Armchair Anonymous: Cooking Disaster II

0:28Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. Good times, take them slow. My life, I had them old. But one thing you gotta know, I'm gonna keep on shining.

0:46Hello? Hi! Where are you? I think you may know the town that I'm from, Brevard, North Carolina, west of Asheville. Oh! Oh! I bet I've ridden through there. The land of waterfalls. Wait, is that where Looking Glass Falls is? Yep, sure is. About 10 minutes from where I'm at right now. Oh, lovely. We were just there. Yeah, you've given some good shout outs to the area. We appreciate it. Okay, so you have a cooking disaster story. I do, yeah. So this happened about three years ago in March. Our daughter at the time was turning three and my wife was about eight months pregnant. And she was going through a big pancake phase.

1:24And so we thought we're going to throw her a pancake brunch. Nice. We'll invite some family and friends over, which seemed like a great idea. It was a great idea. She likes straight flapjacks or she likes chocolate chip. What was her jam? The weird thing is she doesn't like syrup. Still, we can't get her to eat syrup, but she loves a pancake, chocolate chips or fruit. Keep her off the syrup. If she don't want it, that's great. It's her one excuse to be able to eat a sweet. And she's like, nope. Oh, yeah. Day of. Everything is going to plan. Pretty much everything is done. The family arrives, surprisingly going off without a hitch.

1:57And can I ask quickly, like a mechanical question? Have you put a big flat top grilling surface on something? What are we cooking on? Yeah, we're cooking on a griddle primarily. And then we're in our kitchen. So we've got a stove. And so I decided I'm going to do some bacon and I'll cook it in a sheet pan sort of in bulk, which I wouldn't normally do. Being from the South, we make breakfast all the time. I grew up in a family where biscuits and gravy every weekend. Oh, yeah. Wow. Jealous. No problem with cooking a great breakfast. But on this day, obviously, there's more people showing up, probably about 20 people or so, kids, family.

2:29And so I thought, OK, I'm going to put this bacon in a sheet pan and cook it in bulk. And that'll be the quickest way to get the job done. How much bacon are we talking in pounds? Probably two pounds, three pounds, maybe. Not a crazy amount, but enough to fill probably two sheet pans. We're almost to the point of everybody having their brunch, eating pancakes. The bacon is the last thing to kind of come out of the oven. And around that time, the family shows up, kids are playing. It's a little bit of a compact kitchen. So, you know, my mother and mother-in-law are in the kitchen. Of course, they're like, what can we do to help?

2:59Where does this go? Where does that go? And it just gets a little chaotic around family as it tends to do. So I go to reach for the bacon, open the oven. And I guess I'm just so focused. I pull it out probably a little quicker than I should. And just ever so slightly tilted it back towards me. Entire pan of bacon grease spills down my forearm. Oh, fuck. I can feel that. Obviously, there's the initial shock reaction. Drop the pan immediately. Kind of freak out a little bit. There actually wasn't a ton of pain, which is also maybe a little scarier than, you know, you don't really know what you've done in the moment.

3:37I rush to the sink, start to rinse my arm off. And this is where my wife swoops in to save the day. She's a nurse, comes in handy on a lot of occasions. And so, yeah, she helps me get this thing washed off. And I think at the moment I'm trying to just keep as calm as possible. You know, there's kids around. I don't want to freak my daughter out. And it sort of becomes evident what I've done almost immediately. My arm starts to like blister and bubble up. By this time, my daughter finds out. And of course she like runs over. And I mean, she's going to have to be in health care like her mom because she's like immediately interested.

4:10Not scared at all. Not concerned. Just like wants to know what's going on. And she also shifts into take care of dad mode. Oh, so sweet. It is. Yeah. If you had a boy, you would have been like, where's my baseball bat? He would have like run his little trucks over your arm. Yeah, yeah. Totally. I think Rob may have sent you a photo. Oh, he did. He did. Let's see. And we always wait. He said, turn it. Yeah, he wants me to do a full like a fly. Oh!

4:40That's horrible. Oh, my God. The first photo is where my arm sort of bubbled up immediately. We got it patched and taken care of essentially for the weekend until I could get to the doctor. Fortunately, the surgeon that works in our practice was there on that Monday or Tuesday and just had to scrape off the whole thing. It wasn't incredibly painful until that moment. And that's sort of when it like really got real, you know. Can I ask why they have to scrape it off? That's a terrible question for me to answer. Maybe they just clean it and put an ointment on there or something. I think that's essentially it.

