Fire in the kitchen!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

(Don’t worry- all the Nevilles, human and feline, are OK)

Mr. Neville seems to be on a run of setting things on fire in the kitchen lately.

On Saturday, he was heating up some corn tortillas in the oven, and somehow, while trying to turn off the oven, turned it to Clean. We managed to turn the oven off, but it stayed locked for a while. We saw the tortillas burst into flames, and they were circles of carbon when we were finally able to get the oven open. At least it didn’t wreck the cookie sheet they were on, as we thought it might.

Then, yesterday, I had marinated some lamb chops in wine. He put them under the broiler, too close to the broiler, and they caught fire. They went out before too long, and were OK to eat, at least.

Does anyone else have stories of setting things on fire in the kitchen, to make us feel better?

2

I’ve only come close to a kitchen fire once, but it was the most scary kind: a pot of oil boiled over onto the gas burner.

I watched the thing in slow motion, I swear. Grabbed the lid to the pot and slammed it on, while turning off the burner and somehow, miraculously, the overboiled oil didn’t catch fire! I can only surmise that the sheer volume of liquid kept it from igniting before I got the flame turned off. Had it splattered instead of boiled over, it would have been a different story, and it would have caught and then wicked its way back up the pot, under the lid and ignited the whole damn thing.

God, that was a mess to clean up. The oil covered the stove and made its way down through the burners into the underneath part of the stovetop. Still, better than a fire.

And now I know - really, use a *much *bigger pot than you think you need when you’re deep frying!

3

anne, i feel yer pain.

one fine fall afternoon, long ago when the queen was a wee thing and the queen’s little sister even wee-er, said little sister did her very best to burn down *our *kitchen.
said little sister, in all other things a sober and responsible young lady, had A Very Bad Habit of putting a pan of grease on the stove to heat up and then walking away from it for a while. you all know where this is going of course…

mother and i had both reprimanded little sister MANY TIMES that the practice was A Very Bad Habit, to which little sister repeatedly ignored or simply blew off.

little sisters. can’t kill ‘em. the neighbors would talk.

so, on that fine fall afternoon i happened to be home sick from work. damn good thing, too. our mother was confined to a wheelchair, so as it turned out, things could have been A Lot Worse. i was as far from the kitchen as you could physically get – way on the other side of the house, relaxing in front of the tv - when I heard my name called.

the next time I heard my name - about a nanosecond later – it was the Sound Incarnate of absolute, utter terror at a volume and register i didn’t know little sister was physically capable of. it was then that i first twigged to the possibility that little sister was probably never going to be an ellen ripley in the face of a dire emergency.

i don’t remember going from the tv room to the kitchen. i don’t remember grabbing a box of baking soda from under the kitchen sink. i don’t remember ripping off the top of the (previously-unopened) box. apparently while dumping the fire-filled pan in the sink at the same time (note to self: shoulda not done that. should gotten a lid to smother the flames, but i was a little preoccupied with a wall fire by that point. you know. priorities.).

the next thing i do remember is coming back to myself, busily throwing handfuls at said wall as well as the stove, both of which were blazing merrily away. a few more seconds and it would have burned through the false ceiling tile and then it would have been game over for the queen’s amateur firefighting stint. from my reporting days and hanging around firemen all those years, i know a fire doubles in size every minute. it would have been ‘grab the mom, the dogs, and the cat, and vamoose the premises immediately if not sooner.’

oh, and you know that bit about mothers lifting cars off their kids? i looked at that box of baking soda later – what was left of it. it was constructed of plastic-reinforced cardboard. thick, plastic reinforced cardboard.

yeah. there’s a lot to be said for adrenaline.

needless to say, that was The Last Time little sister indulged in her Very Bad Habit. it scared her so badly she didn’t cook with grease in a pan until after she was married, some ten years later.

yanno what really sucked?

guess who ended up having to repaint the damn kitchen all by herself because Someone Else scorched the sh*t out of it?? the little snot had to go back to college the next afternoon. :smiley:

4

That reminds me, always keep a fire extinguisher on the opposite side of the room as the oven, preferably in an adjacent room.

5

yeah, right after that, guess what i went out and got? the firemen donated one of theirs to me after hearing my tale of woe. hard to believe we didn’t have one in the house. i of all people should have known better!

two more reminders:

  1. remember to pick it up periodically, turn it upside down and shake the hell out of it. keeps the powder from congealing at the bottom of the cylinder.

  2. have it serviced yearly by a reputable extinguisher company. if not, get rid of it and buy a new one. i think if you take old ones to the local fire house they can recycle it for you, but check with them first.

