I love deep fried turkey, I've had it down south and it's delicious, but talk about a potential kitchen disaster?

Here's a link: Deep Fried Turkey Disaster

I'v only recently heard many say that deep fried turkey is really good. I'd try it, but damn, after seeing that video, it'd be just my luck I'd not just burn my house down but probably wipe out my entire family. That's really scary.
Surely there's gotta be an easier way to deep fry a turkey?????


TIS

That video was funny. Haha amateurs

A basic deep frying rule: Never let the oil get very hot.

Whatever it is, keep the heat to the minimum. It takes forever to start getting hot, but once it gets hot, it hardly needs much additional heat to maintain the temperature. You can also avoid food turning into charcoal

Well they did say the turkey was only partially thawed and that's why the huge fireball. All I can say to whomever might try it..follow directions very carefully.

I have had my share of cooking mishaps, and was trying to think of a really different one, but I guess I've had the normal mishaps like burning the roast or undercooking the turkey; one time as a newlywed, we had another couple over for dinner. I had just learned how to make spaghetti sauce. The only problem was I only made enough sauce for two people but cooked enough noodles for four. Needless to say, the pasta was pretty darn dry. Don't know what I was thinking. I must say though, that particular blunder never happened again.

My family in Michigan and my aunt's family still tease me about my famous "lopsided" cake. Don't even ask. I don't know what/how I did it but it was an oblong cake that more or less looked like a hill.

TIS

As much as I love biscuits and gravy, I can't make biscuits to save my life. They come out like paper weights. So I buy

Mig,

I can't make pie crust!! I tried for years and finally gave up. It seems like I'd always have to end up patching it together. I'll buy the frozen crust, it's easier.

I feel I'm better (and more confident) at cooking meals as opposed to desserts. Maybe cause I don't usually care too much for the desserts, I don't know. Yet, I can make chocolate cookies from scratch and those aren't bad.

TIS

TIS,

I'm like you. I'm better at making the meals than making desserts. I don't do the pie crusts either. I buy the frozen ones to. Maybe one of these days I'll try to make one.

Years ago, one of my cousins had company over and bought a couple of those forzen pies. They were very popular in the 70's (I think they still make them). They were chocolate, lemon or banana cream. You simple take them out of the freezer and after a half hour or so serve it, no baking. Anyone she put them in the oven. Talk about liquid pie.

TIS

Frozen pie crusts are disgusting

We nearly always used packaged biscuits and pie crusts. After a continuous series of disasters with the crusts, we gave up and looked around for a good commercial brand. I really think that's the key - experimentation because there is so much to choose from out there.

One pseudo-mishap comes to mind, but it has nothing to do with baking:

Around 15 years ago, I gave my late father and The Bee-yotch (his wife) our recipe for pasta with tuna and olive sauce (I posted it in another thread in this forum). I mailed them the full instructions, and waited to hear how everything turned out.

After a couple of weeks, I still hadn't heard anything, so I called him and asked him what they thought of the tuna sauce recipe. He said it was terrible. I was shocked, to say the least. I asked him if they had followed my directions exactly, and he said they had. Then I asked him if there were problems with the spaghetti. "Spaghetti?" he replied. "Yeah," I said, "What happened with the spaghetti?" There was a silence on the other end of the phone, then he sheepishly confessed that they hadn't made any! He had forgotten all about that part. I gently reminded him that it was a sauce, meant to be served over pasta, and that they should try it once more, but the proper way. But, stubborn person that he was, he wouldn't do it.

After that, I gave up. I don't believe I ever sent him another recipe.

Signor V.

SV,

You're right on the variety of frozen crusts these days. They have some supposedly "easy to roll" dough I have yet to try.

Talking about biscuits, etc, true story from just a couple hours ago. I went to the grocery store with my daughter (the one with 3 kids). She's loading up the cart and gets some frozen mini pancakes. She makes a comment about how she's not making the "homemade" kind......"I said you mean like Aunt Jemima where you just add water?" She said "yes". I cracked up and said, "that's not homemade. Homemade is buying the proper flour and making literally from scratch. We both got a good laugh.

TIS

Megan makes homemade pie crusts from scratch. I don't really like sweets or pies that much but her Peach pie (fresh peaches) was....I don't know what to call it, awesome and wonderful don't do it justice...

I started using the Pillsbury Pie Crust and Pepperidge Farm Pastry Sheets rather than go through the agony of making my own. The pie crust can be bought where you pick up the biscuits. It's so much easier, and they are very tasty.

Me too, Babe, pride be damned!

I do the same thing with pizza dough. There are several local pizzerias that are happy to sell me the dough, one or two at a time. This way, it never goes into the plastic bags, like say--Addeo's, in the supermarkets.

Always fresh.

Pride be damned is right! The pie crusts are very good, and I use the Pepperidge Farm Pastry Sheets for my favorite, no-brainer - Brie en croute (think I spelled that right), although that did lead to a cooking mishap once. I forgot to "vent" the brie after I took it out of the oven. When my guests sliced into it, they brie poured out all over the place, just like lava.

