Dinner a la flambé

It’s a good thing Zoe is the next Rachael Ray because her mother has some serious problems in the kitchen. Last night I had a strange desire to cook a nice meal for Zoe and myself. Typically during the week we do easy since it’s just the two of us and I’m okay with cereal for dinner. I decided yesterday that we needed some ham, au gratin potatoes for me, mashed potatoes for Zoe, asparagus for me and green beans for Zoe. This meal would be at least a 5 pot meal, which is exactly 4 pots more than I like washing.

We rushed home, she played Mr. Potato Head and I got started. I put some water on the boil for the potatoes and got to work on Zoe’s potatoes.

After about 4 minutes I noticed that the water I had put on the stove still wasn’t appearing to be getting hot.

Then I discovered why.

I turned on the wrong burner. The one that was getting hot was cooking my burner cover. My stainless steel, holds up to anything burner cover.

In my panic I turned off the burner, grabbed some hot pads and lifted the scorched burner cover off. That’s when I saw the spark of a small fire.

Fortunately it was only a spark. I dropped the burner cover in the sink and got the water running to cool it.

That’s when I noticed my cloth hot pad also seemed to be smoking or igniting. I threw it into the sink too.

The house is filling with smoke, Zoe’s running to the door and asking, “mom okay? Okay mom?” I’m running around the kitchen trying to make sure the stove isn’t sparking anymore, the sink is keeping the hot pad and the burner cover from doing anything else and waving my arms around to keep the fire alarms from going off.

Just typing this makes my heart race again.

Fortunately no damage was done to the stove. A little elbow grease took care of any marks. The hot pad and burner cover didn’t survive. At least our house did and so did dinner.