6

I’m always watching the Ms in the kitchen. She has a bad habit of turning the burners to high by default. She has, in the past, turned something on to heat and walked away from it. I’ve come into the kitchen to find flames on more than one occasion, and once came in to find a cast aluminum coffee maker actually on fire and melting on the burner. We had a serious talk after that, as I pointed out that we could not afford to lose everything we owned because of that sort of carelessness. She’s gotten much better.

7

I’m utterly paranoid about that sort of thing. Partially because, one day when I was probably somewhere between 10-12, my dad had set the teakettle to boil for his instant joe, made his coffee & left for work. Mom & I woke up to discover that what he HADN’T done was turn off the burner he put it back on.

The water had long since boiled away and the enamelled metal teakettle was gray halfway up the sides. The plastic handle had started melting. This is not a fragrance you want to wake up to… :eek:

8

One time my brother gave me a fire extinguisher for a present. I thought “Huh. That’s an odd present. Oh, well.” and threw it on top of the fridge.

Then, when my microwave (which he also gave me for a present. He’s awesome like that… Or is he?..) caught fire. I thought “Fire extinguisher. What a great present!”

Here’s a little tip: If you shoot a fire extinguisher into a confined space like a microwave, the cloud of fire extinguisher contents will blow back in your face a few split seconds faster than your body will realize you should not be breathing the stuff. You will cough a lot.

9

Back in the early 1930s my grandmother and aunt were in the kitchen of their house. My mother and the rest of her brothers were around the yards doing chores.

My aunt did not realize that she had gotten kerosene on the [oilcloth] table cloth and body of the lamp while filling it, and she lit it.

She died within the week and my grandmother took about 3 years to die [recurring pneumonia took her out, she had severe lung damage from the fire]

There has been since that time a family policy that if you are filling oil lamps, you do it outside.

10

The worst I ever did was drop a piece of bread onto the turned-off-but-still-hot heating element of the toaster oven.

11

I was making rumaki once (that’s a chicken liver and water chestnut wrapped with bacon) in the broiler. At some point I noticed thick, black smoke pouring out of the crack around the door of the broiler.

I almost opened to broiler door to look inside, then it occurred to me it was better to let the fire stay in the metal box. I turned off the oven and let everything cool down. When I opened the broiler there where little charcoal briquettes in the exact shape of rumaki on the broiler pan.

The other exciting “domestic fire” story I have is from last summer when, assisting my landlord in patching the roof of my building, we accidentally set the roof on fire. Cue bucket brigade. No serious harm done, the damage was easily repaired, and I discovered just how many 80 pound buckets of water I could run up a 25 foot ladder in succession while having an asthma attack (smoke bad for lungs!) Answer: an amazing number. Around 50. Yes, 50, because we kept pouring the water on for long after we thought it was out just to be sure. We also blew the contents of two fire extinguishers over it. Uh, that was after the first two buckets and before the rest. It was an exciting morning, but not the kind of excitement that’s good for you.

12

When I was 12 years old, I was essentially a morning and afternoon latchkey kid. Mom worked long hours, and my stepfather worked nights teaching and often didn’t get home until really late, so he liked to sleep in when I had to get ready for school. Which generally wasn’t a problem, as I was a mostly responsible 12-year-old and I very rarely had a problem.

Every morning, I would heat myself up something for breakfast, usually a Pop-Tart. I’d pop it in the toaster, then go finish getting my backpack packed so I could grab it out of the toaster and leave. Until one morning, when I went back to the toaster and found a six-inch jet of flame coming out of the top of it. Did I mention it was underneath a kitchen cabinet at the time?

I wasn’t sure what to do–I knew that it was still plugged in, so I couldn’t use water, but I didn’t have anything at hand to put the fire out, and I couldn’t reach the plug, it being behind the jets of flame. So I ran and woke up my stepfather, who was ROYALLY pissed. He managed to unplug the toaster and took it outside, where it burned itself out. The bottom of the kitchen cabinet was completely scorched, though–I’m amazed it didn’t actually catch fire.

13

I evacuated part of my junior high school. We were making refrigerated ginger cookies. I sliced mine too thin, popped them in the oven, then ignored them. They caught on fire, causing the smoke alarms to go off. The sprinkler only went off in the Home Ec room. Yet, I still did well in that class. Go figure.

TheKid caused a toaster malfunction. She didn’t think the toast was, well, toasted enough so she pushed them down for another round. The toast caught on fire. I unplugged the toaster, tossed it in the sink, and doused it with water. Of course, she was more bummed about no toast than flames jumping out of the toaster.

14

Does the dining room count?

