I had a skillet meal to cook, some Indonesian rice dish called Nasi Goreng. It sounded like some Third Reich chant, but the cooking directions were pretty idiot-proof. Heat a little oil in a pan, dump the bag of frozen rice and vegetables in, stir, and eat. This was during my Buffy obsession, so I was glued to the TV from 6-8, and so didn't think about dinner until the first commercial during whatever 8:00 show I was watching.
I've got a decent system set up for cooking pasta and not missing much TV. Put water at a medium heat during a break. When another break hits, the water should be boiling nicely. Dump the pasta in, crank the heat, stir a little, and then turn the heat off and watch more TV. In five minutes, sacrifice a minute of precious TV to drain the pasta before it gets mushy.
I was hoping for a similar system making the Nasi Goreng. I'd heat up the oil, dump the bag, turn off the heat, and watch some TV. The rice, however, was one frozen brick. I chipped a little off with a fork, which fell into the sputtering pan and began hissing. It'd take a while to get the iceberg out of the bag, and I could hear the TV switching from commercials to Survivor: Africa. So I carried the hot pan and the bag to the living room, so I could chip and watch. I really wish this was caused by a good show, and not Survivor. Worse yet, the clip episode of Survivor.
I put the pan down on the carpet, and chipped a little more rice ice into it. I put pots and pans down on the carpet all the time. The clich� about bachelors never using plates is remarkably accurate. Most of the time I'm putting down a big pot of pasta. Of course, the pasta pot goes several minutes between the gas flame and the carpet, and is full of heat-conducing pasta. This frying pan was empty, save for a dollop of oil and about four grains of rice, and was under a maximum flame just seconds before.
After a minute of unsuccessful chipping, I went to swirl the frozen rice in the pan. I couldn't. It felt glued to the ground. This could not possibly be good.
I gave it a tug. Nothing. I gave it a prolonged tug. The entire carpet began moving up, like I was lifting up a sheet.
Carpet is synthetic. That means it's plastic. Plastic can melt.
I gave the pan a good hard yank, and a rip came from underneath. Half the pan broke free, and underneath was a char mark as dark as coal to a blind man. Not only was the carpet melted, but it was rehardening on my pan. It was jet black, far off from the light brown it was during Buffy. The pan was still hot, and still probably doing damage. I figured another rip might tear the whole carpet instead of just the fibers, so I jammed my fork underneath the half still melted on and eventually pried a solid sheet of cooling plastic off the pan. It was like getting a spatula under a burnt pancake, only the pan was the pancake.
After five minutes of panic, I realized this would not be repaired any time soon. I put the pan on the stove and carefully added the rest of the rice. When it was done cooking, I put it on a damn plate. (It was pretty good, although not worth destroying my rug.) I went to wash the pan, and I found that the carpet goo on the pan had melted itself to my burner. I had to turn the heat on again to liquefy the carpet enough so I could get it off again. If anyone has an asbestos glove and unmeltable steel wool, I'd like to borrow them.
The carpet looks like a tiny UFO landed. The half I ripped off has just the stumps of the carpet fibers remaining, like the remains of a forest fire. The fork-spilt half is a smooth, solid sheet of black plastic. Correspondingly, half of my frying pan looks like a charbroiled English muffin: the other half is clean.
Something like this should be reported to the landlord. It's his carpet, after all. I barely see him, even though we live next door: I drop off the check every month, we say hi in passing, and that's about it. We don't stop by each other's places much, so he hasn't really seen my apartment since it was empty and unfurnished. I don't want him to see me living in my own squalor (bachelor truth clich� #2).
Public shame about living in filth can be alleviated two ways: 1. cleaning, or 2. becoming a hermit. I was inadvertently becoming 2. I had every intention of cleaning, but I'm paying a decent amount of money for cable TV now, and as soon as I realize I have free time and I'm in a dirty apartment, I can miraculously find a movie on cable.
I wanted to tell my landlord immediately about the rug, but that turned into as soon as I cleaned the apartment. That was planned for tomorrow, and then the day after, and then next week. A month passed, and another, and still that cleaning was only a week away.
The burn mark was right in the center of the room, so I began looking for a coffee table. 99% of coffee tables out there were comprised of legs and a platform, which wouldn't cut it for me. I needed a solid block, a box. Ideally it would be a treasure chest, and those things are often buried. I haven't found a decent table yet, mostly because I'm rejecting anything that is not a treasure chest.
One weekend I got bored. It was the President's Day weekend, one of those three day weekends that sneak up on you unannounced. It's always when you have no real plans, so instead of completely wasting two days, you'll completely waste three. I was so bored I squeezed all the entertainment I could out of the cable box, and still had time to kill. I got so bored I cleaned.
The whole apartment got scrubbed. It's a small apartment, but a messy one, so that meant a good deal of work. All the junk in my living room got thrown out or whittled down to one stack of papers. (I always have a stack of papers in my life that I can't throw away yet can't put anywhere. I think this is how junk drawers evolved.) I was finally in a position to come clean (lousy pun, I know).
