I’ve related a few of my worst mishaps in the main cooking thread. . .
The Legend of the Curry Tornado:
So my Preethi brand Indian Mixer-Grinder is fuckin magical. It’s ludicrously powerful, has two blending cups and a bunch of blades and shit, and wasn’t very pricy at all. On the other hand, it has exactly zero safety features. Press switch, blades move, no questions asked.
So I had made myself some chicken tikka masala. And as I put my stick blender into the pot to blitz it smooth (gf hates to find onion or tomato pieces in her food) before adding the chicken, I realized my stick blender was broken.
Curry’s barely below boiling hot, it’s already like 8PM, and gf is hungry and cranky. So am I.
So I slop it all into the big cup of the Preethi. The lid just fits on with a thin cheap rubber ring to stop most leaks. But it’s just push on/pull off. Not exactly the tightest seal.
I recognize this is stupid. I recognize it’s phenomenally stupid. So I toss it in the fridge for five minutes to cool, wrap a towel completely around it, and then push the lid down with my full body weight while turning the switch. Surely that’ll be enough!
Of course, it is not enough. A rising torrent of boiling hot curry, half liquefied, comes swirling up the sides of the mixer-grinder, forces the lid partially off, spraying the towel and quickly me with a jet of pure lava. Shrieking, i fall back, barely managing to flip the switch off, but not before the lid just comes rocketing off as a tornado of curry hell swirls up, skyward toward my vaulted ceiling. Doesn’t quite make it there, so it settles for lazily spiraling outward to coat every fucking surface within 8 feet instead.
Chef pro tip: turmeric-laced curry stains carpet like a motherfucker (I was doing the blending on the gigantic island between my kitchen and living room areas. Never had something spray 3 feet clear across it before).
Or perhaps The Curious Case of the Chicken Pasties?
Once, I decided I was gonna make chicken pasties, because I saw a recipe on Youtube and they sounded like an even better version of chicken pot pie (it’s basically just a CPP with like a 2:1 crust:filling ratio! YESSSS). So I dig around for a few recipes and mix and match and decide on one of those fancy modernist cuisine vodka pie crusts (the vodka wettens the dough enough to shape, but the alcohol doesn’t form gluten with the flour like pure water would, leading to a more tender crust).
Except somewhere along the lines after my food processor produced a sludge altogether like the world’s worst peanut butter when I tried to process cold butter and shortening into my flour, I managed to mix up tbsp and oz on my miniature measuring up (I normally use it for mixed drinks for the gf, and thus default to the oz side). Thus, instead of including the 8 tbsp of vodka recommended by the recipe, I wound up with 16. . .
. . . I tried dumping more flour and butter into it, but it was for naught, and I had to start from scratch, including a trip to the liquor store to get more vodka, since I’d used up all I had in the house on the last go around.
To add insult to injury, when all was said and done and the pasties were made (hideous, malformed lumps of crust that they were, due to being homemade), my gf and I learned that she apparently hates savory pies because her brain can’t get over the mental disconnect of having something savory come out of a shape that is “supposed” to be sweet!
Goddammit.
Then there’s the time I made my first curry out of ingredients I hated, or the time I melted my favorite Gamecube controller when it fell behind my precariously situated toaster oven while trying to cook in a cramped single room dorm in college, or the time I shattered a bottle of Thai black soy sauce all over my kitchen and self while making stir fry for lunch on break from work. . .