Fire! Fire! Fire!

Well, by that title alone, it should give you an indication of my night last night.

First of all, we're all okay and the house is still standing.

In fact, except for the stove and two cookie sheets, everything survived with no damage.

I feel so stupid.

Light of my life got a cookbook from Santa this past year. It's a pretty sophisticated cookbook for kids. She's made dinner using the book twice. Both times she's made the same thing. Chicken nuggets and french fries. The french fries are home made and are DELICIOUS!!!

Last night, I was going to make hamburgers and homemade french fries for dinner. I pulled out the ol' George Foreman grill (love it!) and pulled out the cookie sheets to cook the fries on.

The recipe states to preheat the oven to 400 degrees and to pour 3 tablespoons of corn oil (I use veggie instead of corn) into each pan. You're to heat up the oil in the oven in the pans and then take the pans out to place the cut potatoes on them. After you've laid them out, you're supposed to sprinkle paprika on them. Of course, for anyone who's wanting to know how I do the fries, I sprinkle paprika, onion salt, garlic salt and ground black pepper on them. Paprika alone does not a good fry make.

I digress.

I poured the oil in the pans and set them in the oven..........forgetting that this is the oven that's thermostat is off by 150 degrees.

Yes, that's right. I was supposed to have decreased the temperature to 250 degrees before putting in the pans.

I forgot.

So, when I started seeing smoke come out of the oven, I opened the door like an idiot and saw the pretty orange flames dancing across the top pan. Like a bigger idiot, I kept the oven door open to let in all that nice pretty rich oxygen so it could play with the flames.

I yelled and my mom came running yelling at me to "shut the door, shut the damn door". I finally did and immediately started searching for the fire extinguisher.

I remember when we moved into this house, I told myself, "I'm going to put the fire extinguisher in the kitchen, specifically, I will put it in the cabinet with the pots and pans" (and yes, I do talk to myself that way). Instead, I put it in PLAIN VIEW next to the cabinet. However, I forgot that it was in PLAIN VIEW and instead threw every pot and pan out looking for the stupid extinguisher that was in PLAIN VIEW not even 6 inches from my right hand. Needless to say, I wasted a precious 2 minutes looking for an item that was in PLAIN VIEW.

By the time I got the extinguisher, mom had come up with the brilliant idea of unplugging the stove. By that time, the flames were starting to shoot out from the top right eye of the stove. There's a hole there that can let heat escape and we didn't think to put something over that to keep that nice pretty rich oxygen from getting in. Right after I unplugged the stove, we threw a tin pie plate over the eye. Soon after, the smoke lessened and the fire played itself out.

I never had to use the fire extinguisher. I wanted to so bad (that's the 10 year old boy inside of me wanting to play with something so cool as a fire extinguisher) but mom talked me out of it.

The whole house filled with smoke but it's slowly airing out. I smell like a hamburger this morning.....that could explain the weird looks I've been getting. Or not.

Other than the stove and the two cookie sheets, everything survived. We're getting a new stove today. I can finally have stove that works properly. I haven't had a properly working stove in 10 years. The one I had in my old house, I couldn't bake anything but cakes in it. No brownies, no cookies, no nothing. It sucked.

I think the only reason I didn't panic too much was because I knew that light of my life was over at M's house. They were at the house when the fire started but I quickly told them to go over to M's house while we dealt with the fire. I never let her know how scary it got so she wasn't too upset by the whole thing. Thank goodness it wasn't worse.

You know how they say things come in 3's? Well, I've survived a hurricane, a tornado and now this fire. I'm good now, right? No more catastrophes, right?

Anyway, that was the highlight of my weekend.

How was yours?

Later,

Mama Dawg