That sounds lovely. Even in the era in which I lived in coop housing, the veg ethos was strong. Several of the houses cooked and served only veg meals. Pretty sure they all had very dog-eared copies of moosewood!
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A gentleman acquaintance gave me a recipe for French bread. Fifty years ago, not too many guys that I knew were into cooking, let alone baking French bread. So, I tried the recipe. The loaves were gorgeous. I had room temperature butter at the ready. I cut myself a nice slice, buttered it, took a big bite, chewed happily, and proceeded to shatter a molar. You can figure out how much the restoration and dental crown cost.
I do not bake now .
Yes, I realize that the tooth may have been compromised because it contained a huge filling. The American Dental Association awarded me the coveted Betty Crocker Black Apron Award for contributing to the financial well-being of dentists.
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Not really an early mishap, but I was heating up some rice vinegar with sugar in it (in the microwave) for a batch of sushi rice. I went to stir it with a spoon and it flashed up the spoon. I guess it was super heated. I took this picture as a reminder not to be stupid and respect heating liquids in a microwave.
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ouch!!
Ouch!! to your molar and your bank account!
When I started grad school, it became the time all my childhood fillings needed to be replaced. I got my first crown then. My dentist had 5 children and he joked that my long filling replacement project was funding his children’s college funds quite nicely.
Fortunately I was still on my parents’ very-good-for-the-time dental insurance.
Decades later, I have several more crowns.
Too many mishaps to list them all (and some of them recent)! A few memorable ones:
-dropping a hot skillet-ful of fish-fragrant Sichuan eggplant into the sink, and having it bounce/splatter all the way up to the ceiling of my rental apartment.
-stirring sizzling hot homemade chili crisp with a spoon and putting said spoon in my mouth to lick
-doing the above with hot sugar while making caramel
-the ol’ grab the cast iron skillet or enameled cast iron lid barehanded after heating in the oven
-many things that have jumped out of the fridge when the door was opened, including yogurt, and splattered everywhere
-losing my grip on a glass container of homemade ranch dressing at our friend’s house and having it go EVERYWHERE and all over me. She was still finding splatters a week later. 
-picking up a cruet or jar of homemade salad dressing, giving it a shake, and having dressing go everywhere (DH had “helpfully” unscrewed the lid without telling me).
-childhood smoothies involving bananas, chocolate instant pudding, and apples – in my friend’s mother’s kitchen. She was not pleased.
-at age two or three, putting a metal pot full of water and oatmeal into the microwave for many, many minutes. I was making Mom breakfast. No sparks; maybe the pot was too dull (or I was just lucky. This was the '80s and microwaves were really expensive).
More will come to me, I’m sure.
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This is not super early, although it occurred over 30 years ago. Eight days after Spawn2 was born, I was making some oxtail stew. (Remember when oxtail was CHEAP?) I had some oil in a dutch oven, and was putting the chunks of oxtail in to brown when one of the chunks slipped out of my hand, splashing hot oil up and all over my forearm. It hurt. A lot. Mrs. ricepad came waddling (remember, eight days post-partum!) into the kitchen as fast as she could and asked if she could do anything to help. I told her, “Yeah, get [Spawn1] out of here so I can swear!” (I had put two-year old Spawn1 on a chair a few feet away so he would watch and ‘help’.) In typical ricepad style, I tried to tough it out, running the burn under cool water, but between the pain and the skin starting to slough, I eventually gave in and went to the emergency clinic. I still have a faint scar.
To add insult to injury, when I got home from the clinic, I wanted to resume making the stew, but under the next chunk of oxtail there was a crushed cockroach. The form of the roach’s body was impressed into the meat, so it was apparent he’d been packaged with the oxtail. I don’t remember what I eventually made for dinner that night, but it wasn’t oxtail stew.
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Yikes. Harrowing.
That reminds me also of the time I put scalding-hot polenta into a standard blender to blitz out lumps. It practically exploded out of the lid, all over my dominant hand and arm. Incredibly painful, and I was cooking for my grandparents at the time. That one blistered 
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Yow. I think lava hot polenta might be worse. You win!
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Nah, you ended up in the ER! Plus the cockroach. 
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You made me recall an incident where I was grilling a tri-tip on our outdoor gas grill. I had it in one of those disposable roasting pans to save the drippings for gravy. It was all ready, but it was dark out, and the light for the backyard was on the fritz. I pulled the pan from the grill and went to step inside, missed the step and hit the ground, the pan bouncing off the carpet and my left hand getting hot grease all over it. I immediate went and plunged my hand into the pool in the backyard while the ex gathered up the roast.