I was getting ready for a camping trip and it was cold outside so I brought my camping stove (one of those little MSR Whisperlites, for backpacking) into the dining room to make sure it still worked.

The fact that I hadn’t used it in many months and really didn’t remember the operating instructions all that well didn’t bother me.

The fact that it’s not a very good idea to experiment with white gas in the house didn’t occur to me.

Anyway, I pressurized the fuel container and proceeded to go through what I thought was the correct procedure for lighting it. If you’ve never used one, you probably don’t know that there is a little cup on the bottom of the heater where a small quantity of liquid gas collects and can burn very easily.

Especially if you open the valve all the way while trying to get it to light.

It eventually, and quite suddenly, lit. Mere moments later the chandelier hanging above it (as a light source, don’t you know) began contributing even more light as it also contributed combustible material.

I believe I said a bad word. Possibly two. There was a towel close-to-hand and I was able to use that to beat out the flames. There was a fire extinguisher 10 feet away, but I was being much more reactive than might have been indicated and forgot all about it at the moment. I’d like to think I would have gone for it next but I was able to put out the fire before it got any worse. Singed the towel pretty good, though.

I was living alone at the time so no one ever found out about it. Until now. Please don’t tell my wife who thinks we are going to have fun on our next camping trip.

15

I night out drinking and then cooking a frozen pizza are a near lethal combination. Believe me, I know. It’s like your body’s telling you, “You’ve got 16 minutes while that thing cooks. Why don’t you just lay down on the couch and close your eyes for 10 minutes. What could happen?”

Then 45 minutes later you’re awaken by the sound of your wife screaming, “What the HELL are you burning?”

Near lethal combination on two fronts now that I think about it.

16

When I was in the fifth grade or so, my mom decided to bake chocolate pies for Christmas. She was going to make one to keep at the house, and one to take to my grandfather. Since the liquid chocolate pie filling tended to splatter during cooking, she placed the two filled pie crusts (store-bought, in tins) on a cookie sheet before placing them in the oven. The cookie sheet itself was old, and somewhat warped; while in the oven, this warping increased to the extent that both pie crusts spilled their contents into the bottom of the stove. A decent-sized fire erupted that destroyed the element in the bottom of the oven and reduced the two pies to blackened chunks. Mom was very upset; I remember tasting the remains of one of the pies and telling her it was fine. :smiley: Apparently there was some problem getting the oven repaired prior to Christmas, since I remember the turkey being cooked on the grill that year.

Fires caused by a stray piece of foil falling into the bottom of the oven are also a spectacular event.

17

Was he pissed about the fire, or about you waking him up? My “don’t bother me” orders have a standing exception for situations where there is blood, fire, or more than an inch of water on the floor.

I nearly set a toaster on fire once. I had put something in there that was too wide for the toaster (this happened in 1992, I don’t remember what it was), and it made the death rattle that toasters make when they’re trying to pop up but can’t. Fortunately, my mom managed to unplug it before it actually caught fire. I prefer toaster ovens to toasters, now. Though Mr. Neville has set two toaster ovens on fire before, so it’s not like those are completely safe.

Pop-Tarts are well known to cause toaster fires. Dave Barry did some excellent research on this phenomenon.

We don’t deep-fry at home, because I’m a 'fraidy cat about hot oil fires.

18

I had a fire in the microwave once. There was a piece of foil inside the styrofoam container that I forgot about (yes, I know microwaving styrofoam is bad anyway). The foil superheated the foam and it all went up. There were little bits of burnt foam and plenty of smoke billowing from the back of the microwave. It cleaned out, though. That was at least 8 years ago and the microwave still works fine. There are scorch marks at the back of the inside.

19

Yes.

20

Last summer, I was in the process of baking a cheesecake for one of my guys at work’s birthday. After about ten minutes in the oven, I stepped out onto the deck (just off the kitchen, I can see in) to make a phone call. Ten minutes later, I ended my phone call prematurely when the smoke detecter shrieked.

Upon entering the kitchen, I could see a flame through the oven window (not good if you’re baking in an electric oven). I immediately got out the box of baking soda (I’m a vetran of a couple of minor grease fires in ovens) and emptied it.

When the fire failed to go out, I looked more closely to see that it was the actual element itself arcing and causing the fire. Off with the power!

But unfortunately, not before panic set in and I emptied my kitchen fire extinguisher onto the fire and cheesecake. :frowning:

Can you say total kitchen mess?

It was only two days before apartment maintenence came and replaced the element. It took a couple of weeks to get all of the powder from the fire extinguisher out of the nooks and crannies of my kitchen.