Nearly started a couple of house fires after moving in together with my IT Guy. He puts the pizza box into the oven to store the leftovers, and I, being an “out of sight out of mind” type will not only forget that there’s more pizza (and get unnecessarily hungry) but also consider the oven to be a cooking implement and not storage device.
Grease soaked flammable cardboard should not go into the MakeHot Box, says I. Meat or cheese containing leftovers go into the fridge, says I.
Leftover pizza goes into the oven, says he.
His mother is staying with us and apparently that’s how he was raised, because that’s where she pops any leftover pizza, too. (So it’s not just a guy thing or bachelor-who-never-cooks thing.)
None of the options apply. I store the pizza, not the offending box. It takes me eight days to eat eight slices of a Little Caesar’s Hot and Now, one slice each day for lunch. I separate the pieces, stack them up in a plastic bag and rewarm one each day from the fridge.
My oven “can go up to 500” only if I tell it to, and I don’t.
As Chronos wisely says. Nevertheless I always open the oven to look before turning it on.
There’s no upper limit to the dumbness and laziness of some people. In their very small defense, many take-home pizza boxes had (have?) printed instructions to put the pizza and the box in the oven at 200-250ish for a few minutes to reheat the pizza.
Which plants the seed in lazy minds that pizza boxes go safely & properly into an oven. What’s lost is the implicit context and implicit restrictions on time and temp and reason.
This is why it’s so hard to write instructions. If they’re long and detailed idiots won’t read them. If they’re short & sweet, idiots won’t understand the whole situation.
It never once occurred to me to store pizza in the oven, much less with a flammable box around it. Leftovers (pizza or otherwise) go into the fridge, or the garbage; not out in the warm where they can start to rot.
When I buy pizza I always get a larger one than I need, specifically to obtain leftovers. These pieces get wrapped in plastic wrap, then placed into ziploc freezer bags and put into the freezer for when I want more later in the week.
I’m borrowing this. I couldn’t quite articulate why this practice bothered me so much, aside from the “didn’t see box, so forgot I had leftovers for breakfast” angle.
We had a fun thread a couple years ago about a older couple who stored all their Tupperware in the lower oven they never used. They had a small kitchen, lotsa kitchen equipment, yadda yadda.
When their daughter & SIL came to visit for a holiday & helped to cook a feast needing both ovens much hilarity ensued because the SIL (our OP) didn’t know about the family secret. Daughter never thought to mention it because she’d grown up with it and it seemed totally normal to her. :smack:
Turns out that a sizeable fraction of Dopers (or their parents) use the oven as a storage cabinet for seldom used items. Who’da thunk it?
Someone I know always left leftover pizza, in its box, on the kitchen counter. Apparently, that’s how she always did it. Our leftover pizza goes into the fridge, either in its box, or wrapped in foil.
My pizza stays on the kitchen counter – in the box if it’s bought or covered with a kitchen towel if I made it – eaten the next day at room temperature.
I never store things in the oven but am aware that some people do so I’ve made it a habit to always look inside before turning it on.
In the box in the oven. If I choose to reheat it, I do take it out of the box.
At work the leftovers are kept in the box on the Break room table. I was eating a leftover cold slice one morning and a co-worker came into the room. I don’t think she could have been more aghast if I were standing there nekkid.