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It’s always nice to get a home-cooked meal from friends, family, or a loved one. That is until you remember that some people have very “interesting” ideas about food hygiene, recipes, and eating habits in general.
Someone asked, “What's the weirdest habit you've witnessed in a friend's kitchen?” and people shared the horrifying and amusing things they have seen. From terribly unsanitary practices to the strangest recipe personalizations, get comfortable, make sure you are done eating as you read through, and upvote your favorite examples. We got in touch with beetlebloop to learn more.
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#1
Taking raw chicken and putting it directly in her flour canister to cover with flour to fry. I am still horrified years later.
#2
Can I include my own kitchen? My husband has a habit of just putting used utensils in the freezer. Not washed, just licked clean (sometimes). Says the freezer kills the bacteria and he can reuse them as many times as he wants.
I do the dishes every day. Literally no reason for this weird habit 😐
#3
Keeping the water running at full speed while doing other tasks. As in for minutes. Not to achieve a certain temperature. And getting mad when I’d turn it off and passive aggressively turning it back on after I’d said it was wasteful and made me uncomfy. Rot in hell kimberly!
Bored Panda got in touch with beetlebloop who made the original thread and they were kind enough to answer some of our questions. We wanted to know if there was perhaps some sort of incident that inspired them to ask about other’s experiences with strange kitchen habits.
“My sister-in-law had us over recently and offered us some tea. I thought she had inadvertently dropped the teabag into the mug without detaching the label and hanging it over the side. No big deal, right? But then I saw she had a whole bowl of used teabags she'd fished out of other mugs that all still had their labels attached too! My husband had noticed the same thing independently, and we debriefed on this as soon as we got home and agreed she was clearly deranged!”
#4
I had a roommate after college that said the best way to boil water was a ‘slow boil.’ He insisted on using low heat.
#5
I’m not a friend, but I was a Tupperware lady in the 90s. I got to the woman’s house to set up for her party and she was in the kitchen talking to me. I see her grab the kitchen towel, wipe her dogs bottom with it And she says to me “She’s on her period!”
Then she went back to making her sushi rolls and kept using the same towel.
#6
Cut up raw meat using bare hands, then opened drawers, cabinets, and the fridge before washing their hands.
When she asked if I wanted to do weekly meal prep with her, I politely declined.
“I once witnessed my co-worker (who seemed perfectly normal) taking the basket of spent grounds out of our coffeemaker and dumping the entire thing down the sink. We did not have a garbage disposal so this seemed completely insane, to me and to all our other co-workers who were there. That moment lives in my head rent-free and springs to mind every time I dump coffee grounds out (not in the sink)!” they shared with Bored Panda.
#7
My uncle left raw chicken out on the counter—for who knows how long —and it was covered it ants. I let him know. He rinsed the ants off, and put the chicken back in the fridge.
Ample Aardvark 11 months ago
Yum, chicken with an extra side of salmonella and a hint of formic acid
#8
When my childhood dog would poop inside, and if it was...not solid, my dad would use a spoon to clean it up. Not a designated spoon that was the dog s**t spoon, just a regular spoon from the cutlery drawer. I did not discover this until he had been doing this for years. I was HORRIFIED and furious. When I told him it was disgusting, he got so defensive and said "well, how would you like me to clean it up?" I then listed many different ways to clean dog s**t. My mom also didn't seen too concerned with it. I refused to use their cutlery until they no longer had any dogs and they had bought a new set. And quite frankly, I try to avoid eating there as much as possible because I have no idea what else my parents think is normal.
#9
Maybe more wholesome than weird. At the grandfather’s house of my friend - he always kept a stock of homemade jerky chips in the freezer that were separated into servings. My friend had braces and loved jerky so grandpa made thin sliced jerky that wouldn’t get stuck in your teeth. I miss jerky chips.
By this point, the original thread had thousands of comments, so we were curious to hear their opinion on why it ended up being so popular. “I think the thread became popular because eating is such a universal, personal, and visceral experience. It can be mystifying and/or horrifying to see people you thought you knew acting bizarrely and so differently from the way you do things. One other example that freaks me out is people who eat fruit rinds you're not supposed to eat. Like kiwi skins or watermelon rinds. Ugh!”
#10
Not a friend's kitchen, but My mom thinks it's weird that my husband and I use a sharpie to date everything that goes in the fridge pretty much. The expiration/best buy date is affected by when it was opened but it also helps us realize when something has been in there longer than we realize and should either be used up or thrown out.
Shredded cheese? Gets an opened date written. Lunch meat? Yep.
#11
I opened a friend's fridge and it contained 30-40 cans of whipped cream and NOTHING ELSE. Family of 3.
