Fire anyone?

Well, SuperGirl is ashamed to admit that she had a very close call this morning.  I had started a pot of water boiling so that I could get my heating pad ready to use later and then gotten into the shower.  The next time I remembered the water and heating pad was a few moments before Stake Conference started.  After quickly whispering to Pat to ask him if he had remembered and turned the stove off, I had to race home to rescue my kitchen.  I know it was the spirit prompting me to remember because it was a very urgent and random thought.  All the way home I was trying to sniff the air to see if I could smell smoke, scanning the sky for flames, and praying that our house would not burn down.  All I could think about was how we had left the dogs in our bedroom and they wouldn't be able to get out.  As I opened the front door, I heard a loud popping and saw some plasticky smelling smoke.  When I went into the kitched, I saw that my heating pad had exploded and was burned to the bottom of the pan, but no actual flames yet.  I think we were seconds away from that though.  Thank heavens we had left most of the house windows open so that a lot of the toxic plastic melting smoke had drifted outside.  I spent a few minutes fanning the door to clean the rest out and then went back to church.  I missed the first 30 minutes of stake conference, but our house was safe!

Now for the second kitchen related fun of the day.  For lunch, I made chicken enchilladas with fresh corn salsa, asparagus spears and banana bread.  I had the enchilladas almost assembled and was pre-heating the oven.  I started to smell an unusual smell and kept thinking that I had smelled it before but couldn't for the life of me remember where.  The warmer the kitchen got, the stronger the smell.  For a moment I thought that it was my escapade from the morning that was causing the smell, but it seemed different than the smell that I had smelled earlier.  Then all of the sudden, I realized what it was.  I remembered two distinct moments in my life.  The first was an eventful Thanksgiving at a cousin's house when they decided to clean their oven prior to cooking the turkey and the smell forced us to evacuate the house for much longer than normally necessary.  The second memory was a time I was trying to make bread early in our marriage and reached for the cooking spray to oil my pan.  Unsuspectingly, I had reached for the oven cleaner instead of the cooking spray and was just about to drop the first spoonful into the pan when I realized the switch that Pat had made on me.  For those of you who are rolling on the floor laughing at the mental image this picture makes, oven cleaner does not come out of pans easily, it is similar to spraying it with WD40.

Yup, you guessed it.  As part of the weekly cleaning, Pat and his auntie had sprayed the oven with cooking spray and then Pat had "forgotten" to go back and wipe it out.  So before I could cook anything, I had to wait for the oven to cool off again, and then Pat had to wipe out the cleaning solution.  The second time I preheated the oven, it smelled much better.  Our enchillada lunch turned into an enchillada supper by the time we were done.  But very delicious, especially the salsa and the asparagus that I grilled on the side.  Pat was enjoying his first helping so much that he forgot to hold onto his plate and the dogs got to have a nice taste as well.  And he wonders why they always sit at his feet while he is eating instead of mine.  :)