Monday, March 17, 2008

Communication Is Key (Now With Photos)


It's OK to pre-heat your oven. It's a good idea, in fact.

It's OK to use the oven as an impromptu hiding place for things you don't want little hands to clutch or touch. I mean, who hasn't done this? It's done.

But if one person uses the oven to hide a large Tupperware cake pan full of iced sugar cookies from the kids before she leaves for work in the morning, and some other person pre-heats the oven to 450* Fahrenheit to make dinner in the evening, without checking the oven first, there will be smoke. And flame. Pools of flaming plastic will puddle up on the bottom of the oven. It helps if you had the foresight to place the cookie tub on the broiler pan to contain the plastic, and it's nice to have an 11-year-old to ask, "Should the oven be smoking like that?"

The cookies will be surprisingly well-preserved as long as you don't hit them with the fire extinguisher, but you should probably throw them out anyway, and the garlic bread will come out just fine on the grill.

I just thought you should all know.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I forgot I put a cake back in the oven one day to keep the cat out of it.....guess you can figure out what happened when I went to preheat for the dinner roast that night.......LOL

Tam said...

I'm a big believer in opening the oven and looking inside before I preheat it.

Now you know why.

(The worst part about the incident was that the person I failed to communicate with was myself! :o )

Spook, RN said...

I dragged my ass home one day after completing my 5th 14 hour shift in a row. I was exhausted. Feeling too tired to cook anything meaningful, I decided to "bake" some cold-pizza.

Next thing I know, I hear the smoke detector going off. I open my groggy eyes to find the entire apartment filled with choking smoke billowing from the oven.

I hastily put the smoking, charred ruins of the pizza out and commenced cleaning.

It wasn't bad enough that I almost burned the apartment down - but my apartment has high, vaulted ceilings. Being the middle of the winter and poor air circulation, my apartment REEKED of that nauseating burnt smell for WEEKS.

Ugh!

Rick Scheibner said...

Man, I hate it when that happens.

Rick
http://www.rickscheibner.net