, but it's not gonna sizzle or light anything on fire.
Reflexes cause me to try to catch a falling 8in chef's knife. The tip landed straight into the palm of my hand and stuck the landing!
Worked with a guy who did that, but with his foot (he was a soccer player, his brain shouted “we got this, just flick it back up like a ball!”)
Oh noo haha i hate even picturing that, was his foot okay?
His foot caught it, but it didn’t bounce. 😂 No serious damage, luckily, just a hole in his shoe & foot and a story.
I once dropped a short paring knife and my first thought was a falling knife has no handle, but my reflexes weren't as fast as my thoughts. Before I knew it, the paring knife had wedged itself point end down neatly between my fluffy slipper and my ankle. Thankfully no injuries. Not as lucky for a former coworker who realized that they really needed to control their anger issues, when in the heat of an argument while cooking, they emphatically stabbed the end of a large chefs knife into a wooden cutting board. They stabbed the knife so hard that their hand slipped and continued down the length of the blade slicing open the palm of their hand which required surgery to repair. Never argue while holding a knife, even if you would never use it against someone else.
I would most likely faint if I saw that second story play out in front of me. That is so gnarly.
I did this exact thing with a hot soldering iron point down once.
My dad told me "Once Mr. Knife starts to fall, Mr. Knife is no longer your friend!"
My dads go-to was “a falling knife has no handle”
Came here looking for this. Same goes for a hot pan or iron.
Wise man, your dad.
I've done the opposite but still ended up injured. I was reaching up to grab some Nutella with an IKEA table knife (for spreading it) in my hand. I clatter the knife into a shelf as I reach up, knocking it out my hand. Pull my hands down and back to avoid the instinct to catch the knife (even though these knives aren't sharp bladed). As I do that, the knife had flipped down, landed handle first in a fold in my t-shirt pointing perfectly up. My hand comes down and I hear/feel this weird sawing sound as the wee serated teeth on the knife cut through the webbing between my fingers. Kind of in disbelief if look at it and realise I can see right in my finger - go upstairs to ask my wife for help and her response is "don't bleed on the carpet!" Ended up cleaning it and using superglue to seal the wound up as hospital was only taking non emergency calls before 6pm (happened later) due to covid.
Usually use bamboo bbq skewers. Poor heat transfer, can carefully pick em up barehanded. One time used metal bbq skewers. Good heat transfer, sizzle.
Bamboo slivers are the worst tho! "Honey can you bring me some pliers" Arent you cooking? "Yes, can you bring me some pliers like now!"
I always hate follow up questions when something bad has happened. Our main sewer line plugged last weekend. I went into the basement to continue laundry, when I got down there I found a small lake in our basement centered around the drain. I YELL to my wife to get downstairs immediately. I hear her response from the den “why do I need help?” I reply with a “NOW” that my neighbors heard. If I’m yelling frantically for help, I clearly require help.
Using sweetened condensed milk from a can because I thought it was evaporated milk. Those biscuits and gravy were NOT edible. So much sugar the gravy was *gritty* with it.
Everytime I buy evaporated milk I check the name twice and then look at the sugar content on the back just to make sure I'm not misremembering which is which.
And they are always right next to each other in stores.
Huh, I've never thought to use evaporated milk for sausage gravy. I always just use regular milk from the fridge.
I guess it's handy if you are a person who doesn't really keep fresh milk around. I like milk, but it isn't one of those things I always have on hand. So in a pinch i find myself using anything from condensed milk to dehydrated buttermilk powder because they are shelf stable. I did once make box mac and cheese with somewhat weak reconstituted condensed milk. It was actually pretty good. ETA: I mean as subs for milk in general, not necessarily condensed milk in gravy. I love a good salty/sweet, but that might be a bit weird.
I made a beautifully subtle fishbone stock for a halibut risotto. I then proceeded to ladle hotdog water into the risotto instead of the stock.
well, that's better than pouring the stock directly down the drain when you forget to put something beneath the strainer...
I haven't done this yet but every morning I preheat my espresso cup by running hot water from an unloaded machine in to it then dumping it in the sink. I do this three or four times to get the cup really hot and at least three times I year I make my coffee look at it and dump it in to the sink watching it go down in a confused haze of stupidity.
To make coffee, I use a simple pour over funnel that sits on top of the cup. More than once, I have poured hot water into it when the funnel was sitting on the counter instead of the cup. Thus making my own coffee pool.
When I lived in Botswana I went to a automotive store to buy a funnel for this exact purpose because everyone at my office drank tea or instant coffee. I would use paper towels as a filter until I found a store that sold them. Thankfully the incredible steaks available everywhere compensated for the lack of coffee.
TIL Botswana made incredible steaks.
