There are good explosions and bad explosions in life. Watching fireworks explode in the sky on the 4th of July: good explosions. Watching fireworks tip over and shoot at you: bad explosions. Carrying in your baby and having explosions of oohs and ahhs at the cuteness thereof: good explosions. Carrying in your baby in one arm and Mexican food in the other, only to set them down to find guacamole had leaked down your arm so you lick it off only to realize that's the arm that carried in your baby: bad explosion. Taking a bite of dinner and having an explosion of awesome flavor hit your mouth: good explosion. Having your dinner blow up before it can reach your mouth: bad explosion.
Today's Pinstrosity goes right along with that last explosion.
The Original Pin:
Kristen found the delectable dish on Pinterest and knew that had to go on her dinner menu. "It looked amazing! I added extra veg, extra beans, and a little wheat spaghetti to make it last us longer. It was all done and smelled great, so I took it out of the stove and set it on my stove top (which is where I usually let my dishes cool)."
This point in dinner is always tantalizing. You're getting the last touches of dinner ready. Your horde is clamoring to be fed and can smell the goodness they are about to launch into. You're so proud of yourself for actually cooking that night and having dinner ready. And then...
"I heard this massive explosion (literally, it sounded like a small bomb) and went into the kitchen to find that the glass dish had shattered into a zillion pieces. I briefly hoped that I might salvage some of our dinner before realizing that the biggest piece of remaining glass in the whole thing was about the size of my palm. Other than that, mostly shards of quarter-size glass were everywhere."
"So much food waste. So much sadness. So much cleaning."
What can cause your dinner to explode, you ask? We'll tell you...but first one more story. Sadly, I've had this exact same experience. Well...I was making No-Flip-Oven Pancakes so not the exact experience...but close.
It was the night before mine and Cameron's road trip to Mississippi. We were up late packing and trying to get last minute stuff done. We hadn't had much dinner and there was some milk and eggs in the fridge that needed to be used up before we left, so I decided to put together No-Flip-Oven Pancakes (aka German Pancakes). I mixed it up, put it in the oven and went back to packing. Finally the timer yelled at us that dinner was done, but I was right in the middle of loading something, so I pulled the pan out of the oven and set it on the stove to cool while I finished that last errand I was working on. Not much longer after that smoke is pouring from the pan. I grab a hot pad, move the pan off the stove and we stand back in despair, looking at our smoldering dinner. Suddenly the pan exploded. It was loud! Shards of glass went everywhere. Luckily the side of the pan facing us stayed intact...we were just a few feet from the pan when it exploded and had the whole pan exploded we would have likely had shards of glass in our gut. There were glass shards and bits of dinner all over the place. And to boot, our house now smelled like burned eggs. Mmmmm.
Anyone guess what the problem is with both of these stories? A hot burner. For some reason one of the burners was on and Kristen and I both ended up setting our dinners (baked in glass pyrex pans) on the one hot burner. I still don't know why a burner was on with our stove...but it was. It shook us up pretty good, the experience could have been so bad. With Kristen's pan, I'm glad no one was in the kitchen as her whole pan exploded into flying shards of dinner death.
Lessons learned:
- Don't set the pans on the stove to cool. Just don't get in that habit. I know, it's easy. We're trying to break ourselves of the habit and it's hard. Take the extra second and counter space to pull out a hot pad and set the pan there. Then you know you'll never set anything on a burner that was left on by accident.
- Remember to turn off the burners when you're done using them. Everyone forgets every now and then...it does happen. Since the exploding dinner episode though I'm way more careful about checking to make sure everything is turned off when I'm done using it.
I hope everyone had a great Monday yesterday (I got to go visit my parents, brother, and grandparents...so I had a lovely day). Happy Tuesday everyone...you made it one day further. Give yourself a pat on the back.
No comments:
Post a Comment