#12
MIL insists on keeping cabibet doors above the microwave open. Why you ask? So the heat doesn't build up in the cabinet and start a fire.
#13
I knew a bloke who thought you were meant to throw.out wooden spoons after each use he'd spend so much money on them. When we told him you could re-use them his mind was blown.
#14
The dish cloth used once only. Do the dishes wipe down the stove top, counters, cupboard fronts then throw in the bin and get a new one. Must cost a lot.
Sue Garnhum 11 months ago
Does that person not know that they have invented this cool contraption called a 'washing machine'?
#15
I watched my coworker wash his potatoes with dish soap. Squirted the soap straight onto the potato, rubbed it all over with his bare hands, rinsed it, started chopping it.
Threw the chopped, unpeeled, soapy potatoes into a pot. Boiled them, mashed them without adding anything to them, then for some reason, picked the skin out of the pot of mashed with his bare hands. No milk, cream, butter, salt, anything.
Tasted like a sad, soapy pile of compost.
#16
I had an acquaintance whose place I went to a couple of times for parties. On both occasions, they brought out a blender to *blend wine*. I think one of the times I just saw them blend a single bottle but another time they blended two bottles together (to a weird result).
I think they fundamentally misunderstood what it meant to “blend wines” and thought that it involved the appliance. I was absolutely gobsmacked but didn’t know them well enough to feel comfortable with asking them why they did it.
Julian Smith 11 months ago
Putting cheaper wines through the blending process is a way of rapidly aerating the wine and improving the flavor. People also use those spinning milk frother things. #StudentLife
#17
Knew a guy that kept his chef knifes stabbed into the wall.
#18
My ex FIL thought traditional spaghetti with meat sauce was too “spicy”. So he would make noodles and top them with ground beef and ketchup.
Cranky when UNcaffeinated 11 months ago
He could have a weird allergy. I am allergic to oregano. It burns my mouth ten times worse than a ghost pepper or reaper. I also always believed that everyone cried while brushing their teeth due to the mint being too extreme. Nope. Allergic to fluoride.
#19
Putting vegetables to stir fry into a cold pan, then adding oil, then turning the pan on.
#20
I worked with someone who told me that if she ever cooks and bakes for other people she will strip down to her underwear to do it to avoid any cross contamination of dog hair or other linty bits from her clothes.
#21
Friend of mine growing up had me over for family dinner; spaghetti. When everyone (5-6 of us total) were done, the mom scraped all the uneaten spaghetti on everyone's plate back into the big pot.
#22
My husband's old roommate used to take a new dish every time he ate something then leave it behind in his room instead of putting it in the dishwasher. One day it occurred to my husband that there were like five dishes left in the kitchen and the rest were nowhere to be found, until he looked in said roommate's room and found his mouldy hoard.
Lydsylou (she/her) 11 months ago
I would've taken the 5 plates and use them for myself but hide them in my own bedroom then let the roommate realise he can either wash his ones or eat off a mouldy plate
#23
Their shih tzu started sharting all over the place, they grabbed the dog and washed him in the sink and then didn’t clean or sanitize it afterwards.
#24
Well not me but my sister. She would go to this woman’s home to get her nails done. She did this quite often but it was usually earlier in the day when husbands and kids were away at work and school. One day the woman switched it up and asked her to come in the evening. This woman proceeded to start on my sisters nails and half way through she stops and starts making dinner. And then goes back and forth from making dinner to doing my sisters nails. NOT ONE TIME DID SHE WASH HER HANDS. Literally had nail dust and acrylic dust on her hands and nail polish remover and proceeded to chop and touch that poor family’s meal. 🤢🤮
#25
My old roommate would take a coffee cup from the night before with old coffee and milk in it and make a new one in the morning without dumping the old coffee out first.
#26
I was friends with a family that had 6 kids. The parents made everyone drink a full glass of milk with every meal, including guests. They would set out a gallon of milk on the table each meal, and it would just sit there until it was all gone, even if it took longer than one meal. I've always hated drinking milk, but those experiences really finished it off for me. I recently thought about it after finding one of my toddler's old milk cups hidden in his room. The smell really took me back.
#27
My neighbors had to finish their plates completely, and I mean licked clean, because the dessert yogurt would be poured in the used plates. It was so gross having yogurt with a bite of potato. It is still a running gag with my family.
#28
Old roommate used to cook her pasta like this: very small pot for a lot of pasta, fill the pot with pasta, add cold water just to cover it and then put it on the stove to heat. She did not salt the pasta either... plus she overcooked it to a degree were it broke by being touched by a fork.
