Model Abbey Clancy and her children suffered a terrifying ordeal when a cooking mishap caused chaos in the £3million home they share with Peter Crouch. During an episode of the couple’s podcast, The Therapy Couch, Abbey recounted that she had attempted to cook a nice meal for Peter, preparing her “speciality” while he was out running a few errands.
She had started with the best intentions, saying: “I thought, ‘I’m going to make Pete a nice steak and dauphinoise [potatoes] for his dinner’,” but that wasn’t how it worked out.
Peter reflected on the ridiculousness of the incident, saying: “Bear in mind, I’ve left the house for one hour – I haven’t been out for long – but we’ve had the police round, the fire brigade round, the kids are screaming, and there’s alarms going off everywhere.”
Abbey confessed that she’d had trouble with heating a frying pan correctly for searing a steak, preferring butter to oil, which resulted in a distinctly smoky situation.
The outcome left the whole house “covered in smoke,” Abbey said. “I couldn’t even see the pan.”
The couple’s lavish residence is, not surprisingly, fitted with a sophisticated smoke alarm system which promptly went into action.
“We had one set of fire alarms go off, then another even louder alarm,” Abbey said. In the midst of this chaos, the phone rang with the fire brigade on the other end, leading to Abbey’s embarrassed admission that it was just a case of cookery gone wrong rather than a genuine emergency.
Desperate to silence the blaring alarm, Abbey made a frantic call to her husband Peter for help. She recalled: “Pete’s like, ‘You need to press the red button with the key.’ So I pressed a red button with a key – then four minutes later three police cars turned up at my door.”
In the commotion, Abbey had mistakenly hit the panic button, which led to a swift response from the police. When confronted by an officer inquiring about the emergency, Abbey could only laugh as she admitted to pressing the incorrect button.
Despite her confession, the officers insisted on inspecting their home to rule out any possibility that she was being forced to send them away by an intruder, obliging Abbey to invite them in while clad in her cosy dressing gown.
To her surprise, one of the attending officers was familiar with her podcast, leaving Abbey feeling both scared and guilty for inadvertently wasting police time.
Upon his return, Peter Crouch found himself shocked at the sight of police and fire services summoned to their residence. Reflecting on the incident, he remarked with dismay: “It was carnage,” and jokingly lamented, “it all goes to pot when I’m not here.”