5:15I'm really sad that the listener can't see it because what's so freaky about it, and I've never seen a burn like this, the burn has the drip marks. It looks like liquid, the burn. You see this, Monty, on the right? Yeah, I do. Wow. It came up my wrist and wrapped around the wrist there, around the thumb. Do you have a scar? Shockingly, it healed up really well. I'll credit my wife for jumping into action quickly. We probably have more medical supplies around the house than the typical household, thankfully. And she just got it patched up quick. And I was pretty religious about putting ointment on it for six weeks.

5:52Of course, my daughter wanted to help with that as well. So I've got a nice reminder every day to take care of your arm, daddy. Oh, my. That's rough. For the listener, if you saw this, you would know to never cook bacon ever again. Yeah, it was a little while before I decided to give that a go. I still haven't cooked bacon in a sheet pan. I mean, how is one supposed to remove that sheet pan with all that hot grease underneath? Were you wearing oven mitts? I had a towel in my hand, which is par for the course. I'm kind of act first, think second kind of guy, unfortunately. Oh, I'm so lazy. I've used like paper towels on the counter.

6:28I can get it out in time before that cooks through. A dish towel is what the chefs do. They don't use oven mitts. But you have to really be a chef. And you have to be confident in your skills. You do. I use oven mitts. You do. But you also like the decor of the oven mitts. Yeah, they're cute. The thing I live in the most fear of in these burn situations is when you hear people where the skin just rolls off. Yeah, I was a little nervous that was what I was in for. There's a few seconds that pass between when it happens and when you start to realize what you've actually done. I mean, it was rough, but it thankfully was not that sort of situation.

7:04this is a PSA because I would definitely try that like if I didn't hear the end of the story I'd be like oh that's a hack cook the bacon in the oven exactly no yeah don't do it get it all done I was even thinking while you're telling like oh I even had a grate I would add a little grate between the cookie sheet and the bacon so that it wouldn't be sitting in the oil I think I did have a grate on the pan which I thought that's a great idea but obviously the grease is still in the pan yeah It sure is. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Slowly and carefully remove and make sure it's level. So how old is baby now?

7:35She's almost six and baby number two, almost three. Oh, sweet. Oh, congratulations. Another girl? Two girls. Wouldn't have it any other way. Now go get you a vasectomy because you don't want three. Yeah, already taken care of. Okay, good job. Just pour a little hot grease down there. That could also. Might do the trick as well. Let's do a prompt. Accidental vasectomies. Unauthorized vasectomies. Not contribute to that. Well, thanks for sharing. Yeah, Seth, it's lovely meeting you. This is great. Thank you guys so much. Would you mind if I let my wife come say hi? We'd love to meet your wife. The nurse, we love nurses.

8:17We're going to ask her some medical questions. Hello. Hi. Oh, I'd be delighted if you were the nurse that walked in the room. Look how cheery she looks. Yeah. I have a question. Do you think I could maybe get my ears repierced even though it's gone rancid twice? It doesn't seem like a smart move. Oh, man. I would love to say yes as a girl. I'm like, heck yeah. Yeah. But, you know. Okay. I trust you. What's your name? My name is Casey. Casey, you know the old adage, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on you. We're already at the shame on me part. The third would be like, shame, I'm a fucking dum-dum.

8:53No, that's why third would be shame on Casey. That's why I asked. Well, I mean, Dax has already had to operate once. He did. Once or twice. Have I done two? Well, finger, ear. Always jewelry related. Yeah. How long have you been nursing? It'll be almost 13 years. You guys are the best. Thanks. Well, I think one thing Seth forgot to mention was whenever the grease thing happened, you know, he's being very stoic. He's fine. He's fine. He's fine. And I look over at him and he starts to turn that white yellow color. And I was like, no, you need to sit down. He's like, I'm fine. I was like, sit down and eat something.

9:29I probably handed him a pancake at that point. Smart. Don't faint on me. Good job. I don't need to deal with a head injury. I already have like 20 people at the house. And here we are with this pretty severe burn. And let's pass out on top of all of it. Yeah. What if you pass out onto the sheep pan? Oh, my God. Face first. Oh, my God. Jesus. That was like a Mr. Bean movie or something. Oh, wow. Well, thank you, guys. It's lovely meeting you. Thanks. And I think we need to shout out Angie, too. Angie is Seth's college friend who got us his arm cherries. Oh, shout out Angie. Oh! You're wearing a beautiful piece of merch.

