That's, um, aluminum soup on the burner. I'd had a burst of energy and decided to make quiches for dinner - one with artichoke hearts, the other with asparagus. I put the pot on the burner, cranked it up to high, chopped the asparagus, and went to dump it into the pot.
That's when I saw the pot was empty. I'd neglected to add water. (What was that about my beautiful brain?)
I picked up the pot to rescue it from the heat, and the aluminum soup spilled out in a big glop. The aluminum layer sandwiched between two layers of stainless steel had liquified, expanded, and popped the bottom off the pan.
The blobular aluminum was shiny and pretty, in a perverse way:
Now, the good news is that this stove is 25 years old. It bakes unevenly and I've been jonesing for a new one ever since we bought this house nearly seven years ago. I know we could just replace the burner, but maybe this is the nudge I need to do a little research and buy a new range. Any suggestions? Past negotiations on this have always hit a stalemate because I long for a gas stove, while my husband wants something like a ceramic top that's easy to clean. As you can see, he's not being unreasonable - not at all.
The other reason I can't be upset about this is that I'm ecstatic about the surge of energy behind this kitchen fiasco. Yesterday I rode my bike to work and was pretty useless for the rest of the evening. Today I felt strong enough to bike to work again, and I still had enough oomph to embark on cooking a real dinner for just the second time since I fell sick on January 20.
As for the quiches? They were delicious.
4 comments:
My husband would prefer to have a gas stove, but he knows it would be too dangerous. That is, because my track record on kitchen accidents involving heat isn't good. We LIVE on aluminum soup around here. ;-) Imagine putting a bunch of eggs in a pot to hard-boil them, then leaving the room and forgetting all about them. Then returning an hour later to find all the water gone, the pot burned up and bits of egg and shells all over the walls. Oh, for scratch-n-sniff blog comments.
Oooh, your egg incident sounds far grosser than the time I boiled carrot soup down to petrified sediment. I for one am glad that Blogger doesn't have a scratch-and-sniff feature yet!
I'm actually not such a bad cook, measured by the end product, but kitchen-accident-prone? Oh yeah. It's a wonder I don't have any permanent scars just from chopping veggies alone. And yes, I know a sharp knife helps, but I still have a fraught relationship with onions.
I can't live without my gas range. Can. Not. If I leave anything at all on the stove top and also leave the room, I always always set a timer to remind me something's on.
My eldest son came home late one night, possibly somewhat the worse for wear and hungry. Put a pot on the stove to cook a hotdog - never min leaving the room - he left the apartment altogether because he was upset over something - likely being a teenager -and didn't want to wake me up! My youngest son went after him to console him.
I woke up in the morning and went out to the kitchen to make my morning coffee. I was a bit groggy and couldn't figure out what was wrong for a few minutes. The whole (white) kitchen was absolutey blackened, as were the living room walls and ceilings. What was left of the pot was in the sink.
Why, I wondered, had I not awoken to the sound of a smoke alarm? Because they had dismantled the smoke alarm some months earlier when not wanting to arouse me with another kind of smoke - this came out under a cross-examination and which I felt provoked enough to use extreme measures such as telling them they almost killed their mother.
It wasn't a gas stove. And learning of the use of an illicit substance proved to be a useful smoke signal.
See, good things can come from bad cookery!
Wow, Hesperia, it's really lucky that all of you survived that overcooked hot dog. The cleanup must have been a huge project. If good things came of it, I'd say it's because you handled it as wisely as well as possible.
But you also make a good argument for having multiple smoke detectors. We have one in practically every room. I've always thought we have more than anyone really needs, but maybe not!
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