I’ll own up to it, it was completely my fault.
Our summer schedule is, in actuality, not much of a schedule. All 5 kids at home this summer have jobs with 1 on a summer swim team and that means we are constantly coming and going. Throw Pokemon Go in to the mix (which takes me out on walks at the end of the day) and I’m lucky if I can get more than a few of us at a time sitting at the dinner table.
To combat this, I’ve been making a lot of one-pan dishes and casseroles that can be reheated and eaten when people come home after late shifts. When you’re kids get older, this becomes the new reality.
Last night I had planned a one-pan chicken, noodle vegetable dish. Marc had decided to go to the grocery store *right* before it was ready to be served, (I can’t tell you how many times he does that. At this point, it’s beyond coincidence and I think he’s trying to tell me something.)
Anyway, anticipating he’d be back soon, I stirred the cooked noodles into the vegetables and chicken, put a metal lid on and placed the pan on the other side of the stove away from the hot burner.
What I didn’t do was turn the burner I used off.
We serve ourselves from the kitchen and then take our food outside to the deck table. When we dished out the food, someone (guilty as charged) naturally put the lid off to the side, which in this case happened to be a burner that was still on. When you let a metal lid with an oven mitt draped on it sit on top of a hot burner, just take a guess at what happens.
Logan had left the dinner table in the middle of the meal to get himself a glass of water (THANK GOD). All of the sudden he came running outside with fire in his hands.
“Well that’s kind of interesting,” a detached part of my brain observed.
He ran the fire over to the outdoor faucet and drenched his fire pile, which turned out to be my oven glove with water. (Fun fact, we all agreed that a burned oven mitt smells like toasted marshmallows.)
Marc went inside and *picked* up the metal lid which had been sitting on the hot burner with his hand. (In all fairness, you wouldn’t naturally expect a metal lid to be red hot.)
Marc then dropped the metal lid and ran to the sink to put his now blistering fingers under cold water.
Logan was holding ice on his burnt hand.
The house was filled with smoke, my new King Arthur oven mitt was destroyed, more than one person in our family needed burn ointment and there would be no leftovers tonight. A rather dramatic end to an “easy summer dinner.”
“Soooo,” drawled Addy. “Anyone up for ice cream?”
***
Wendy Thomas writes about the lessons learned while raising children and chickens in New Hampshire. Contact her at [email protected]
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