I consider myself a good cook. Sure, I’m still young and I have a lot of room to grow, but at the end of the day, I can put together some nice meals. So, it is with great embarrassment that I admit that I have had three fires in my kitchen in as many weeks. Seriously, I don’t know what I’m doing, but it seems like every time I turn around, something is bursting into flames.
The first I blame on the weather. It was a snowy weekend here in the northeast and I had a hankering to make some chicken parmesan. There was only one thing standing in my way: I didn’t have any breadcrumbs. I could have sworn that I had some panko in my pantry, and I did, but it turned out that they were very old, very, very old. There was one option left and I thought it was a slam dunk: I had a whole package of leftover pita bread that I wasn’t going to eat. I figured that I could toast it up and throw it in the food processor — instant bread crumbs.
The plan started out working well. I threw a pita into my toaster oven and let that puppy get nice and brown. I set the toaster oven to dark and when it dinged, I was slightly disappointed; the bread was barely toasted and needed some more time. Now here is where it gets interesting. I swear, I turned my back for approximately one minute and when I checked on the pita it was on fire. Literally, a piece of bread had spontaneously burst into flames. The scientist in me was secretly amazed and a little proud at this. The cook was mortified.
The second fire came just last night. I had hosted a New Year’s Eve party, and I had cooked up a few stromboli. I knew that they were going to make a mess in my oven, and I was right. While cooking, all the delicious pizza-filling leaked out of the dough and created a couple of large mounds of burnt cheese and sauce on the bottom of my oven. Of course, I forgot to clean it up and when I turned my oven on last night, they started burning. I didn’t notice at first, but then my eye caught the gently glowing light through the oven window. One of the blobs had caught fire during my oven preheat and was slowly (and controllably) burning. There was nothing that I could really do, so I cracked a window, plastic-wrapped my smoke detector (don’t try that one at home, kids) and let it burn off.
I thought I was fine. My house was relatively smoke free and I was ready to throw my dinner in the oven. It was then that I noticed that the second pile of goo had burst into flame. Well, after that smoke had cleared, I was able to cook my meal, and I think I’m going to be fire free for a while.
Have you ever set your kitchen on fire?
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Jan 07, 2010 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
Dude, I was laughing so hard while reading this last night, because I could literally picture you cool as a cucumber while the flames licked up through the toaster oven door! Too funny!