105.5 Triple M - Hell's In Your Kitchen

Hell's In Your Kitchen

Thanks for submitting your kitchen nightmares!

One lucky listener received a grand prize package which includes a trip for two from Madison to Los Angeles, a hotel stay at The London Hotel in West Hollywood, and $250 gift certificate and reservations to Chef Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant.

Below are some of the winning entries:

Grand Prize Winner: Kristi from Middleton
When I was in college my friends and I took a summer sublet apartment. It was the upper of a dubious old house. Not much worked right, to say the least. One night I thought I would impress my boyfriend by cooking him a homemade meal. At the time my specialty was spaghetti and meatballs. Boil noodles, head can of sauce with frozen meatballs. Serve. Expanding my horizons, I also planned to make one of those frozen loaves of French bread. Pre-garlic-buttered, of course. I started the noodles and sauce on the stove top and turned on the gas oven to preheat. Five minutes later I opened the oven door to check if it was hot enough yet. Think about how you open you oven door, when it’s one of those free-standing models: you open door, bend down, look in. That’s what I did. That’s when the fireball that exploded out of the oven caught me right in the face. At the hospital they wanted to know if I’d been playing with fireworks, because it was the 5th of July. I said I hadn’t. Besides, it wasn’t just my face that was burned. On the back of my head were charred little balls of melted hair globs. My boyfriend-I do think I impressed him- said the flame came out about four feet. It burned my eyebrows, my eyelashes and my bangs. Aside from a lot of unwanted hair removal my skin was mostly okay. Except that my nose was one big watery blister. The doctor peeled the skin off my nose. I went home looking like a sad, ratty-wigged, alopecia-suffering Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Strangely, the expensive restaurant that I worked at didn’t want me to cocktail waitress for a while. My landlord? He stopped by to tell me that I didn’t really look all that bad. And since he tried to fix the oven himself we just went on not using it. Oddly enough, the entire house burnt down eight months later. We didn’t live there by then and no one was home. It was spring break.

Qualifying Entrant: Greg from Madison
I was making a four-pepper chili recipe. As I was chopping the peppers, I suddenly sliced into the tip of my little finger. After bleeding through about five band-aids, I decided I needed to go to Urgent Care. I left my wife a note telling her what had happened. She got home and saw the note and a blood trail and began to worry. I returned home safely with a bandaged finger, but after all that, the doctor told me that I could not eat the chili because the peppers in it would interfere with my clotting. P.S.: I never found the sliced off finger tip.

Qualifying Entrant: Kaianna from Madison
A “few” years back, I was invited to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. The first mistake I made was to accept the invitation; the second mistake was that I arrived on time. I strolled into the house at 5pm and found that several of the house mates were in the kitchen making breakfast. Most of the guests and roommates were musicians and they were probably still partying from the night before. The good news was someone had thought ahead and had the turkey in the oven, the bad news as that the giblets were still inside the turkey (in the paper wrap) and the oven was only 250 degrees. At this point I realized that no one but me seemed very interested in having a meal that day so I asked if it would be okay if I took over the cooking. Then proceeded to whip up a totally fantastic feast with what I could scrap together. There was something totally magical about being able to create something wonderful from what seems like nothing. Although we didn’t eat until after midnight it was one of the best meals I ever made.

Qualifying Entrant: Marla from Madison
One night for dinner I made some especially delicious breaded pork chops. I browned them in butter flavored Pam and finished them in the oven. As I was cleaning up I wondered why the lemon Pledge was sitting on the stove. Then I realized I didn’t have any butter flavored Pam. I had browned and then sprayed the oven pan with lemon Pledge. I called poison control and they recommended I didn’t use that on a regular basis. Too bad because it tasted great.

Qualifying Entrant: Jennifer from Middleton
I had made a casserole that bubbled over and spilled out all over the oven. I thought it would be a good idea to activate the self-cleaning feature. I walked away and came back a little later because I smelled smoke. There was a raging fire in my oven. I called for my husband who rushed in with a fire extinguisher, but he couldn’t get the oven open to put out the fire. (The oven door locks in the self-cleaning mode). He finally forced the oven door open and put out the fire while I stood outside in the evening cold on our deck with our two young children who were a little freaked out. Needless to say, the house reeked of smoke so we ended up going out to eat. Our oven door was bent and broken beyond repair. We had to buy a new oven. Turns out when a fire starts in the oven in the self-cleaning mode, you are just supposed to let it burn itself out.