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Burning Water

Whenever someone starts talking about their horror stories in the kitchen, I am always reminded of my buddy who managed to screw up pasta.  Pasta is one of those meals that's supposed to be easy to make, even with limited cooking ability.  In its most basic form, it's easy to prepare: boil some water, throw the pasta/noodles in the water until they cook, take the noodles out, throw pre-made sauce on it, and enjoy.  In theory, it should be almost impossible to mess this up.

Well, let's hypothesize a situation where one is a college kid who wants to play some video games while he waits for the water to boil.  Let's further postulate that the video game console is in an adjoining room, rather than in the living room.  Given this hypothetical situation, it's theoretically possible for said college kid to forget all about the pot of water on the stove.  After enough time, the water would completely evaporate, but the stove would still be on.  And if the student were to ignore the stove for longer still, the pot would begin to burn, to the point where the bottom would fall out if one were to later realize one's mistake.

It's a very unlikely scenario, right?  Not for my buddy.

And to this day, I give him a hard time about it, since he essentially managed to screw up boiling water.  In fact, I've been known to joke that he burned water.  Well, after today, I'm not going to tease him quite as much.  Or at all.

I needed to boil some water, and I was watching the tail end of a football game.  I didn't have a tea kettle handy, so I just threw water into a pot and turned on the stove.  I figured I'd watch a few downs, then go turn off the stove once it boiled.  Of the two tasks in that last sentence, I managed to do one of them correctly.  I realized my mistake when I suddenly smelled something vaguely like "burning" coming from the kitchen.

Luckily for me, I caught it early enough that there was no real damage done to the pot.  It had some black marks on it, but otherwise, there was no real damage done.  Even luckier, the burn marks came off after I used some polish/cleaner stuff we had lying around the house.  I also made more of an effort to find a tea kettle I could use.

So, what did I learn from today's unexpected excitement?
  • Open flame demands respect, no matter how small the flame is or how many times you've done the task
  • Sporting events are a poor choice for multitasking; it's too easy to get caught up in the game
  • That polish powder is pretty darn amazing.  I fully expected the pot to have permanent burn marks, but the pot looks more or less okay
  • Karma sure has interesting ways of exacting revenge.  Or, as the saying in Spanish goes, "don't spit at the sky, lest it fall on your face"
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