I don't think it takes very long to make a pie crust from scratch, maybe Megan just makes it look easy.

I've never heard of the Brie stuff you're talking about, SB.

It's really good, LN. You wrap a round brie in a pastry sheet, matching all the ends. Then you put it in the oven, end side down, until the pastry browns. When you take it out of the oven, put a vertical slice in the top to allow it to vent. Do this about 20 minutes or so before you serve it so that you avoid the "brie lava" that I experienced. It's a very simple thing to serve your guests and it's more impressive than plain cheese and crackers.

Cooking mishap - I wanted a two egg omelette today. I got everything ready (scrambling the eggs, lightly oiled the pan, etc.) and poured the eggs into the pan after a few minutes.... it wasn't cooking.

I could feel the heat and couldn't understand "why" it wasn't cooking.

Then it hit me.... I turned on the wrong burner on the stove.

What is Brie en croute?

See my post above SC's. It's all explained there.

I was cleaning the stove top yesterday and needed to rest my free hand on something, so I reached to touch the oven, forgetting my daughter was cooking brownies. OUCH!

Sounds like something I would do. Have you ever put a pan of biscuits in the oven and forget to turn it on?

I did that with dinner a couple weeks ago. I mashed potatoes, steamed the veggies and waited for the meat to get done. I turned the timer on, but didnt' bother turning the oven on.

If I had the money and didn't want to weigh 220 pounds I'd just eat out every night.

There was one very serious cooking mishap that happened when I was a little over two years old. In fact, it is possibly my earliest memory.

We lived in a small house in the suburbs, and it happened one afternoon when my father was at work.

I was with my mother, and we were both in the kitchen. She was making preparations for dinner, and was preheating the oven. After several minutes, she checked the oven and noticed that it was not lit. So, she opened the oven door to relight it. I was standing quite near her. She didn't realize that the gas had built up within the oven, and as she bent over and struck the match all the gas ignited with what I can only describe as a noise like a huge explosion. A literal wall of flame shot out of the oven over my mother and me. The fireball was huge, but it only lasted around a second or two - we were burned, but not set on fire. I ran screaming out of the house through the kitchen's side door absolutely convinced my mother had been killed. Nobody could possibly live through that, I thought. Neighbors found me still screaming in the backyard, holding my hands to my face to try and stop the pain from the burns.

Amazingly enough, the burns were actually minor, and we were both okay in a few days. But, at the time, to a two-year-old, it seemed like the end of the world.

Signor V.

Wow...they had electricity back then?

That's a scary story, Signor V. Your mother must have been worried. What kind of burns did you both have?

Those brief fireballs are something else. On a much smaller scale, I was once cooking on a grill at a picnic/fundraiser, and lifted the top of the grill, and saw nothing but a sudden, brief wall of flame all around. I didn't feel a thing, other than a rush of surprise, but seconds afterward someone asked me, "Where did your eyebrows go?"

Sr. Vitelli's story reminds me of a similar one of my own. My ex and I bought a house in 1980. One of its main selling points to us was its modern, well equipped kitchen. It had a six burner stove with two ovens and we were anxious to try it. The day we moved in I went to light the oven, holding a match to the oven's pilot light, but it didn't light. I tried the other oven. Same result. I couldn't figure it out until ALL OF A SUDDEN the oven went on.... we'd never had a self-igniting oven before.

It was a gas stove - still the best way to cook as far as I'm concerned.



The burns were first-degree and our hair and eyebrows were a bit singed. My mother also sprained her wrist because she fell over when the flames flashed. She got the worst of it - she was kneeling down right in front of the open oven door while I was standing a couple of feet to her right, watching her.

My father came home as fast as he could and we both saw the doctor that day. I remember we were given some sort of salve for the burns, and my mother's wrist was bandaged. She was told to rest in bed for a few days, which she did.

All in all, probably the scariest moment of my young life.

Signor V.

This isn't a cooking mishap, but it's along the same line of discussion with exploding fire and gas...

I used to work for a hotel as a bellman/valet and every room had a gas fireplace that burned real wood. People often times couldn't figure out how to light the fireplace so they would call for help.

I learned early on that when the guest says "Oh, I turned the gas off" they probably turned it all the way up.

I went to light the fireplace for them and like SV said, it was like a wall of flame shot towards me. Fortunately my eyebrows were in tact, but the hair on my hands and about half way up my arms were completely gone! It all happened so fast and really didn't hurt, but it was amazing how fast the hair disappeared!

Not to depart from the topic, but it is amzing how quickly hair burns.

When I was in college, I remember being in a bar one night with friends and while one of my buddies with a full, thick head of hair was talking to a girl, another friend lit his hair on fire. It went up in flames so fast that we snuffed it out. The girl screamed, but the guy whose head was ablaze was wondering why we were smacking him in the head. Most of his hair was gone.