10:05He got me this for Christmas. I love it. Oh, good job, Seth. I went to get him a shirt and went on the website. And that's actually where we saw the props. I was like, this is perfect. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Two birds. We're out of shirts, unfortunately, at that point. But it's OK. I got one, so it's all that matters. We're sold out of shirts? Yeah, we sold out. Oh, my God. But we might re-up, so we'll keep you guys updated. What do you mean we might? We must. Okay. Okay, we're going to re-up. We're going to sidebar about this. All right, lovely meeting you guys. Bye. Bye, guys. Do you think it's sad?

10:37Like, they hand over their headphones to their partner, and then they just have to sit, and they, like, don't know what is being said, and it's like, I'm left out now. I do think that. I don't want to get in another round of technical difficulties, but I almost want to say, like, just pull your headphones out so that you guys can now just chat. And we can all be in this together. Yeah, but we don't want to do that. We like when people are left out. Something to work through. Too dangerous. Sarah. Mile a while for me. Sarah. If you want to be free. Hi. All you got to do is say so. How annoyed are you or how much do you love Sarah Smile?

11:20Honestly, I've never heard that one before. Hall and Oates? I think you have. Probably. It's probably just not a good rendition that Dax is doing. That is definitely the case. I didn't know what you were singing. And I know Sarah Smile. Smile. Won't you smile a while for me, Sarah? I think it's because there's so much other band stuff going on. The company meant? I was in that movie, in that song. acapella is tough well especially when you're not a good singer sarah where are you i am in the mcdonald's garbage can i am in london ontario oh my god i literally was like you're in a garbage can right now at mcdonald's what is happening it's really funny you bring that up sarah because i was just at my friend kevin zeger's house yesterday and he grew up about 10 minutes i think east of London and his folks were in town for the holidays and I got to tell him how I used to expel my rubbish over there.

12:15And he was saying that London is a wild place when you're young and you go downtown, you can have a real raucous time. Oh yeah. I went to university here and can confirm. So you have a cooking disaster? Yes. So this would have been in the summer of 2013. I was dating my now husband and boyfriend and we were about three hours apart. He was close to London and I was living in Toronto. So I was going to visit him for the weekend. He was living with his parents. His dad was going to do a dinner. All his siblings were going to be there. How long had you been dating? About eight months. So this is a high stakes meeting.

12:49This is the time for you to put your best foot forward. A hundred percent. So the dad's making dinner and I'm like, well, we should do dessert. And so my husband says, let's make lemon meringue pie. That's like a real specific suggestion, but sure. he just had a craving no it's actually his favorite dessert given the choice that's what he picks which seems insane to me but to each their own so we're newly enough into this relationship that i just go along with it yeah yeah okay let's lemon meringue pie i hate lemon meringue pie but let's do it early dating so misleading because you know you wake up like two years later and you're like lemon meringue pie and you're like i hate lemon meringue pie Yeah, we're married now.

13:29How long do you carry it along? Yeah, that's insane. I'm not participating in that. So we go out, we get all the things to make this pie. I find my mother-in-law's pie plate. We're using the like refrigerated crust that you just roll out. We're preheating the oven in this like hundred year old farmhouse that doesn't have central air conditioning. So we've got the oven going. It's really hot in the kitchen. And I'm like, no problem. Let's turn on the ceiling fan. Up to this point in my life, I've never operated a ceiling fan. So I reach up to pull the cord and the whole light fixture comes down.

13:58Oh. Oh my God. Jesus, on your head? That's so scary. It landed on the pie plate and just sort of like bounced off of it. How big is this ceiling fan? Just the light fixture in the center came down from the fan. Okay, not the fan blades. No. So just the light fixture part came down and hit the pie plate vicinity. Nothing broke. We put the light fixture back up, carry on making the pie. and there's nothing else memorable that happened during that dinner until we serve the pie. Uh-oh. I have a terrible yes. Me too, I have a bad idea.