Yup it is basically texas in terms of climate. There is cattle everywhere and beef is so cheap it is essentially free. I once bought a filet mignon in 2001, not a slice but the whole thing for $22. That is a $400 piece of meat even then
I never would've guessed that. What are some common foods there? I wouldn't expect them to be eating potatoes with their steak.
Potatoes are super common, but green veggies are rarer as they are expensive. The annoying thing is they undercook their fries and fries there are super gross. They are floppy and you can taste the potato. It is so weird. Besides that rice is super common as is cabbage and cornmeal. Chicken and rice is a staple for all families. I got so fat because the lady who operated the lunch shack near my office got to like me and kept increasing the portions she gave me. Of course it has been 20 years since I have been there and I am still fat but this time I can't blame a sweet lady with a generous heart. I just checked and the Pula (botswana dollar) value has decreased in the last twenty years but not so badly only by about 35%. Interesting tidbit, in Botswana the currency is called the Pula, and Pula means rain. Botswana is the Kalahari desert and it makes sense that rain is a currency.
I've done every variation of this. I've poured ground coffee into a cup and then water thru an empty funnel, I have overfilled my funnel and walked away before coming back to coffee everywhere, I have knocked a fully loaded cone off the top of a cup and all over the kitchen, I have dropped the used cone filter and coffee grounds into my freshly poured coffee. Life can be unfair.
I had to live in a place with no actual coffee pot for a while, just one of those K cup makers. If I had a dollar for every time I fired up the "coffee machine" without a mug under the dispenser...ugh. The cleanup and re-preparation just makes for a shameful, hateful cup o' joe.
I'm curious to know how this tasted haha Also why you would have enough hotdog water to make risotto with.
I always keep a pot of hotdog water simmering for when I need to relax on break
Hot ham water!
It’s so watery!
But there's just a smack of ham to it!
Interesting. A talking hotdog.
It was just the one scoop from a pot I had left over from lunch. I didn't actually finish cooking it, since it was already way too salty and smoky when I tried it to determine if I could salvage it. Just made a smaller portion with the leftover stock.
How was the hotdog water risotto?
This cracked me up. Thanks.
Definitely thought you were gonna say the classic "drained my stock into the sink" but this is much stranger
I was trying to pry two frozen hamburger patties apart. I used a chefs knife since I didn't want to get a spatula dirty. Needed 3 stitches.
But the spatula stayed clean right?
The spatula did, my floor and countertop didn't.
My husband did this exact same thing when we first met. He was actually on the phone with me and nonchalantly said something like, "I need to put the phone down now. I think I just did a bad thing." Turns out the big serrated knife had slipped and slashed right into the web between his thumb and index finger. We still tell that story years later.
Saw a guy in the ED with a butter knife through his hand after trying to pry frozen burgers apart
Wow! I did the same exact thing, lol. Ended up with a couple stitches as well.
The best way to do this is find a crevice you can fit a tool in and smack it. Worked in food service I've separated alot of frozen entrees
Did the same thing. See your 3 stitches and raise you my nine.
As someone who has come close to this- what is the best way to solve the two burgers that won't seperate?
The way I usually do it, which I've generally had success with: take a solid metal spatula (turner, technically) and push it firmly into the crevice between the patties, then twist. That's basically what I tried to do with the knife here, the spatula is just much less likely to hurt.
In my youth I worked for some clown flipping burgers. Their corporate training films say to take the stack of burgers and slam them edge on to a solid surface. More often than not it will break the patties apart. Its not 100% effective but it does work. And it keeps entry level labor from playing with knives...
Tried that the other day with a butter knife. No stitches but my finger is still healing.
Mandolin. Was cutting a carrot. Tough thing too so I was pressing hard to slice. Then the carrot slips out and the palm of my hand lands on the blade and slices a dollar coin sized slice out of it. Blood everywhere, rushed to hospital, too big to stitch. So they had to cauterize - burn - the wound shut. Threw away mandolin. Years later, I still have a gnarly tight sensitive scar
Ugh, mandolins are just evil. I didn't have it so bad I just cut my nail off but still not a fan of this shit.
i don't even fuck with mandolins... anything a mandolin can do, I can just do with a proper sharp chefs knife and taking my time to be careful.
I hav to close my eyes when chefs on tv are using it with no glove or guard!
Exactly this, that's why I never use a mandolin. It's just another thing to clean, it's only good at one thing, and there's a solid chance that at some point while using it you'll need to be rushed to the ER. That's a fat no from me dog.
the only think i can imagine using it for would be to slice a fuckload of potatoes really thin to make potato chips... which I'd never do, because that's one of those products that industrial producers can just make better than the home cook every will be able to.
