In the continuing spirit of good fun and public humiliation, I've made the decision to post on my website a story of epic proportions - a "sweeping chronicle of days gone by" raves ... that guy in the subway who always asks me for change. This will allow you, my faithful two (2) readers, the distinct pleasure of ridiculing me.
At my house, we have a candle on the stove. It's a pillar candle, it's red, and it smells. Pretty typical candle I'd say, were I forced to hazard a guess. It has safely observed our cooking attempts for weeks since it magically appeared there. Monday evening was no different when I set my water to boiling in preparation for frozen tortellini. You know, the frozen bagged kind. As I am wont to do, I set the water to boiling and left it alone. Typically it takes 20 minutes to boil water on our stove anyway, so I went away and forgot about it. Half an hour later I checked up on it, only to find a writhing mass of flame engulfing my poor pot of boiling water.
My first (and only) flash of intelligence was to turn off the gas on the stove. That said and done, I still had aforementioned writhing mass of flame to contend with. You see, the candle had melted into the depression in the stove where the burner lies, and now had formed a pool of molten, burning wax. Removing the (very) black pot didn't help. My call for help roused Liz and Lisse, who were ... predisposed in the other room, and we proceeded to have a brainstorm about exactly what should be done in a case like this. I distinctly remember Lisse saying "well, it's not a greasefire," but we were a bit hesitant to use water. So what was the next line of action? Being renters in Boston, of course we don't have a fire extinguisher. We couldn't remember if it was flour or baking powder you're supposed to use with kitchen fires. We have a lot more flour than baking powder, so flour was the next step.
All flour does, as I've learned, is burn, make things really disgusting-looking, and splatter the burning wax everywhere. So now we had several mini-fires burning on the stove, a little less flour, and still not much baking powder. Oh and we had a hole melted in the upper section of the stove. But what did we have a lot of? Water! It wasn't the brightest idea a group of twenty-somethings has ever had, but we were running out of options and the fire wasn't really going to be going anywhere anytime soon. Pour some water in carefully from the side, and voila! now we have a boiling mass of flameless, brown, flour-wax mix.
Word to the wise: Don't set your stove on fire. The cleanup just isn't worth it! On the bright side, at least we know we need to get a fire extinguisher.