14:47So I'm serving the pie. This is it. This is the first time I've made anything for this family to consume. Quick question. How did it look visually? Did you guys feel like you nailed it? The pie looked great. Yeah. You're like, fuck yeah. Time to show off. Yeah. I've made a lemon meringue pie when I really should have been making a chocolate chip cookies. Yeah. So serving the pie, one piece, two piece, I get to the third piece and the pie does the thing where it flops over onto its side. And my mother-in-law says, it's really weird that it burnt like that. And I'm like, what? it so i look at it and i'm like oh that is weird that it burnt because the bottom of the pie is speckled with burnt dots and so i lift up the whole pie plate and i look and i'm like oh the whole pie is speckled with these burnt dots and then i look a little bit closer and it's dead bugs

15:38hold on hold on that's better i didn't know i know you were ill-prepared you were expecting glass right yeah me too but this is so preferred but not for you no i'd rather you'd rather eat glass i want the glass cooked bugs dead bugs all in your protein edible not sharp no this is a win i think given the situation that makes sense so that thing had so many bugs in it probably as light pictures do and it just came down and we didn't check and it's so much that they could see them all scattered about. And people had already eaten the other three pieces? My youngest brother-in-law, as youngest brother-in-laws do, had inhaled his piece of pie.

16:22Yeah. But he still maintains to this day that it was a great pie. Yeah, sure. I can't imagine this would diminish the taste at all. I would never be able to live knowing I ate all those bugs. I'd be like, serve it up. They're cooked! Ew! Now, did you think when you saw and you were like, oh my god it's full of bugs that i should just protect yeah oh i think i spattered some crisco at the bottom oh you're so nice and honest you're such a good arm cherry i think i would have panicked in the moment and been like oh no you know what the light fell i'm nervous there's glass let's not eat it but i knew that there wasn't glass bugs were so far away in my mind yeah the glass is a red herring that's how it works you're like so worried about an intestinal I would just be for some reason so much more embarrassed to serve a pie with bugs in it than a pie with glass in it.

17:14Really? Yeah. Even though one's potentially life threatening. Yeah. I have to imagine there's someone like me at this party that's like, give me a piece. No, I think they were just trying to follow my lead of like, oh, my God, if we can't eat this pie, there's bugs in this pie. Forget it. Never mind. We should all go home. Oh, my God. That's so disgusting. My mother-in-law asked me, I made pumpkin cookies about a year ago, and she asked me for the recipe. For the first time she'd ever asked me for the recipe I ever made for anything, I was like, I've done it. It took me 12 years, but here we are.

17:48That's great. Did you add some bugs? I was going to say you should have put random insects, presumably mosquitoes and moths. Ew, mosquitoes. Don't listen, Monica, but the reason I knew it was bugs was because I saw a wing. Ew.

18:07I hate this story. It's so funny. I don't mind. I know. I hate bugs and maggots. This is kind of like maggots everywhere. But you got married and everything worked out. We have two kids. No bugs are eaten in our household. Actually, that's not true. My oldest eats ants and there's nothing I can do about it. Oh, my God. Is that a thing? No need to stop. Again, we're omnivores. We're totally fine and equipped to eat ants. I don't want to eat them. You ever watch the chimps eat the ants or termites out of the line with a stick? I attempt to stop her, but she's three years old, so I don't stand a chance.

18:40You should do real ants on a log. Do you guys do ants on a log up in Canada? The celery and the peanut butter and could be raisins, but in this case. Can I just do a quick shout out to my two coworkers? So my coworker, Caroline, got me into Armchair Expert and my coworker, John, has been along on the ride as we both discovered this podcast. Well, big thanks to her. she tripled our listenership in Ontario. Exactly. Good job. Oh, well, Sarah, so nice meeting you. Thank you. So nice to meet you, too. And I promise next time I drive through London, there will be no littering because I know better now.

19:14All right. Take care. I sure love meeting these arm cherries. Here's Emma. I wish Allison Roman would have called in. I wish our Emma was submitting. She never has cooking disasters. She cooks perfectly. hi can you hear us yes i can hear you can you hear me beautifully now did you have fun communicating with emma as emma yes i did actually where are you you seem like a city girl just right away i'm gonna say that i'm in honolulu hawaii oh that's a city how many people live in honolulu i believe on our island it's like a million people and then in the whole state it's like 1.3 Last I checked. Wow.