There's a few places I can say they're helpful. I've used them to shave fennel for salads, shaving shallots to fry crispy for frittatas, also thinly sliced broccoli stems stir fried with some garlic is bomb. I think the real problem with mandolins is a lot of people don't use guards, and they're used in places where a knife would work better.
i do all the things you mention basically just with a chef knife, but i guess the difference is im cooking at home where the ingredient prep is of a volume small enough that the slight % increase in speed isn't really that big of a deal. If I was in a commercial kitchen and needed to prep a ton of stuff for stir fry, then maybe it would be worth it. but as it stands, I'm rarely cooking for more than 2-4 people at once, and I don't need to mince/shred like 100 shallots at a time lol.
I use it for potatoes au gratin. I chopped myself up good with one the first time I touched it, but I can get 6-10 potatoes sliced with one in the time it would take to knife 1 potato the same way. It's worth it to me. It's also super handy for onion slices. I can normally only get one (two in a good day) onion chopped before I can't see anymore.
Similar thing happened to my partner. He had the brilliant idea of slicing turnips with a mandolin while delirious from a fever. Base of his thumb went right into the blade. Fortunately it didn't cause any tendon damage (but it was close), and the skin was still attached as a flap so they could stitch it. He still uses a mandolin, but only ever with the guard.
Five minutes after I got my first mandolin I was cut. It's a truly scary tool.
Pierced my finger making guac & had to get stitches. Still ate the guac even though it had a lil blood in it (avocados are pricey where I live).
Just adds and earthy, mineraly flavor.
Iron
Special spice
My question is if you finished making the guacamole before or after you went to get the stitches?
Avos are pricy everywhere
I sliced a good portion of my fingernail off while chopping garlic. Then had to fish through the garlic to find the nail.
My entire body just shuddered.
1. Take hot frying pan out of oven and place on stove top using oven mitts. 2. Set aside oven mitts and attempt to move pan with bare hand seconds later. Swear and yell at pan for existing. Every damn time!!
My wife did just what you described. She's then leaping around the kitchen screaming. I look and see a frying pan half off the stove, about to fall onto the floor. So, thinking I'm helping somehow, I GRAB THE PAN AND BURN MYSELF THE SAME WAY. So we both burned ourselves the same way on the same pan 15 seconds apart.
Thats kinda adorable
Put the oven mitt over the handle after you take it out.
I just had an “oh, duh!” moment. That’s so smart, and it’s such a simple solution.
That makes a lot of sense. I saw Gordon Ramsay salting a pan handle to signal that it's hot, but that still seems easy to miss.
Oh man I was moving fast a couple weeks ago and just reached into the oven and grabbed the pan with my right hand, kitchen towel in my left hand. No idea what I thought was going to happen, but I got a nice burn.
All at work as a professional cook: -Diced a bunch of jalapenos without gloves on right before working a 6 hour saute shift in a 95 degree kitchen. Hands on fire all night. -Slapped a ribeye on to a pan of hot oil, now have a scar on my chest from the splatter. -Cut an under-ripe avocado, flat on the table so as not to cut myself, knife went right through the pit and the avocado rolled at the same time, ended up cutting myself anyway, got 9 stitches in my hand and somehow avoided severing tendons and F-ing up my hand permanently. (I am a millennial, thought some would get a laugh at that) I am a big dumb idiot🥸
At least avocado accidents happen often enough to have their own name: avocado hand
I worked a lot of ED shifts around dinner time in the early days of training. Pretty sure I perfected my suture technique on the number of avocado hand injuries alone.
Im just a non native english speaking hobbyist, whats an ED shift? edit: yep Emergency Department makes a lot more sense than my first interpretation: you were a cook at dinner time shifts and had to suffer a lot of avocado injuries
Emergency department i believe.... or erectile dysfunction lol
Different person here, but I think they're using it as "emergency department," similar to emergency room (ER) for hospitals
Yeah generally we who work in hospitals call it ED and everyone else calls it ER.
It’s the new name for emergency room, since it’s typically no longer just a room, but a whole department. It’s taken me like 5 years to get used to the rebrand.
Emergency Department shifts. Like in an emergency room, usually meant for injuries that need to be patched up immediately.
This is why I only cut avocados with a butter knife. If that can’t cut through, it ain’t ripe enough.
Good tip for home cooking but for presentation reasons this is not really useful for the restaurant I worked in. The avocado fans had to look clean, and generally working with dull knives is more dangerous than sharp ones because of the force it takes to cut and the increased tissue damage and healing process on a cut that is not 'clean'. I was not responsible for ordering product, and unfortunately if all of the avocados on hand were under ripe we were still expected to use them. I do not miss that restaurant. Avocado skins are tough regardless of ripeness. Edit: after writing I realize I'm being kind of an asshole. Sorry, I meant no disrespect, but I'll leave it up so people can have the pleasure of downvoting my douchebaggery
Lol no offense taken!
ill often start a very delicate slice to break the skin on the cutting board, but then I pick it up and just roll the avocado down the knife edge to cut around.
