With all my Paleo cooking, I was just about starting to feel really confident in the kitchen - when disaster struck.Okay, so perhaps it wasn't really a disaster. In all fairness it probably wasn't even my fault.
But still!
I was baking some plantain crackers and the recipe called for them to be in the oven for quite a while, 60-90 minutes.
At the 60 minute mark I checked them and decided they needed at least another ten minutes so I set the timer. At 70 minutes, same procedure. Before the timer went off again I started to smell smoke so I went over to check on the crackers.
We have a one of my grandmothers hand embroidered kitchen towels hanging on the handlebar of the oven door so I couldn't see what was going on inside.
Luckily I decided to slide the towel to the side instead of opening the oven door because there were massive flames eating away the crackers.
Fire alarms
At this point the fire alarm had gone off in our flat and Alfie was getting really stressed, running around with his tail between his legs crying. I tried to tell him to stay out on the patio as the alarm wouldn't be so loud out there but of course he wouldn't listen - he had to stay close to me.I opened all the windows to let out the smoke thinking that the best way to kill the fire would be to simply starve it of oxygen inside the oven.
The fire alarm in our flat is of the type that you cannot switch off and its really, really loud. The sort of noise you could use to torture people.
I also wasn't sure at which point the building's main alarm would set off and alert the fire department - or at which point the sprinkler system would kick in so I was starting to feel a little stressed to say the very least. Especially since the smoke just kept filling the flat!
Bad idea
A couple of minutes later I checked the oven again - the flames were gone but the smoke still kept coming. I thought I could take the crackers outside to get the smoke out of the house but that turned out to be a bad idea - the fire re-ignited the second I opened the oven door.By now our flat was completely black with smoke so I decided to get the fire extinguisher and kill the fire once and for all.
That was possibly a good idea (fires inside your house is never a good idea) but what I hadn't considered was the mess the extinguisher would leave behind. It was a dry powder type of thing and it left behind a fine layer of sticky dust that clung to each surface so hard that it was impossible to hoover up.
After two hours of dusting and hoovering I decided enough is enough and called our cleaners who spent another three hours scrubbing our flat clean. Just in time for the inlaws to arrive :-)
I'm still a little confused over why the crackers caught fire in the first place - they were not *that* dry ( I did just check on them before they ignited) so I wonder if perhaps there was some cooking oils at the bottom of the oven that caught fire? And more importantly - should I try and bake those crackers again? :-)
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| Alfie helpfully brought some toilet paper to clean up |