#29
This one is not as bad as some of the ones in this thread. But I have this friend, a grown adult male, who doesn't wash his dishes with soap. I realized this after I had already eaten at his house several times. We were talking in his kitchen one day, and I watched him start washing a pan. He rinsed the food off with water and just put it up to dry??
Then, later on, he was at my house, and yelled at me for washing a pan he had given me with soap? He was apparently scared I was going to take off the finish or something?
The kicker is that I am immune deficient (I was born this way, it's not AIDS or HIV) and he knows this, yet he doesn't clean his dishes with soap?
I know everyone runs a household differently, but I feel like this should be kind of a universal standard in a first-world country as long as you can afford it.
#30
Growing my I used to go to this one friends house almost every day after school. This was a middle class family who made a decent amount of money.
Her parents let us have however much soda we wanted, but it was always the off-brand coke ONLY stored in the garage. I live in the desert so imagine walking home in 110 degrees in the summer and cracking a 90 degree coke. YUCK.
Finally I was like yo, you have an ice machine in your fridge can we please have some ice. For the longest time she’d tell me, “no, my parents told me ice is too expensive.
Eventually, she let me use their precious ice but I had to drink from their red solo cups which the entire family REUSED. Once they even flipped out on their maids because they threw away the dirty solo cups.
God that house was so f*****g weird.
What do you think ?
Kathryn Sly 11 months ago
Went to a therapist to try some hypnosis - her office was probably a bedroom at times in her home. The unit was in an old beach side apartment block so the rooms were dank, dark and the furnishings [think curtains, wallpapers and carpets] were probably original and musty too. She allowed a very long haired cat in - I don't' like cats firstly and I told her as much when she asked but she allowed it to stay where it proceeded to jump on the desk and wind itself around her tea cup. All I could think is that her tea would be full of cat hair.I looked around the room and it didn't look clean - the mirror was smeared, cat hair was everywhere and the rubbish bin was full. I never went back and never recommended her to anyone else.
Olli Hawk 10 months ago
Where I work, all the way in the back of the building is a bedroom, living room, and kitchen where my boss lives, she’s super nice and offers us snacks from the kitchen. Theres something about her son walking downstairs to the lobby announcing that he cooked a homemade meal for us really makes me feel like we’re a family or something. We’ve even stayed after our shifts sometimes to help her wash up the dishes. Super cool setting 😃
Awsomemom52 10 months ago
My grandmother sewed cleaning cloths herself. She layered several layers of fabric from worn undershirts, tea towels, etc. and then sewed them together. These home-sewn cloths were rarely, if ever, washed. Because... Quote from my grandmother: “You will be washed clean when you do the dishes!” I still vividly remember the smell of those cloths.🤢 They are the reason why I now replace my towels in the kitchen almost every day. As soon as they smell even remotely like garlic, onions or anything else, they go in the wash. My grandma also didn't see the point in cleaning the outside of cookware. And yes...they were just as gross as you're imagining.
Zaphod 11 months ago
My kitchen, but horrifying to me. I've had lots of roommates, many of them were slobs when I was younger. One time I spent 2 hours cleaning our disaster of a kitchen. The first thing my roommate cooked was pan-fried blackened catfish without a lid. Grease was splattered everywhere when he finished. I was so pissed.
Katchen 9 months ago
I was helping friends move homes and under the kitchen sink they had about ten old spaghetti jars that they would use to pour used cooking oil into. That part I get. What I don’t get is why they didn’t just fill up one jar at a time—there were a bunch of partially filled jars. And why they didn’t rinse the jars first. A bunch of them had mold and dregs of old spaghetti sauce still in them.
Olli Hawk 10 months ago
Not weird per se, it’s just the difference between kitchens is absurd. but anyway, growing up my dad didn’t have money, but my mom had kinda more money than the average family. So at my moms house we’d have friends over and they’d Ooh and Aah over all the snacks we had and all the tasty pricey meals and fruitswe ate, but during the summer at my dads house all we ever ate was cheese and ketchup sandwiches, yogurt and crackers, and those five dollar cardboardy pizzas from the gas station (which we had to walk to because my dad didn’t own a car), also dw we stopped sleeping at my dads house when I was in sixth grade.
Craig Becker 10 months ago (edited)
Many years ago I visited a co-worker, who had several cats and left the litter box on the kitchen counter. After that, I stopped eating at "pot-luck" lunch events. Also: My family and I went to a party at a neighbor's house. There was a charcoal BBQ pit - you know, the round metal things that usually stand on some kind of tripod - in the backyard. There were burgers cooking on it - my neighbor's father looks at it, says "it needs to be hotter" and squirts lighter fluid all over the burning charcoal, which produced this huge cloud of ash and God-knows-what petroleum byproducts that enveloped every burger on the grill. I couldn't help myself, I said "what are you *doing*?!?!" He looked at me like I was insane. I grabbed my wife and kids and we left.