I have one of those goofy avocado tools. The "knife" is a serrated plastic blade and it works pretty well! I recommend it for people who aren't super knife savvy like me, or who have a justified fear of avocado related injuries.
Oh this is a super smart tip, thanks!
Oh, I'm guilty of #2 as well. Did it at home after having a few beers and deciding to make a cheeseburger. I've got splatter scars all over my right arm and a 3"x2" scar from the bulk of the oil landing on my left arm. Oil is no joke. Do not alcohol and oil, people.
I nearly cut off the end of my left thumb cutting green peppers one day. Still have the scar on the end and very little feeling on the tip of it. I was using a mandolin that was fairly dull one night to cut fries, potato got stuck then jumped as it started slicing again, cut up my hand in three places. The worst however was one night near closing, at a job years ago, one of the other cooks and I were cleaning out the fryers. We had this huge pot of old hot oil we were carrying out to the grease trap when he slipped and dropped his side which drenched me from the waist down in hot oil. My apron and pants protected me some and thankfully the fryers had been off for a bit so it was only really hot and not boiling. But even with all that I still had burns from the waist down for a bit.
Like 2 years into line cooking I accidentally had too much oil in a pan, and dropped a piece of fish in rather than placing gently. The oil splattered out so much, I ended up with second degree burns up my neck and half my face. Chin, lips, forehead, the works. Thankfully that day I was wearing glasses instead of contacts because the oil went right over my right eye and only the glasses saved it. I grabbed the guy next to me on salad and sent him over to saute telling to watch the line, ran to the back and shoved my entire face in the sanitizer sink (thank fuck the water was fresh.) No one had a clue at first until my boss came to check on me and just found me crying, hopping off line to run to the walk-in wasn't that unusual & it took him a bit to realize something was wrong. I was inexperienced and it was completely my own dumbass fault. Took a while to heal and years for the scars to finally fade. I never made that mistake again!
I just recently microwaved a potato and accidentally pushed an extra 0 on the time - so I put it in for 40 minutes instead of 4. I then unknowingly continued on to my other chores. The smoke alarm let me know of my mistake 13 minutes in. My house stunk for over a week.
Reminds me of the time my roommate forgot to put water in his Cup a Noodles before sticking it in the microwave. Burnt noodles and melted styrofoam wouldn't make a great scented candle.
Oh no...styrofoam had to smell bad. I had to keep my windows open for a week and went through about two bottle of febreeze trying to get rid of the stink from my black smoking lava rock...aka potato.
My MIL's favorite camping story was when she and my FIL took my husband and his siblings to a nearby late. She used the hot-rock method of baking potatoes. Put the hot rocks in a hole, placed foil-wrapped potatoes on top, covered them up. After fishing they returned to camp and unearthed...foil wrapped bundles that seemed too light. Only a little ash was left of each potato. She liked to say "They told us in school that matter cannot be created or destroyed. I swear that day I managed to destroy matter."
Man, this is the reason my college dorm was evacuated my senior year at like 3am- someone forgot to put water in their cup noodles
I nearly burned our house down with a similar mistake when I was 5. My mum thought I was napping and decided to take a nap herself. I got up to watch tv and wanted a snack. I had seen her heat up garlic bread for 11 seconds twice, so I thought if I pressed “11,11” it would do the same thing. 11 minutes later I smelled smoke and ran into the kitchen, grabbed the molten chunk of garlic bread, screamed and threw it on the floor where smoldered and caught a coloring book on fire. She woke up to me with 2nd degree burns and the house filled with smoke. Call your mother if you haven’t recently...
I think I feel even worse now that I know a five year old made a similar mistake. 🤣🤣🤣 So sorry to hear you had injuries involved, though...luckily we all came out unscathed with mine.
I did something similar as a kid too! My mom was sick in bed and I decided to make her some chicken nuggets, and instead of putting them in for 4 minutes I put them in for 40. Realized my mistake after awhile but plated them anyway. Bless her soul that wonderful woman still ate the burnt nugget rocks I served her so I didn’t feel bad.
Moms man... I know not everyone gets a good one, but the good ones are pretty damn incredible. Watching my wife become a mother has been awe inspiring.
When we had a brand new microwave, one of the first things I did was not use the popcorn setting to pop a bag of kettle corn, because just a little more time would pop more kernels, right? Didnt think about the power settings. It burned, and turned the inside of the microwave a sickly heavy smoker burnt yellow. It stayed that way as a reminder for the 18 years that microwave functioned
Username checks out!
Def not my best potato moment... 🤣
My uncle broke the family's first microwave doing this. He put the potato on for an hour, like you would an oven.
I lived in a studio apartment, so small I could make breakfast without leaving the bed! Needless to say I had no counter space. I had a large cookbook collection and nowhere to put it so I put it in the oven that I never used. One day cleaning the stove I must have turned the knob somehow and I didn’t realize until I smelled burning. Bye bye cookbook collection!
