Kitchen Catastrophes

A Sunday morning is a good time to do something that you haven't don'e for a while, and with such a noble idea I venture in the kitchen to make myself some tea. Nothing exotic, as simple as a cuppa could get. And while the stuff heats up, I decide to checkout the Sunday TOI and it absorbs me for a while; until I nostrils smell something weird and I realize that a disaster has struck. I rush to the kitchen, and it's full of smoke. Open the windows, turn on the exhaust and in a minute, I get a clear view of what would have been a hot cup of tea. The white sprinklings, I realized are ashes while the rest of the stuff is charred red label tea and a coat of soot all along the wall.

This is the second time in less than an year that I have done something like this. The last time it happened, I was distracted by an email I was in the middle of. And it was a bigger disaster in terms of magnitude and set off the fire alarm. I was in Nashua back then, and was boiling water to cook some Maggi in a thin aluminium saucepan and realized the horror only when the alarm went off! The aluminium thing or whatever

remained off it (the thin sheet of metal had melted away and deposited on the plate below the heating layer) was terribly hot to move around and place it anywhere else. Still I tried and molten aluminium dripped over the vinyl floor and wooden kitchen top. Finally, it was time to clear off the smoke and get the alarm to stop blaring. Portions of floor and kitchen top were charred by the molten aluminium and I ended up losing some of my deposit for the apartment.

Let me tell all the sceptics that I am not that bad a cook, and most of my stuff is palatable. Ok, swallow-able, if there is anything like that.

The only respite is that there have been no fires yet. I hope to keep that record intact.

Left - Red hot ashes.
Top - Ashes and the charred remains.