But first I'd make brownies. Boredom was getting to me: if this was a four-day weekend, I'd be taking up needlepoint. I bake so little, I went years without having a cookie tray. My mom finally got me one for Christmas, and it was still sitting in the shelf below the oven with its packaging still taped to the front.
It was about as routine a brownie baking excursion as possible. Preheat the oven, dump the brownie mix in a bowl (technically a five-quart plastic ice cream tub), add eggs, water and oil, and mix. I always like finding lumps of dry brownie mix, churning them to the top, and having them burst to dust as I mash them. I greased my pan, poured the brownie mix in, turned to the oven, and it was a smokestack.
Smoke was billowing out of the top vent. Thick black smoke. There was nothing in there to burn except some cheese dripping from frozen pizza, and those had been baked more times than a Phish roadie. What was being burnt, the oven racks?
I pulled down the oven door and saw an inferno. Huge yellow and orange flames roared out of the each side. This was a gas oven, but it was always harmless blue flames tucked underneath the bottom panel, not an indoor bonfire. There was so much smoke it was getting hazy in the kitchen.
The smoke detector decided then to go off, after the kitchen looked like Los Angeles from the air. Every time I turn the oven on it blares and beeps, and the one time I've got a real fire it waits until I can't see five feet.
I shut the oven, turned off the gas, and then smacked the fire detector quiet. After a minute I peeked in the oven, and the fire was still there but dying down. I shut the over again: by design it probably didn't stop the oxygen flow in, but it probably didn't hurt. I peeked after another minute and the fire was gone from the main oven, although there was an orange glow from beneath the bottom panel. Another minute and that was gone too.
My landlord had told me if I noticed anything in the apartment I debated about telling him, then tell him. An old woman decided to not tell him about a leaky pipe for a few years, and when she did tell him, the water had killed a whole section of wall. Oven flamb� certainly seemed to fit the bill here. Of course, so did a giant rug burn. I was tempted to pop the hood and try to ascertain the problem myself, but me trying to bake brownies set the oven on fire: me trying to fix the oven would surely burn down the block.
My kitchen windows are right over the basement door, and I saw the basement open when I cracked my windows to clear the smoke. I went around the house and told my landlord my oven dilemma. I was certain this wasn't my fault, so I had no problems explaining this one. He'd be walking right by the burn mark, however, so I prepared a ten second summation when he got in the living room so as not to distract him from the potential bomb I had in the kitchen.
He walked quickly through clean living room, not giving a glance at anything. And why should he? After all, I had it this clean every day. The only thing messy was a small stack of papers, and that was indiscreetly lying ... in the middle of the room. Right over the burn mark.
I swear it was unintentional. I had several stacks of papers on the floor over the weekend, and the one that didn't get bagged for recycling was the one in the center square of my living room. On the plus side, I could now postpone telling him. Hey, if I never moved, maybe I'd never have to tell him!
My landlord took a brief look at the oven and made sure the fire was out. He's one of those guys who owns a lot of tools, and manages to use most of them every week, so this wouldn't be a pain for him. He said he'd take it apart and really look at it tomorrow morning when I was at work.
That was bad. What if he moved the papers and saw the burn mark? Telling him in any circumstance was bad, but having him find out while investigating a second stove-related calamity was inadvisable.
We walked back into the living room, and I asked him if he had any extra carpeting from when he did the living room. He said he didn't. I removed the papers, said I accidentally did this 'a little while ago' (two months at this point), but looked into how to fix it and I could patch it with a piece of carpet from the closet, which is carpeted if he didn't know, unless he wanted to redo the entire living room, which he could since after all its his carpet, and I didn't imagine the security deposit I put down being more than the cost of it but if it was I'd cover it.
He looked at the burn mark. "Hunh. Well, I'll check the oven tomorrow." And that was that.
I heard shouting and ran to the kitchen window. The landlord's wife was hysterical, shouting for her husband. She smelled smoke and didn't know where it was coming from. I told her what happened, and she calmed down. I try to make brownies, almost burn down my kitchen, and now almost give a nice old grandmother a heart attack. If I made muffins, I'm sure we'd have nuclear war.
I wrapped up my brownie batter and stuck it in the fridge. The oil on the pan would probably mix with the brownie mix and make brownies with the consistency of the bottom of my frying pan. But I didn't want to risk exploding the oven over a potentially unhappy brownie batch.
My landlord checked the stove the next day, and quickly found the culprit: my cookie tray. The paper around it had ignited during the preheating, and the gas jets from the oven fueled it further. The stove was otherwise fine. I used it the next day to finally cook the brownies. Chilled brownie batter is much easier to remove from the pan than normal, it turns out.
The burn mark is still there, big as a Frisbee. It has a twin on my still-unused cookie tray. I'm debating about going into the closet with a box cutter, or just getting a treasure chest. Treasure chest owners looking to sell: contact me.
I'm doing a lot of cooking with the microwave now. I occasionally use my oven, but only if I have a grown up to supervise.