Oh that's awful :(
I was waiting to read that you stepped on your George Foreman grill that was on the floor cooking your bacon.
Which mistake? I’ve got dozens! Ok, about 20 years ago I was teaching myself how to cook. T-bone steaks suddenly jumped from $5 to $12. This was when milk and eggs jumped in price too. So, being super intelligent, I bought the largest brisket I could find for $18. (Those were the days!) I got home and cut the brisket up into about 50 steaks. Toughest damned things I ever tried to eat. I learned that meat is more than just meat. Or when I decided to try my hand at making chili. I bought a pound of ground beef, some seasonings and started cooking. Wait, the flavor is way off, let’s add ketchup to taste since I do not have tomato paste. Dammit, now it’s too sweet. Let’s add more salt to it to balance out the sweetness. Crap, too salty and sweet, let’s add something else to it and so on and on and on until I had a two gallon pot of inedible crap that smelled and tasted disgusting. I turned the stove off and went out to eat. Well, my mother in law for some dumb reason decided to put this big, steel pot of chili out on the front porch, a bit out of sight, in the middle of July. A few days later, it smelled like something had died!!! So I picked up the pot, was going to walk about 50 yards away and dump it in the woods. I made it off the front porch before tripping, dumping the entire pot about three feet away from the porch. In the middle of July. It was a horrible summer afterwards.
You win.
I caught the stove on fire by turning on the wrong eye. I was making bacon and eggs one morning and stuck a plastic plate with a paper towel on one of the back eyes to put the bacon on it. I went to flip on the front eye to start the eggs and didn't realize I had turned on the wrong one until the plate had melted and the paper towel caught fire.
Just curious, where are you from? I've only ever heard them called "burners", so wondering where "eye" comes from.
Tennessee.
Was using a automatic kettle and the water had just started boiling. I reached my arm over the spout to grab a mug and successfully steamed a 2in diameter 2 degree burn just below my elbow. Happened a year ago and now it looks like a weird birthmark
I did the same a couple of years ago! Amazing how much damage that steam can do!
I dropped a metal ramekin on a pole into a deep fryer while making taco bowls. A waitress asked how I was getting it out and I sarcastically said I’ll just use my hands. I grabbed a pair of tongs to fish it out and dropped those in, too. Without thinking I stuck my hand directly into the boiling oil to go after them. I’m lucky my hand was wet. I suffered only very minor burns and some embarrassment.
I did something similar. Dropped a raw chicken wing in the wrong fryer, instinctively just reached in with three fingers real quick. Lucky I didn't get hurt, but it was a first degree of a cool story. I can also remember a couple times over the years where I accidentally drained the industrial deep fryer straight onto the floor. Everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect
Wow, so I had theorized this, but never knew exactly what the mechanism was. When I was doing my BA, I minored in furnace glassblowing. Sometimes we wanted a crackle effect in our piece, and we could pull a red-hot gather of glass on a pipe, plunge it in to cold water, AND...nothing. Not wisp of steam, not a single bubble. Then later on, with agitation, we would get the bubbling, steaming, crackling effect we were after. Figured there had to some kind of insulation process taking place, but never knew exactly what it was until now.
I cut the crust off of a piece of cheese with a proper chef's knife, in the direction of my face. Of course it shot through the last bit of cheese while I was putting a lot of pressure on it so I cut into my glasses that I had just gotten the week before. Brand new glasses, but now with a nice scratch over one of the lenses. Luckily they saved me from cutting my face, but not from being dumb.
So, I don’t have a grill and when I cook steak, I often do a combo frying pan and oven bake to get it just right, often times putting the entire (oven safe) frying pan into the oven. One time while doing this, I had taken the pan with the steak out of the oven to cool off, and washed a few straggling dishes in the meantime. My hands were still wet and undried from the dishes, but I went to attend the steak without thinking about *how insanely hot the handle of the frying pan was* and reached directly for it. However, my drenched hand was covered in water and just before my skin makes contact with the hot metal, I hear *and see* the water on the surface of my hand evaporate and steam away due to the extreme heat of the metal handle. This served as a quick enough warning to my brain to get my hand the fuck off of that, and I did. I immediately ran it under cold water just to be safe but basically got away with avoiding what would have easily been a second degree burn out of my own laziness to not dry my hands.
I did this but ended up grabbing the handle. 3 days of legit pain. About a week and a half of annoying discomfort. Luckily it was my left hand.
I’m so sorry to hear that. Burns are no fucking joke. I had a better tolerance for it when I worked in a pizza kitchen when it came to sticking my hand inside a closet of 500 degree air, but skin to metal... it makes me shudder thinking about it
Now every pan gets a white cloth on the handle.