19:56Okay. Like 90 % of the Hawaiians are living on. Hawaii. I know you guys have vacationed here a couple of times. Love it. One of the best Four Seasons around. Yeah. It's so good. Have you been to that little restaurant with the tiki torches that are burning? It's Italian. It's like outside. Yes, I have. I don't remember the name, but it's really good. And the Four Seasons on the Big Island in Kona is also really awesome. I keep hearing that maybe now that we're talking about it, they'll invite us. I think that might be the one that like charged me. I think you're talking about the Rosewood. Oh, you're right.

20:26You're absolutely right. Good job. You're right. Thank you for saving the course. Don't this much. You know how I feel. And are you from there or did you move there? Born and raised in Honolulu. Yes. I've lived other places, but my whole family's here. My husband's here. My husband's family's here. So it just makes sense to be here right now. Okay, great. Okay, so you have a cooking disaster story. So this story took place back in 2021 when my husband and I had just had our first baby girl. She was about six weeks old. Oh, teeny. She was one of those babies, though, that didn't like to sleep. So we were really sleep deprived.

21:01And my husband was drinking coffee like a madman. So the cooking disaster takes place in the kitchen. I decided to make him coffee. And at the time, we were using a French press. Are you familiar with like how a French press would work? We are. But I think we should say for the listener how it works. OK, so a French press is like a glass beaker of sorts. and it has a little handle and you put ground coffee and you put boiling hot water into the French press. And then it has a cover that you put on top of that boiling water with like a plunger on top. The beaker is probably about maybe eight inches and then the plunger goes up maybe another six to eight inches and you leave it unplunged while the coffee steeps and you plunge it when you're ready to drink that coffee.

21:46Yeah. And it's got a screen filter on the top. So as it goes down, and gets rid of all the grounds and leaves the yummy coffee. Exactly. So I poured from the kettle the boiling hot water into the coffee, and then that coffee made its way over to, we had at the time in the house we were living in, this little breakfast nook, and it was sitting on top of the table. I'm scared. You're about to hear some questionable parenting decisions, but I just want to tell you we were so deprived. Of course. Yeah. We've learned our lesson. So that's just a little disclaimer. You had been a parent for all of 42 days.

22:18if the baby was six weeks old. Yeah, why do they let people just be parents with no training? Pretty great. I don't know. It was too soon for us. My daughter used to sit on this little baby lounger. I won't say the brand, but it was like this little baby lounger pillow. And I went to go hand the baby on the baby lounger pillow, which you're not supposed to do. And then I handed her to my husband who was going to put her down next to him on this nice thick breakfast nook bench that we had. Okay. As I was doing that, the bottom of the pillow, the top of the French press plunger, you know, over a foot tall, and the entire thing knocked over toward my husband, glass shattered with water, coffee grounds everywhere.

23:07Because my husband's like six feet tall, it landed right onto his thigh. Oh, thigh. penis oh yeah wait wait i missed the third thing was it balls balls yeah oh my oh my god listen we have photos and if we have a picture of your husband's burnt balls i'm gonna be thrilled okay so i didn't know the legality of sending that i did send a picture to emma who i think forwarded to rob it's hiding his penis and balls but you can see higher thing can we look before we look So this big ruckus happens. What I'm immediately afraid of is like, we don't drop the baby because we've knocked something over. Okay, he didn't drop the baby, which I think is the only thing we did right in the story.

23:51Wow, he's a good dad. But the baby, unfortunately, also got splashed with water. Okay. Oh, boiling water. And the baby is screaming louder than I've ever heard a baby scream in my life. My husband put her down. He ran to the shower. Luckily, he knew that you're not really supposed to put like ice water on a burn. You're supposed to put lukewarm water. So he went into the shower, put the shower on lukewarm, and he was just standing there. The baby is screaming, and I'm obviously freaking out. Yeah. And there's broken glass everywhere. Broken glass everywhere, as Monica would say. It was scattywampus.

24:27You have catchphrases, Monica. No, no, you know what's so funny? I love that that's become mine because I got that from you. Yeah, and I got it from a gal at the Groundlings. Because really, the word is cattywampus. Yeah. But Jack says scatty, now I do, and now it's mine. My life mission has been to replace cattywampas with scattywampas. And it's working. It's slowly working. And you're not wearing shoes, right? It's in the morning. Not wearing shoes. Luckily, I'm the only one who somehow came unscathed, but emotionally not, because this baby was so sad. But luckily, she was fine, ultimately. Her burns were super, super minor, and she was back in action one day.