I have had one major cooking disaster, and please, God, don’t let me ever have anything happen to top it! It was a long ago Good Friday, and the kids wanted to watch a prime time movie. Okay. BUT! They had to take a nap if they wanted to stay up that late. They considered it a fair trade. Around five I decided they would be waking up soon, my husband would be home soon, and I’d better make a dinner that would go well with the Charlie Brown movie. Tacos! So I made the filling and set my lovely Le Creuset frying pan – the one with the oak handle- on the burner and filled it with at least an inch of peanut oil to fry the taco shells. And then I remembered I hadn’t taken my medicine, so I dashed to the bedroom to get it. Annnnnd the phone rang. (sigh) And I forgot about the oil heating.
Twenty minutes or so later, when I got off the phone and opened the bedroom door, the “new” ceiling was an ephemeral black cloud that floated about an inch over my head! It had “threads” of melted plastic (the handles from the top oven of the stove) drifting in the air. I rushed to the kitchen, put out all of the fire I could (which included kitchen cabinet doors on each side of the stove, slammed the ruined Le Cruset frying pan into the bottom oven, put a fuill kettle of water on the burner I could no longer turn off because there was no knob, and then rushed to the hallway and closed all of the kids bedroom doors, and called the fire department for help with smoke control.
My insurance company was fabulous! They covered everything and waved the deductable if I would run the crystal through the dishwasher myself. The insurance company was great, but my agent was not. He forgot to tell me that until they had the kitchen restored, the whole family was covered for three meals a day at ANY restaurant of our choice! We lived in Del Mar (CA) then, so instead of a fabulous Easter buffet at a top restaurant we “made do” with pancakes, scrambled eggs and little pig sausages for Easter dinner, But we were all alive and safe and very very grateful!
The claims adjuster told me that the average American family has three house fires in their lifetime. I told him someone else would have to have my other two because I was through with such idiocy! All of my other cooking disasters have been minor irritations by comparison. And I tend to avoid making tacos when enchiladas are so much safer! '-)