Donuts of Disaster

We were invited to a Mardi Gras party last year, which we of course wanted to attend but knew we'd be pretty strapped for time that particular day. It was requested that guests bring a Mardi Gras-themed food item to pass. After considering several recipes and narrowing it down based on what i had in the house, i settled on beignets, a type of French donut. I got the batter together easily enough, but there wasn't time to cook it. So, we grabbed a skillet and a bottle of cooking oil and headed for the party, where we'd finish the donuts on location.

Amanda cannot cook. Amanda has never been able to cook. Every now and then, i'll get this strange feeling that it's time to try and teach her to cook again, and we'll try and do something simple in the kitchen together. On this day, i'd had that inexplicable urge, and for lunch i had shown her how to do macaroni and cheese. Simple enough, right? I watched her as she stirred the noodles into the boiling water. She never stopped stirring. I watched her constantly scraping the bottom of the pot as she stirred. There was no way that anything was getting cooked unevenly in that pot. Well, when it came time to drain the noodles, the entire bottom of the pot had a layer of noodles burned to it. I didn't see it at the time, but this was obvious foreshadowing on the rest of the night.

So we arrive at the party much later than intended, fully intending to leave within two hours to make another scheduled engagement that night. Everybody else was already drunk. I immediately showed myself to the kitchen, apparently checking all of my knowledge of cooking at the door with my shoes. I started up the burner and filled the skillet with oil. This is where things go terribly, terribly wrong.

Remember how i had just shown Amanda how to cook macaroni, right up from the beginning where you boil the water? I had just taught her that water boils faster when you put the lid on it. So Amanda says, "why don't you put the lid on it so that the oil heats faster?"

I gazed quizzically at the skillet for a moment, thinking to myself, ok, there's a reason that i haven't already put the lid on this skillet. But what? Failing to come up for a reason for omitting that action, i went ahead and put the lid on the skillet full of heating oil. At this moment, i was dragged away to play Rock Band. Figuring that we had a couple minutes and Amanda can obviously watch the oil until it's ready, i said i'd do one song and then would have to tend to my donuts. It was Creep, by Radiohead.

About a minute into the song, Amanda came rushing out of the kitchen toward me. "It's on fire!" she shouted. This didn't register in my head at first. I glanced at her, and then turned my attention back to Rock Band. "IT'S ON FIRE!!" she repeated, and suddenly i sprang into action, throwing the guitar controller on the ground and sprinting the ten feet back to kitchen. Sure enough, the skillet was shooting flames probably three to four feet high. By the time i'd reached the kitchen, Ashley had moved the skillet onto the sink. I found out later that this was because she'd intended to pour water on it, but Amanda had fortunately stopped her. You don't pour water on a grease fire. It does not work and in fact makes the situation worse.

I was frantically looking about the kitchen, trying to remember what it is that you put on grease fires instead of water. Ashley shouted to me, "FLOUR!" and at that moment, that sounded right to me. There was a large bag of flour perched atop the refrigerator. How convenient.

So i grabbed the bag, reached in for a fistfull, and tossed it into the fire.

The answer is baking soda. You put baking soda on a grease fire. Not flour. Never flour.

Instead of putting the fire out, a gigantic fireball issued forth toward the ceiling. In light of my failure, my next plan was to get the burning pan out of the apartment as quickly as possible and set it down in the cold, wet snow on the sidewalk, where it could just burn and burn until we figured out what to do with it or until it ran out of fuel. I reached out and grabbed the skillet solidly by the handle.

I got that skillet all of two feet before the heat became too much for my hand. The skillet dropped to the floor, landing squarely between the kitchen and dining room, where the carpet and linoleum met. Grease splattered on my legs and at least one bystander.

Meanwhile, the building's fire alarms are going off, neighbors are coming into the smoke-filled hallway to see what's going on, and general pandemonium is ensuing in the apartment, where it has become almost impossible to breathe.

The reason the hallway was filled with smoke was because our host had run out to get the fire extinguisher. He grabbed the hammer attached to the case and swung to break the glass. Being as drunk as he was, he missed, and only smashed part of the bottom of the window. He took another swing at it, missing again and this time cutting his hand open on the sharp glass edges. Giving up on the hammer, he pulled the rest of the glass out with his hands and brought the fire extinguisher into the apartment.

That fire extinguisher changed hands at least three times, never once landing in the possession of the one person at the party trained in fire extinguisher use: me. It ended up with Gardener, who did not know what he was doing but was the first person willing to give it a go. He aimed the fire extinguisher at the top of the flames, which is not the way it works. This served only to splatter the grease farther into the kitchen, although somehow he eventually hit the base of the flames and got the fire put out.

With the crisis over, everybody who wasn't completely freaking out started to turn their thoughts to damage control. Our completely inebriated host was probably (and understandably so) the most panicked. He was standing in the middle of the living room shouting, "You don't understand! If that fire alarm goes off for more than two minutes the fire department and police are automatically notified! They're going to come in here and search my house and find all my pot and i'm going to go to jail! I'm going to jail! I'm going to jail!" and other such nonsense.

It was probably fifteen minutes before the alarms stopped going off. I don't remember exactly what happened from there but i do remember an old lady in the hallway coming out and asking what was going on. When somebody told her that the kitchen was on fire, she laughed and went back into her apartment.

We finally got everybody out of the apartment about an hour later. The host and one girl went to the emergency room for the glass cuts and the grease burns on the leg, respectively. Amanda and i made our way home, blowing off our other plans. It was at about this time that i realized the best course of action would have been for Amanda to have just put the lid back on the skillet. This would have cut off the fire's air supply and it would have smothered almost immediately. Then we could remove it from the heat and wait for the oil to cool down before trying to open the lid again. As it had happened, though, when Amanda came running through to inform me that the grease was on fire, she'd still had the lid in her hand and didn't drop it until she was outside. We found the lid half buried in the snow just before we left.

A week later, our own kitchen attacked Amanda just for walking into it. Pots and pans just randomly started falling out of the cupboards. She tends to avoid the kitchen these days.