Cranky when UNcaffeinated 11 months ago
I visited a new friend for a few minutes to borrow a college textbook for the upcoming semester. She had just finished the class and had notes, study guides, etc. When I got there she was grating cheese on her kitchen counter. Then I saw it. She scratched her head, like furiously and went right back to grating. I internally gagged. I found out that night that her daughter had caught head lice at daycare and had thoughtfully shared with the entire family. She had already treated the kids and was about to do her own head when she needed to make dinner. I ended up not needing that textbook after all. 😬
Kathryn Sly 11 months ago
Went to a therapist to try some hypnosis - her office was probably a bedroom at times in her home. The unit was in an old beach side apartment block so the rooms were dank, dark and the furnishings [think curtains, wallpapers and carpets] were probably original and musty too. She allowed a very long haired cat in - I don't' like cats firstly and I told her as much when she asked but she allowed it to stay where it proceeded to jump on the desk and wind itself around her tea cup. All I could think is that her tea would be full of cat hair.I looked around the room and it didn't look clean - the mirror was smeared, cat hair was everywhere and the rubbish bin was full. I never went back and never recommended her to anyone else.
Olli Hawk 10 months ago
Where I work, all the way in the back of the building is a bedroom, living room, and kitchen where my boss lives, she’s super nice and offers us snacks from the kitchen. Theres something about her son walking downstairs to the lobby announcing that he cooked a homemade meal for us really makes me feel like we’re a family or something. We’ve even stayed after our shifts sometimes to help her wash up the dishes. Super cool setting 😃
Awsomemom52 10 months ago
My grandmother sewed cleaning cloths herself. She layered several layers of fabric from worn undershirts, tea towels, etc. and then sewed them together. These home-sewn cloths were rarely, if ever, washed. Because... Quote from my grandmother: “You will be washed clean when you do the dishes!” I still vividly remember the smell of those cloths.🤢 They are the reason why I now replace my towels in the kitchen almost every day. As soon as they smell even remotely like garlic, onions or anything else, they go in the wash. My grandma also didn't see the point in cleaning the outside of cookware. And yes...they were just as gross as you're imagining.
Zaphod 11 months ago
My kitchen, but horrifying to me. I've had lots of roommates, many of them were slobs when I was younger. One time I spent 2 hours cleaning our disaster of a kitchen. The first thing my roommate cooked was pan-fried blackened catfish without a lid. Grease was splattered everywhere when he finished. I was so pissed.
Katchen 9 months ago
I was helping friends move homes and under the kitchen sink they had about ten old spaghetti jars that they would use to pour used cooking oil into. That part I get. What I don’t get is why they didn’t just fill up one jar at a time—there were a bunch of partially filled jars. And why they didn’t rinse the jars first. A bunch of them had mold and dregs of old spaghetti sauce still in them.
Olli Hawk 10 months ago
Not weird per se, it’s just the difference between kitchens is absurd. but anyway, growing up my dad didn’t have money, but my mom had kinda more money than the average family. So at my moms house we’d have friends over and they’d Ooh and Aah over all the snacks we had and all the tasty pricey meals and fruitswe ate, but during the summer at my dads house all we ever ate was cheese and ketchup sandwiches, yogurt and crackers, and those five dollar cardboardy pizzas from the gas station (which we had to walk to because my dad didn’t own a car), also dw we stopped sleeping at my dads house when I was in sixth grade.
Craig Becker 10 months ago (edited)
Many years ago I visited a co-worker, who had several cats and left the litter box on the kitchen counter. After that, I stopped eating at "pot-luck" lunch events. Also: My family and I went to a party at a neighbor's house. There was a charcoal BBQ pit - you know, the round metal things that usually stand on some kind of tripod - in the backyard. There were burgers cooking on it - my neighbor's father looks at it, says "it needs to be hotter" and squirts lighter fluid all over the burning charcoal, which produced this huge cloud of ash and God-knows-what petroleum byproducts that enveloped every burger on the grill. I couldn't help myself, I said "what are you *doing*?!?!" He looked at me like I was insane. I grabbed my wife and kids and we left.
Cranky when UNcaffeinated 11 months ago
I visited a new friend for a few minutes to borrow a college textbook for the upcoming semester. She had just finished the class and had notes, study guides, etc. When I got there she was grating cheese on her kitchen counter. Then I saw it. She scratched her head, like furiously and went right back to grating. I internally gagged. I found out that night that her daughter had caught head lice at daycare and had thoughtfully shared with the entire family. She had already treated the kids and was about to do her own head when she needed to make dinner. I ended up not needing that textbook after all. 😬
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