It’s all material.
If you’re a writer.
I’m in the breakfast nook eating leftover Mexican food for lunch, trying to decipher what’s going on with Impeachment II, a Sequel, on my news feed. Phil gets up and goes into the kitchen, where he’s reheating his leftover chile rellenos, I presume. Sounds of dismay ensue, but I’m reading.
“What?” I ask distractedly.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Sounds of slapping on a countertop. A smell. I begin to be curious.
“Should I come in there?”
“No. Everything’s under control.”
Of course I get up and go. And a good thing too. It was almost over and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss those glowing red sparks atop the blackened edges of paper, the bits of black ash floating about the kitchen, the smoke.
“You know,” I said later, “the smoke alarm never went off. It goes off when I’m broiling something and it couldn’t go off now?” I glared at it. “You failed.”
Phil, just a trifle abashed
It took some work to clean that up, especially the blackened inside of the microwave, which Phil did an outstanding job on. The microwave hasn’t been that clean in years.
“This is good,” I tell my abashed husband. “This is almost as good as the time I forgot the eggs until the water boiled away and they exploded. Not as good,” I hastily amend. “Your ash didn’t fly up and stick to the ceiling the way the eggs did. I still win.”
But it’s all material, as I was saying. I’m already composing my Facebook post as I go to my computer: Did you know that if you put a paper bag of chips in the microwave for even just 30 seconds it will burst into flame?
Satisfied, I post my question. A flurry of replies arrives immediately, the kind of flurry you’d think my blog posts would generate, those five-minute reads I painstakingly write every week, but nooooo. No one reads anymore.
Dave Hammond: How did you figure that out? I’m gonna try it.
Well, Hammond’s a percussionist, what do you expect.
Brendan G. Craine: Potato chips are so flammable that they are actually recommended as fire kindling in emergency situations. There’s an episode of Survivorman in which Les Stroud makes a fire using some Fritos.
That scares my friend Yvette, who says, “oh and we eat those.” Now, besides being laid off with unemployment benefits delayed, she has to worry about eating things that are combustible.
One of Craine’s friends says she’s always impressed by his random bits of information.
Craine replies: I have worked hard to build a knowledge base that consists almost entirely of largely useless trivia.
I remember this from when he was my student. I don’t know how many times he walked into my classroom saying, “Fun fact, Ms. Dubrava,” and proceeded to provide some arcane information that had no relationship to our assignment.
This personality disorder began early on and I’m pleased that it has continued into adulthood. Reading Craine’s response, I thought, “how adorable, he made me laugh.” That’s a fun fact about me: if you can make me laugh, all else is forgiven. It’s how I got Phil in the first place. He made me laugh.
By contrast, I read Craine’s response to Phil, who does chuckle but then demands: “does he have a job yet?”
Linda Thompson tells me chips need to be spread on a cookie sheet and heated a few minutes only in the oven, information I will be sure to tell Phil, not because he’ll ever do that again, but because I relish being able to give him instructions.
Meanwhile, my loves, thanks all round for this blog post. Oh, and don’t put paper bags of chips in your microwave. I’m looking at you, Hammond.
All I can say is, “You never get too old to experiment!”
The sparks fly at your place! Here, the biggest excitement was a fish recipe (usually my forte!) that turned into butter smoke-filled kitchen, with salmon salad the next day.
Thanks for the grins, always enjoy your posts.
But, but … WHY is he heating the chips at all? Funny thing is, he looks fairly normal. 🙂
Exactly, Joe! You see the kind of thing I suffer in this marriage.
Yes, I’ve heard Fritos make a good firestarter. Makes sense, with all that oil and those carbs. I buy firstarters for my fireplace. I’m lazy. I can do it with newspaper and twigs, four times out of five, but it takes attention.
Once I tried to take firestarters on an airplane to Maine. They said NO. Should I pack Fritos next time? Firestarters are great for camping. Sometimes foraged wood can be damp.
Firestarter fritos or not I like the taste of them. Pat one day you will have to join me when I make Frito pie! And enjoyed this blog made me smile and laugh! Love it!
Laughter was what I was trying for, Yvette!
Phil makes a great subject. However the photographer seems to have just missed the abashed expression
Quibble, quibble, Ren. But he DOES often appear in this blog.
Well, that was fun! Reminds me of the time I came home late during deadline to a house full of smoke and a RED iron skillet on the stove with a flame burning insistently beneath it. The resident musician, who had “cleaned up after fixing dinner for himself,” was in the basement innocently recording. I was truly glad it had not been an “all-nighter.”
I needed this, thank you.
Andrea, I had two melancholy posts half-drafted and my husband set the microwave on fire and saved me from them. You’re welcome.
Thanks for the laughs, Pat. This one reminds me of an incident from childhood when I walked into the kitchen just after my aunt Emma had opened too soon the pressure cooker full of apple sauce. Sauce everywhere—walls, ceiling, stove, floor, auntie’s hair and abashed face.
i love all these kitchen disaster stories, Bob! Did you see Marilyn’s about the redhot skillet?
I did. That could have been a real disaster. And that reminds me of the time JJ and I put hot dogs on to boil at his parents’ house, went downstairs to work on something, forgot hotdogs, started smelling smoke. The pot could not be saved, but no lasting harm done.
It’s so comforting to know these kinds of things also happened to us when we were young.
Great tale, Pat! Thanks! Also loved the exploding eggs. Looks like you’ve triggered similar stories in us all! Mine’s when my mom came to visit one time and I was broiling steaks for her and my dad – you know, big special treat to show the folks I *could* cook. All of a sudden the smoke alarm went off and I noticed smoke curling out of the slats in the burners. Opened the oven door to be overcome by smoke. As I fled to open doors and windows, my mom, never one to miss a beat in such situations, hollered over my shoulder, “Well, if you’d clean your oven once in a while . . . ” 😉