][1]I’ve been enjoying the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog about food-related injuries. The piece is fun but so are all the comments in which readers detail they many ways in which they have been harmed by whelks, satsumas and Polos.
Intrigued by the piece, I did a little digging around and came up with this survey from the Esure insurance people.
Rather than looking at food-related injuries, it examines how many people have had a cooking accident or caused damage to their kitchen as a result of copying the professional cooking techniques of top TV chefs.
It turns out that 14% of us have had some sort of mishap after watching the current crop of culinary heroes waving their knives around on the telly.
As you might expect, fast chopping, steaming, deep-frying and skewering meat accounted for lots of injuries and a huge number of damaged kitchens.
However, my favourite stat was that 62% of the people questioned liked to try and recreate in real time the dishes which were being prepped on the telly.
The result: ‘a quarter (25 per cent) of amateur cooks admit to leaving their kitchens unattended whilst they run into the lounge to catch the next step on television and a worrying 86 per cent admit they have carelessly left something cooking on the hob whilst doing so. One in ten home cooks have even been injured when running from kitchen to lounge in order to copy recipes from the TV – in fact, 34 per cent of those admitted to having slipped on peelings and spilt liquids in the process.’
We’ve all done daft things in the kitchen but running between the lounge and the kitchen to follow a TV chef’s recipe?
For some reason, the Darwin Awards keep on popping up in my mind.
If you want to avoid deep-frying, steaming or skewering yourself, switch the TV off, log on to your computer and check out the latest offers and new member restaurants on 5pm.