You know I do all this stuff to give you a laugh, right? To give me more fodder for a story, right? I don’t do it just for fun. 🙂 I do it with purpose!

First off, the setting:

It’s a cool, windy day, so not quite yet warm out. This is good in that it means the bugs are still at bay. My birds are happily eating at the feeders, not paying any attention to me and my pending disaster. This is the foreshadowing of conflict. Just in case you were already tired of the boringness of this post. Notice, boringness is not a word. As an author, I can take liberties with made-up words. It’s like James Bond having a license to kill.

But I digress. I usually bake something. Just set on the timer, the meal is done when it’s done. Eventually I pry myself away from writing or edits and go check on it. It’s usually still fairly hot.

Rarely, I fry something unless it’s leftovers and I don’t want to just reheat it. So I’ll make something special like roast beef hash.

Usually, I set the heat on low because I forget when I’m writing  or editing. And I try to remember to check on it, or sometimes boil another cup of hot tea and wait for the stuff to finish cooking. I really hate to wait on anything. I want action. I want to get more editing or writing done. Staring at food cooking or water boiling doesn’t do a thing for me.

Now, I was impatient. So I put it on medium heat, not a smart thing to do. All protagonists should have faults, and impatience is apparently one of mine. I’m not saying it always is though. I can be really patient about a lot of stuff. I just do other things and then no problem. So I’m not sure what clued me in. Maybe the slight odor of smoke? Hate smoke. It makes me ill. So any hint of it, and I usually notice. I have the door to the rest of the house closed, so it would have blocked the smoke for a time.

I rush through the house to the kitchen, choking on smoke, really, really a lot of smoke. Not exaggerating here. And the frying pan has flames all around the lid of the pan. They’re too  high to reach the lid and close it all the way.

But that is one way to douse the flames, cut off the oxygen.  I immediately turned off the stove, and moved the pan off the heat. Now, they say not to move a pan because you could splash burning oil all over you and that would be worse. The oil was only a thin layer, so it was too low in the pan, and mostly burned up to worry about.

I ran through the house to get the baking soda. That will also put out flames, BUT, it takes a lot of it, and I threw some on it, but couldn’t douse the flames because the pan’s lid covered most of the oil I would have needed to reach.

Now, I have to again mention the horrendous amount of smoke in the house. The oil burned off shortly after that since there wasn’t a whole lot to begin with, but then I was trying to as quickly as I could, open windows, the front door, the back door, turning all the fans on as I went.

I scared off a big old hawk sitting on the telephone pole and as I’m trying to catch fresh breaths of air, I’m thinking how much I wished I’d gotten a photo of him!

Remember my eau de skunk post? Well, guess what? The next thing I know, I’m smelling skunk. LOL

They say not to take the pan outside, again for the danger that you could splash burning hot oil on yourself. But after I opened all the windows, I took the pan outside, and made the dumb mistake of opening up the lid. What was inside? A whole bunch of smoke, which I promptly inhaled. And choked on.

Nothing was left in the pan but burned-to-a-crisp potatoes–or Cajun style, blackened.

I hadn’t put the roast beef chunks in, so… I had those cold. And that was the rather unappealing lunch I had.  And I’m back to baking in the future. This was a picture I took of a Japanese cook who makes fires on purpose. Not something I would do!!!! Just for clarification.

So… are you entertained???

Do you ever burn up your food???

Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male!”
www.terryspear.com