Burnin’ down the house

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . September 4, 2010 . 7:03PM

It’s never been a huge secret that I don’t know how to cook. Those that have been my friend or family know that I routinely burn things as simple as soup and popcorn. And yes, I stand beside the microwave while the popcorn is popping and count the pops in my head. It still burns. I also kill plants. It’s amazing to me that I’ve been able to keep my animals alive, let alone my child.

So, a couple weeks ago, I was on a frozen pizza kick. I’d been home more frequently than usual and thanks to Netflix and their amazing instant streaming capabilities, I’ve been watching a lot more television than I normally would. I preheated my oven, stuck in the pizza and waited my 11 minutes.

…

…

At which time smoke started rolling from the oven, the smoke detector started bleating like an angry sheep and my dogs started howling like I’d stuck them all with needles. I’m certain the look on my face was not only sheer panic but also an incredible what the heck is happening to me when I realized that there was literally nothing I could do to stop the noise. It was 99 degrees outside so opening the windows meant undoing what the air conditioning had spent all day doing.

So, I did what any normal person would do. I searched for the batteries, which I couldn’t find. Then, I flapped doors in the house like an angry chicken until, 25 minutes later, the unhappy smoke detector quieted its banshee yell. Then I scraped the black off the bottom of the pizza and got down to business.

I mentioned this to the other adult that lives in my house who laughed and didn’t bother to mention that I could stop the angry noise by holding the button down for two seconds.

Fast forward to the next day where, lo and behold, it was pizza for lunch again! I’d made sure that the pizza stone was clean and ready to go. The oven was clean and there was no way the alarm was going to go off again. I was all ready for a good pizza. No black!

The oven hadn’t even hit 375 when the alarm started shrieking. The dogs started howling. I was a deer in headlights.

I ran into the kitchen and the oven was smoking. I have 9-foot ceilings so my 5’10″ self had to stand on a chair to reach the detector. I twisted and twisted the detector to try to find the batteries at which point the detector sparked and fizzled. Apparently, when they are wired into the ceiling they don’t like to be twisted. When I did this, all the lights in the left quadrant of the house went off.

Well…I stopped the smoke detector. Luckily it was just a broken circuit and the smoke detector is replaceable.

And hey, the pizza came out perfectly.

Someday I’ll learn how to cook. Or maybe just stick with the microwave. But not for popcorn.