Fess-Up Friday: Molten Plastic – Hive and Nest

I’m thinking of changing the name of this blog to “I’m an Idiot”, seeing as how that’s the theme of most of my stories. Honestly I don’t know what’s happening. I am dropping things, breaking things, crashing into things; it’s a little scary. Can that be the sign of a brain tumor? What about dimentia? Is 41 too young for that? Because I’m sort of losing my mind.

For Fess-Up Friday may I present the pizza dough incident that occurred this week.

Setting: My kitchen.
Characters: Me, one son, three daughters and four of their friends.

I decided to make pizza dough, which I do about once a week. Everyone was hungry as we’d just gotten back from swimming. Normally I let the dough raise on the back porch because it’s hot and humid* but I wanted to speed things up a smidge so I preheated the oven a bit and put the dough in to raise. In a big plastic bowl.

Fifteen minutes later I decided to preheat the oven to 500º–the temperature pizza cooks at. At no point did the fact that there was already something oven occur to me. Not even when I started smelling something very odd.  Eventually the odd chemical-y smell got incredibly strong and I opened the door to find a bowl halfway melted and dripping all over the oven.

I’m very proud to say that I did not swear even once. Not even when the plastic puddle on the bottom of the oven burst into flames.

The nice thing about fires in the oven is that all you have to do is shut the door and it will eventually go out. I stood there with a fire extinguisher but all I could think was, “this is going to make the biggest mess if I spray it.” So I didn’t. And the fire went out after a few minutes.

Although the 90% of the bowl melted, the bread did not get burned. But the bread probably would have given us cancer if we’d eaten it. The plastic smelled so horrendous!

I’m sure my house is now full of toxins but the good news is that I’m apparently already brain-damaged. So no harm done!  And the oven was surprisingly easy to clean up once it cooled.

Have you melted anything you’ve regretted?

P.S. There are drawbacks to letting your dough rise outside. Even if it’s pretty well covered, you know how sneaky bugs are. This was a loaf of bread India made last week. A fly had crawled down into the corner of the pan and baked right into the corner.

Want to see it closer up? So gross. You might want to think twice about eating anything I cook for you.