Okay, I didn't really burn down the house, and the photo shown with this blog posting is simply for dramatic purposes, but I did manage to start a fire in the house yesterday.
While listening to a training session for work during lunch yesterday, I started cooking chicken breasts that we were going to use for dinner. I had started by heating a little bit of olive oil in a pan. Once the oil was hot, I added a couple of chicken breasts. These were chicken breasts that had been individually frozen with an ice glaze, and not all the ice had melted. Now I should have known from my years of experience working at Hardee's that putting ice in hot oil was a very bad idea, but I did it anyway.
At first there was a little bubbling of the oil as it melted the ice, but then the bubbling and splattering of the oil got much more vigorous. So next came my second big mistake, removing the pan from the burner. It sounded like a good idea, removing the pan from the heat would cause the oil to cool down, reducing the splattering. And while that happened, I hadn't considered the oil splattering out of the pan onto the hot surface of the stove.
As soon as I had moved the pan away, a ring of fire sprang up from where the heating element was under the flat top of the stove's hot burner. Now the oil that had splattered onto the stove burned up very quickly, extinguishing the fire, but it was a bit frightening. In reality, the fire probably lasted no longer than one second, but it seemed much longer as I stood, watching it on the stove.
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