Kitchen Calamity

So you all know I hate our kitchen—it’s just ENTIRELY too small (even if every single counter was completely cleared off, there’s still no good place to put a cutting board or mixing bowls, etc.). So I was getting dinner ready for our little grilling dinner party—starting the water boiling for rice, turning the big pan on for sauteing onions, and chopping onions on a cutting board on the stove. (I had debated cutting them across the sink, but I had already dirtied up the too-small cutting board so figured why change mid-stream?)

So I’m peeling and cutting onions and I see a small wisp of smoke and notice that my cutting board is a little too close to the rice pot, so I move it and continue. A few minutes later, there’s suddenly way more smoke and a putrid toxic smell and HOLY SHIT—I had turned the wrong burner on and my big plastic cutting board was melting. 😯

So in about the span of three seconds, I grabbed the melting board and set in on the sink, turned off the burner, and turned on the fans…just as Ruth was walking in from outside. She was surprised, of course, but there wasn’t much she could do. I opened the sliding door and was fanning the smoke out to hopefully keep the smoke detector from blasting…when it hit me: GET THE BURNING PLASTIC OFF THE BURNER. So I grabbed the always-handy razor blade from the drawer and scraped off the melted plastic which just about immediately halted the toxic smoke (and man was it TOXIC—it was literally burning my nose and throat). The smoke alarm never went off and the kitchen was back to normal in about five minutes.

Thankfully the rest of the dinner went off without a hitch and was super delicious!

I joked that I cursed myself because just that morning I ordered three new bamboo cutting boards to replace some of my plastic ones that were getting a little janky…