Sometimes you are glad that there’s no cameras around to record your goofy nonsense…other times, you want evidence so you can review it later and share with others! I’m not sure which category this life event would fall under, but, none-the-less, it’s one of our favorite family stories:
I was frying up a batch of homemade taco shells, left the pan on the stove top to sit down and enjoy Taco Tuesday with my son Jonathan and his friend, Tommy, when Jonathan looked up and said, ‘There’s a fire’ and he said it with a pretty calm voice so when I got around to looking back into the kitchen behind me the fire was looking more like the Lord God Almighty leading the children of Israel by night with a pillar—only the pillar was billowing out of my taco pan! The fire was HUGE and licking the ceiling!
I jumped up from the table, ran back into the kitchen, grabbed a lid, but the flames were so high and hot it was too hard to get the lid to stay on and smother the pan. So, Tommy says in an equally nonchalant tone to Jonathan’s original announcement, “Well I’m a certified Boy Scout with a fire patch…got an extinguisher?” To which Jonathan says, “Oh yeah we DO have one!” He gets it and the Boy Scout starts to get ready to earn another badge (the ‘Saving an Old Lady in Distress’ badge I think) when it occurs to me, “Hey, I wonder if that extinguisher is rated for oil fires?” So I quickly stop Dudley Do-Right from potentially igniting himself AND me along with the pillar of fire and landing us all on the evening news.
Meanwhile the eternal flame is continuing to combust and now a cloud of thick black smoke has decided to join the party and is accumulating in my kitchen. So, the boys run around like the Keystone Cops and open all the windows and doors while I look for a hot pad to protect my hand because I’ve decided I could at least get the towering inferno out of my kitchen. I secure a hot pad (my husband’s fleece vest that was draped across the chair back) and exit with the flaming pan through the sliding glass door out to the side yard trying all the while not to catch myself or the over-hanging trees on fire.
I set the pan-o-fire down, get the lid and try again to smother it…this time it works, and the goo that used to be the oil for our lightly crisped tacos is all that remains…well that is until I get back into the kitchen to find that the paint on the stove hood is cinder black and bubbled like your first sun burned back of summer.
Just as I’m reaching up to feel the puckered warm paint, a fire alarm shrills through the house so I dart from room to room until I find that apparently Jonathan’s the lucky one with the only working alarm in the house. I balance tip-toe on his guitar amp and remove the battery, silencing the screaming alarm then step back down to the kitchen to survey the damage…Meanwhile, believe it or not, Glen has been asleep, hibernating blissfully through the entire “I Love Lucy meets Jennifer Richmond” episode!
Whew!
So could we all just keep this on the down low, and next Tuesday the tacos are on me…at Taco Bell!
Meanwhile the eternal flame is continuing to combust and now a cloud of thick black smoke has decided to join the party and is accumulating in my kitchen. So, the boys run around like the Keystone Cops and open all the windows and doors while I look for a hot pad to protect my hand because I’ve decided I could at least get the towering inferno out of my kitchen. I secure a hot pad (my husband’s fleece vest that was draped across the chair back) and exit with the flaming pan through the sliding glass door out to the side yard trying all the while not to catch myself or the over-hanging trees on fire.
I set the pan-o-fire down, get the lid and try again to smother it…this time it works, and the goo that used to be the oil for our lightly crisped tacos is all that remains…well that is until I get back into the kitchen to find that the paint on the stove hood is cinder black and bubbled like your first sun burned back of summer.
Just as I’m reaching up to feel the puckered warm paint, a fire alarm shrills through the house so I dart from room to room until I find that apparently Jonathan’s the lucky one with the only working alarm in the house. I balance tip-toe on his guitar amp and remove the battery, silencing the screaming alarm then step back down to the kitchen to survey the damage…Meanwhile, believe it or not, Glen has been asleep, hibernating blissfully through the entire “I Love Lucy meets Jennifer Richmond” episode!
Whew!
So could we all just keep this on the down low, and next Tuesday the tacos are on me…at Taco Bell!
~Jennifer
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