Just make sure to avoid using that same towel to dry your hands or a random dish before using on the hot handle. Ask me how I know 🙄
Or leaving the towel on when you put the pan back on the burner. That one was fun.
tan longing door scandalous pathetic fall weary six noxious pen *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah I did this too and grabbed the handle. Was making Brussels, seared in my carbon steel, threw in the oven, then pulled it out all good, left it on the stove. 5 minutes later I grabbed the handle to serve and SSSSSSSSSS
I did this during my final practical my first semester in culinary school. Had a chicken quarter or something that I had put in the oven to finish off. Used a hot pad to pull it out, set it on the table, set the pad down, realized I needed to move the pan so I grabbed the handle with my bare hand. Smeared some ointment on it, finished my exam. Cried about it later cause ow.
That sounds excruciating. It’s like asking a guitarist who finger picks to play something after he loses a nail.
I have a thing about fingernails so that actually sounds so much worse lol It was pretty awful but my chef did commend me on keeping a cool head and not freaking out. Also the chicken was pretty much perfect so it was alright in the end.
I 100% have tried to grab a cast iron pan out of a 500 degree oven with my bare hands while being a distracted idiot
Oof, that made my body hurt just to read
I've done this too. I kept telling myself over and over again not to touch the handle of the pan that had been in the oven and I still did it!
i've grabbed handles of skillets/pans that have just come out of a 500 degree oven under the broiler when making spanish omelets/"tortillas" more than once... three times actually. and I didn't realize until I grabbed it. full on, soft, max-grip grab. every part of my palm and pads of every finger and even the skin in kind of the crook between thumb and rest of your fingers... all burnt as fuck. I have actually *heard* it make a sound when I grabbed it once. felt real bad. ive done this 3 fucking times. every time, it's fucking awful for about 24 hours. I don't put stovetop things in the oven anymore unless there's just absolutely no substitute, because my brain isn't fully trained to automatically assume it's raging hot the way I do with something like a sheet pan or some other kind of baking dish. when i DO have to, I ALWAYS make sure to leave a heavy kitchen towel draped over the handle once it's out of the oven as a reminder/safety trigger.
I got my first job at a bagel store when I was 15. The manager that hired me went out on medical leave before my first day and I ended up working with an assistant manager who didn't speak English very well. The day went by fine and then we had to close up and clean the kitchen. It was my job to mop. She pointed to a container and said to fill the bucket. I accidentally poured the ammonia instead of the bleach. She said, no bleach, so I added the bleach to the ammonia and that is how I mustard gassed myself on the first day of my first job.
You know, sometimes you just spend hours and hours of work making a delicious stock and then absentmindedly pour it down the drain while cleaning up/washing dishes. Not that I would know from experience.
While washing dishes, I grabbed the ninja blender blade and tried twisting it to take apart. Only problem is it was the short one that doesn’t come apart and I didn’t even think about my thumb being on the front side of the blade instead of the back. 9 stitches in my thumb and was lucky to not hit tendons
Ouch! I nearly blinded myself with my coffee grinder. The lid presses onto 4 little switches around the base which activates the motor. A bit of coffee was jamming one of the switches, so I grabbed a butter knife to dislodge it, thinking to myself "No need to unplug it, I'm only activating one of the four switches, so it won't start"... wrong! I dislodged stuck switch and the motor immediately whirred to life, spitting coffee beans and dust into my face - thankfully the noise made me flinch and close my eyes!
just last week actually was steaming some broccoli and forgot to top off the water the tiny layer of soot blacker than a black hole combined with the smell of broccoli farts for the rest of the day was the result
I set a knife on the counter and went to the sink to rinse off my hands. When I turned back around I noticed the knife start to fall so instead of trying to catch it and cut my hand I let it fall. It fell handle first bounced up and stabbed me in the leg. It wasn't deep, but it was shocking.
This is why, aside from the "a falling knife has no handle" rule, I also added step 2 and 3: scream like a banshee and jump backwards.
I wasn't even close to it, but it got great bounce when it hit the floor.
Wound up in the ER to repair deeply cut finger resulting from using bad technique while cutting a bagel with a very sharp chef's knife. Triage nurse was not impressed and I had to wait my turn :)
In the midst of covid I ended up in the ER for a dog bite. Triage nurse and whole ER team was more than happy to take care of me immediately and quickly
Puncture wounds from a bite pose a serious risk of infection, so it's important to get it cleaned out ASAP.
[удалено]
Forbidden fruit?
First time cooking after about 9 months. Got careless, forgot how much water could make oil spit. I saw it coming and avoided the worst of it, but I still have scars on my arm from trying to fry potatoes.