The roast was fine.
The back of my hand blistered up like crazy (2nd degree!) and looked like tissue paper for more than a month while things healed.
We fixed the light.
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It seems like we’re now Quint, Hooper, and Brody sitting around a galley table comparing scars!
[Edited to correct typo.]
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“Show me the way to go home…”
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One more:
Back in my college days, junior year, the ex- and I sharing our first apartment. I am cutting up chicken breasts and garlic for…. something. Don’t remember. Probably pasta with jarred alfredo.
Naturally, as an inexperienced 20 year old, I had sharpened my knives exactly zero times. So trying to force through this half blunt filet knife (not even using the right one!), it skids and cuts through the tip of my left index finger, about 3/8 of an end from the end, and about 3/4 the way through, so I had a little ‘flap’ at the tip of my finger.
What did I do? Wrapped it in a paper towel and squeezed it tight, wrapped some packing tape on it and finished making dinner. Afterwards, I gently unwrapped it, to find that no, it was NOT closing on its own, not even a little.
So off to the student health center, where they tried direct pressure for another hour before giving up and putting in 4 stitches. I was severely admonished by the staff for continuing to cook, esp raw chicken, while wounded.
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Long ago for a big-deal dinner with lots of friend I made my first (and last) croquembouche. I muffed the caramel, and the thing had to be taken apart piece by piece with a hacksaw.
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That sounds like the Thanksgiving Knife Incident of 2011 for me. Mincing herbs for the first family T’giving dinner in my new townhouse, I sliced a major chunk of nail and flesh from my left forefinger. Wrapped it tightly in paper towels when it wouldn’t stop bleeding, and called Mom to come down early to help me finish prep.
By the time she got there I had switched to a large Band-Aid, and it was now stuck to my finger. We had to find me a chair to sit in (as I was getting a bit faint) and she carefully loosened the Band-Aid under warm running water. Re-wrapped it after Neosporining the hell out of it. The throbbing was insane. My sister told me about a finger guard/splint, which I immediately bought the next morning (along with NONSTICK bandages!) after not getting any sleep because I kept hitting my finger on the covers overnight. So I had this on for 2 weeks, which was GREAT fun typing at work - the 5, 6, r, t, f, g, v, and b keys were typed with my middle finger for those 2 weeks. LOL
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Thank you for your contributions so far, although I wish fewer of them involved such bodily harm 
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I have tons of crowns, all for the same reason that my first cooking mishap was such a mishap -lots of childhood fillings. No fluoride in the water. Teeth were mostly fillings inside a fragile shell. Boom. Crowns.
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I was born in North Carolina in 1955. Not sure when we got flouride in the water. It was explained to me by my dad that our family genes meant “soft teeth.” His really close cousin became a dentist who liked to tell us that it was okay to have our “candy bugs” drilled out without anesthesia.
We were served sweetened with real sugar iced tea frequently. Not commercial soft drinks as often as homemade sweet iced tea. I lost my ability to drink iced tea decades ago. Long sterling silver iced tea spoons to stir that sugar in were available in my childhood. I have zero of those!
I feel lucky that I have a mouth full of replaced metal (the earlier fillings) and a mouth full of often-replaced larger crowns and have avoided bridges and root canals so far. My next dental appointment is to replace another crown. My Medicare Advantage will pay for some of it!
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My childhood dentist (whom I stayed with for over 50 years !!) always used lidocaine, whatever, on my permanent tenth. He was the most painless dentist ever. He’s probably the reason I was never afraid to see a dentist. Now “sweet tea” - and those long spoons - I have my mother’s silver and it has, of course (she being a belle of the south), a complete set of iced tea spoons. When we were kids, my cousins and I used to have contests of how much sugar we could pour into our iced tea (winner was when the spoon could stand straight up in the sugar pile) . Yes, everybody talked about “sort teeth”. Rooties? I’ve had way too many, but I’ve had really good endodontists, so there were no issues. I’m all for restoration instead of implants.
But getting back to cooking disasters: let us not forget the worst of all - forgetting to turn the oven on. I haven’t done that, but a late friend did … with guests for dinner Christmas-ish. Luckily, I had just sent them a gift ham …
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