The Miscellaneous, Slightly Worrisome, Post of Doom

% The title of this post is somewhat misleading. It erroneously implies that other posts have not been one of the following: miscellaneous, slightly worrisome, or posts of doom. As far as I know, all posts to this blog have, in some way or another, fit into all of the preceding categories quite nicely.

% That being said, on the the actual content of the post.

% When I was younger there was a considerable amount of time and energy devoted to teaching my fellow classmates and me about fire safety. Various teachers spent hours teaching their impressionable students to be panic stricken by the mere thought that a fire might someday occur in their vicinity by calming reiterating what to do and what not to do in case of a fire using the same tone of voice that a doctor uses when ey say "This will only hurt a bit". I know I, for one, started to refuse to sleep with my door open because a) the smoke detector light that I could see from my room glowed red and made me think that something was wrong and b) smoke would find it more difficult to get through doors, and we all learned that smoke is what killed people who were in fires. Anyone who knows my habits around fire now are free to take a moment to speculate about what made those habits change..... OK, moment's up, speculation is over. Though feel welcome to post a comment about it.

% One of the situations they never seemed to go over in those classes, however, was what to do if something caught fire in the oven. Or maybe they did go over it, and I just knew that I would never be let close enough to an oven for it to be a worry. At any rate, I was given cause to wonder about this. If something catches fire in the oven, what do you do? After turning off the oven, I mean - I figure that is a pretty self evident first step. What's the next step?

% On the one hand, can you think of a better place in the kitchen to have a fire? There is limited air flow, the only fuel available is what is in the oven, and the fire is surrounded by a metal box that is built to contain heat. I realize that it might not be built for a fire, but unless you have something fairly large that can start a good blaze, an oil fire (which, come to think of it, is likely to be the case), or you were cooking from the Anarchist's Cookbook, it shouldn't get too much hotter than the maximum rating for the oven, and it shouldn't stay hot for a significant period of time. (To all of the National and International Security people who found this blog due to the mention of the Anarchist's Cookbook: Welcome. Relax, stay awhile, browse around. I'll make it easy on you - I have not read the book, though if I didn't have a backlog of reading material to go through first, I would probably consider doing so.) So my thinking is, it might be best to just let it burn itself out.

% On the other hand, there are different fingers.

% The problems with leaving the fire in the oven is that, while the oven might be rated to withstand heat, there is no assurance that the pan you were using is rated for the same amount of heat, and it is probably in much closer contact with the source of heat than the actual oven is. Burning your backing sheet is bad, especially if it is the type of backing sheet that is likely to hold flavours. And that's the other thing - will all future food you put in the oven end up tasting charred, because of the fire that was in there? That would be rather unfortunate, to say the least. Not to mention, if you leave the fire in the oven, your food is a write-off. OK, so maybe it would be anyway, but it's a write-off and you didn't even try to stop it. Wouldn't that make you feel helpless?

% But the moment you open the oven door, there's going to be this influx of nice, oxygen rich air into the oven. The flame will likely get higher, and hotter, which just increases the damage it will do. And if you happen to be unlucky / dumb enough to open the door and lean in just as some of the liquid in there boils and splatters, you could end up with scalding liquid on your face, which I can tell you is not a pleasant experience (it really isn't). And what are you going to do when you open the door? Throw water in? I don't know how many of you have tried throwing water into an oven door (or any enclosed area at about that height, with a small opening). It is surprisingly difficult, cause you don't want to get the area around it wet, and the water will actually tend to fly higher than the door opening. Then there's avoiding the steam burns when the water hits the hot elements, etc., plus the fact that I don't know if I have ready access to a bucket (suppose I could use a mixing bowl), and it's really a tricky proposition.

% The conclusion that I've come to so far is that the very next step, after turning off the stove, is to turn on the range hood to get rid of the smoke, and then start looking for a long stick and some marshmallows. If I'm going to have a fire in the stove, I might as well cook something with it.%

Sabius.
Finished the 22 day of April, Year of Our Lord 2007.

(The fact that this will appear quite far down the page, due to it having been started significantly before it was posted, is purely happy coincidence. Thank you for scrolling down the page to read it.)