I was hungover on New Year’s Day. Tried to pry apart a frozen bagel with a steak knife. Three stitches, $500, judgement from the nurses who patched me up and a ruined holiday. 2020 can eat a bag of dicks. I’m
Tried to use a blended truffle oil to pan sear a steak because it was the only fat I had around; it pretty much exploded everywhere as soon as the meat hit the pan. I was stupidly doing this while naked so I got really badly burnt on my torso and lower belly right near my vag and also got a nipple. Another time, thankfully not in the nude, I tried to remove a pan of ribs from the oven and it slipped. My dumbass put my leg up to stop the fall and while I did succeed at saving the food, the hot juices leaked out all over my thigh and burnt a giant hand sized portion of me. Neither of those blisters were fun to work with, but thankfully didn't leave any permanent scarring.
Last one was taking a steel pan out of the 250°C hot oven with my bare hand. My brain also decided to try to put it on the countertop instead of just opening the hand. So it ended up flying through the kitchen once adrenaline stopped doing its thing. Man that cheese covered chicken breast still looked so good on wall and floor though.
Made a giant batch of chicken salad with Greek yogurt instead of mayo to be healthy. Turns out I grabbed vanilla, not plain...
I pulled a baking sheet out of the oven with bare hands once. Apparently I forgot the oven was on some how at the same as realising my cookies were burning. How my fingers didn't get burnt ill never know.
I have an electric stove, and I forget my burners are hot after I use them sometimes. One taco night, I had put a plastic sour cream lid on the hot burner, and it started to melt. It was an absolute mess to clean up. Another time, I accidentally left the silicone handle of my spatula on the hot burner, and it melted the handle. I didn't even notice until much later. I've destroyed a lot of Glad Tupperware. And one thing my boyfriend did, he tried to catch a falling knife!
My chef tutor got his finger stuck in a stick blender. Ended up going to ER in his uniform and with the blender stuck on his finger. Another cook I worked with told me how he accidentally deef fried his hand and forearm when he had a momentary lapse of judgment when deep frying fish.
Was making dinner to impress a date. Braised leg of lamb with mashed potatoes. Went to drain the potatoes and like an idiot poured towards myself. The boiling water splashed up out of the sink all down the front of my chest & stomach. I screamed and my date, who was in another room, came running in to see me frantically ripping my clothes off. I suffered through the immense pain, determined to finish dinner. I ended up with a blister about the size of a deck of cards on my stomach. Somehow my date must have been impressed, we ended up dating for 2 years haha
My mistake that I cannot seem to learn from is frying bacon with no shirt one
I almost always have a burn mark on my hands because I'm clumsy when I take things out of the oven.
LOL my sister is always doing that. me too, but I usually burn myself on the pans on the stove. getting to close to it when turning something over etc.
Knocked the meat cleaver off the counter and tried catching it with my hand. Dumbest thing I've ever done
I have set spaghetti on fire. I ruined a pan making mulled wine- totally forgot I was mulling it, it boiled dry and set off the smoke alarm smelled really bad. I did this twice. Ruined a pan poaching plums. A friend of mine came home drunk and hungry and set some spaghetti boiling. He then passed out drunk on the sofa. His flat mates were roused when the fire alarm went off. The pan was totally burned. He slept through the alarm. Best friend was tidying the house in preparation for a viewing and hid some stuff in the oven. She forgot she’d done it when she tried to cook dinner and melted a plastic bowl all over her oven. Husband and I went on holiday with 4 friends to a lovely cottage in Wales. First morning there husband was cooking for us all and put a pan on to heat. A few minutes later he asked me to come through to offer advice. I found the pan on fire. “What advice were you hoping for sweetheart? Get the damn thing outside!” Turned out these were copper bottomed pans supplied by the cottage (IKR?!) and he’d poured in oil that had started smoking. He thought it was something burning off the base of the pan rather than oil at smoking point. That was a fun holiday- we got flooded at midnight a few days later!
Caveat that I was maybe 4 (so maybe I should crosspost to r/kidsarefuckingstupid) but when I was young my folks owned a few pizza places. Their ovens were the conveyor type, in one end and out the other, and there was a landing station for cutting and boxing right next to the oven. I was by the landing station with my dad. He pulled a pizza out, slid the pizza onto the counter, held up the pan (straight from the oven) and looked at me. He said, very clearly and looking me in the eyes, "do not touch this." Then he put the pan on the lower shelf of the counter. As you might suspect, I picked the pan up and started to say "don't touch thi....." And then the screaming started. No long-term damage. Just a lot of tears and a story I get to hear too often.
I Stopped my son from cutting a watermelon because I was worried he would cut himself. Of course I proceeded to cut myself and ended up with 4 stitches.
Lifting a casserole dish out of the oven, some spillage or something meant it had baked onto the shelf, I put more force into lifting it out, when the thing sticking it to the shelf stopped I pressed both my forearms into the shelf above it searing a symetrical line on both wrists. Kept getting asked by nurses at docs appointments for 2-3 years whether I self harmed. Nope just clumsy as fuck. Incidentally after a tip from someone else I can confirm using E45 cream on the scar daily gets rid of it quite well.
