Nancy Leson's wild romance with the Instant Pot grew too steamy for husband Mac to tolerate. "Every time you vent that thing it's taking the paint off the ceiling. " Solution: Put the pot on the gas stove where the big overhead hood can catch the steam.
What could go wrong?
I consoled Nancy by predicting that within six months most Instant Pots will be gathering dust in basements, anyway. She disagrees but of course she's obligated to. After her I-P disaster, Nance contacted her Facebook friends to hear their tales of kitchen fails.
One guy confessed that he'd attempted to extinguish his flaming toaster by pouring water into it. And there were plenty more.
Allegra: "I left a Pyrex baking dish on the back burner of the stove and then turned on said burner on accident instead of the front one (I'd just moved and the knobs were in opposite places). Luckily I was not in the kitchen when the dish exploded in a hail of shrapnel. It was in the walls all around, I found it in cabinets, and it took out a pane of a built in china hutch."
Abbie: "Leaving a pot on the stove boiling to make hard-boiled eggs and leaving to go see Gone With the Wind. Oh the smell, and lucky the building didn't burn down."
Vickie: "Pulled a Pampered Chef stoneware cooking sheet out of the oven. Sheet with 6 chick breasts on it, exploded into a bazillion pieces all over stove, kitchen and me. The sound was amazing as were the places I found pieces of chicken weeks later...."
Linda: "First time I had my hubby’s family for dinner, recipe called for 6 cloves of garlic, I put in 6 heads of garlic!" To which Bruce Burger replied "I thought this thread was for kitchen fails, not strokes of genius!"
It even happens to the pros
Philadelphia Chef Derek Davis: "My wife, baby and I had just moved into the apartment above my first restaurant. So tired from the move we ordered a pizza. By the time it arrived it was cold so we put it in the brand new oven. In five minutes the whole place was engulfed in smoke, I opened the oven and pieces of charred paper flew out and there were chunks of styrofoam on fire. It seemed that I had never taken the packing materials out. I was telling this story to someone in a coffee shop a few years later and was overheard by a gossip writer from the Philadelphia Inquirer. The next Sunday the incident was in the newspaper and I caught quite a bit of public ridicule. I even had a cop pull me over just to laugh in my face! True story."
"Murphy never sleeps."