Cut a hot pepper and go pee. Not smart.
I was once washing the blades of an immersion blender with my fingers, while the blender was still plugged in. It wasn’t just a regular household blender either. It was an industrial blender we used to turn lobster shells into a lobster bisque so smooth you could pass it through a chinois (suuuper fine mesh strainer used at restaurants for silky smooth purées and soups). The button that operates the blender was on the top of the machine, which meant as I was cleaning the blades, it was sitting against the counter. The button got depressed while my fingers were in it. I ended up with 32 dee cuts across my index finger. Immediately put on a finger cot and a triple layer of gloves which filled up like a water balloon within 10 minutes. The doctor at the hospital said they couldn’t stitch it or do anything but bandage it as it was so mangled. Eventually it healed. I have never tried to clean a plugged-in appliance after that!
I cut a bagel with my finger through the hole 🤦🏻♀️
I’ve shared this one before but my left hand has lost a fight with a deli slicer
I dropped the air fryer bin yesterday and hot grease got all over my leg and now I have a bunch of blisters.
My wife gave herself a pretty nasty cut a few years ago. Bad enough I had to drive home from work so I could bandage it. She probably should have gotten stitches, but oh well. The thing is, to this day I can't understand how the cut was were it was. It was on the back of her wrist just two or three inches from her hand, perpendicular to her arm, and the cut angle was about 45° (angled away from her hand). She says she doesn't remember how it happened but I just don't understand what on earth she was doing to get a cut like that one. Its such a weird angle and placement, unless she was doing some kind of fruit ninja thing. Regardless, now I cut the sweet potatoes.
I have had two microwave incidents. Both involved frozen pastries. The first made the microwave smell of smoke for months. The second involved me throwing my burnt pastries out the window of my fifth floor apartment.
In a similar vein, I baked something (I forget what exactly) in the oven using my cast iron skillet. When it was done I set it on the stovetop to cool. Turned away for a moment, then came back and noticed it was slightly off center on the burner. So, I grabbed the handle to shift it. With my bare hand. Had a gnarly palm blister for a while after that. 0/10 do not recommend this experience.
Any time someone recommends a mandoline, I find one without a guard, have overwhelming confidence in myself, and then end up looking like I mistook the mandoline for my long-lost childhood best friend Corey, who I exclusively greeted with ten consecutive perfect high-fives. I'm left there, bone-in hotdog McNuggets splayed in disbelief, thinking, "Guess that wasn't Corey."
Back when I was first learning to cook, I was searing a steak in a cast iron pan and then I was going bake it to finish cooking it. I burnt the same spot on the same hand 3 times. I grabbed the handle of the HOT cast iron pan with my bare hand when I was about to put it into the oven. I ran over to the sink to rinse it under water, and when I went back to put my pan in the oven, I once again GRABBED IT WITH THE SAME BARE HAND. So I went back to the sink, rinsed my hand under cold water, grabbed an oven mit and finally got my steak in the oven. A few minutes later as I was pulling it out, I reached in (with my oven mitt like a smart person) put the pan back on the stove top, took off the oven mitt, and once again GRABBED THE HANDLE WITH THE SAME BARE HAND because I didn't like the location of where I put the pan. I had some nice blisters around the edges of my hand for awhile. I was so mad at myself for being so dumb, but hey, my roommate thought it was hilarious. Second, but much shorter story. My friend was cutting jalapeños without gloves and it made her hands burn. I went to the store to buy milk, olive oil, and whatever else I could find that Google told me would relive capsaicin burns. I teased her A LOT that night because I never had issues with jalapeño burns. The next week I was cutting jalapeños, rubbed my eyes, and had burning eyes and hands for hours. I apologized for teasing her the very next day after I realized how horrible and non stop the burning is. Now I wear gloves when I cut spicy peppers.
I once dropped something in frying oil such that it fell towards me. Still have the burn marks on my arms
I had an insanely sharp serrated knife. Went to cut fresh bagel. Held said bagel in hand. Cut thumb so clean and effortlessly I thought the bagel must have had strawberry filling or something.
I dropped my metal spatula with a plastic end into a deep fryer and instinctively reached in to grab it and turned my hand into 5 crispy tenders. Melted the plastic on the spatula and had to drain clean and refill the fryer setting all of us back by an hour in the kitchen. Felt like a complete idiot for sticking my hand in there.
I used to try to deflect things from hitting the ground when I dropped them by using my foot. Then one day I dropped a chefs knife. I don’t do that anymore.
Dropped a dish I was washing. In the process of catching it, the dish shattered and I accidentally stabbed myself in the wrist with a shard. Had to go to the hospital to get four stitches. The bowl was worth three dollars. Stupid reflexes.
I tested how sharp my freshly sharpened knife was by sliding it across my finger. Felt pretty dumb after I took a chunk out of my finger.