Friday, June 06, 2008

Warning: Plastic is not made for the oven

Let me preface this post: Back at the beginning of May, in the midst of the maelstrom that is my life, I had to rapid fire clean my house in under 5 minutes due to a lady from church coming over (the fear of man will get you in trouble every time!). Well, I have these 2 plastic cupcake carriers that I love and use like crazy. Well, their storage place is in the tiny cupboard above the fridge. I didn't have time to go through and clean everything out and try to shove it in there. I opted for something I have only done 1 other time (and this is the reason why)- I put them in the oven. I know, I know, at this point, you're already rolling your eyes because you know what's about to happen. However, I usually always make sure that I open the oven at least once before turning it on. (I'm a big fan of the preset cook feature. I usually put dinner-or whatever- in at 4, and it cooks automatically to be ready at 6:30. I love that feature.) Well, I digress......

So, that night, I was making a big spaghetti dinner. Everything was pretty much done. I just had to throw the bread in the oven. Not thinking, and since bread only takes a couple minutes to bake, I opted to not use the aforementioned preset cook feature. Well, I crank the oven up to 420. Yep, that's hot. Well, I'm getting the bread ready on the the cookie sheet, and trying to keep an eye on the kids. I'm picking stuff up around the house and I start to smell something. I thought that maybe I had spilled something on the oven floor last time I baked and didn't realize it. I go over to the kitchen to check on the oven and I see a little smoke coming from the oven. All of a sudden, it hit me! I'm an idiot!!! There were orange flames everywhere in the oven! I turned the oven off, and then the smoke really started to pour out of the oven. I watch to make sure that the flames are actually getting smaller. I gather the kids and we head outside, barefoot and all.

To make a long story short, we had dinner at Roly Poly's that night. We were late for Shepherding Group. Plus, I had to clean the oven at some point. What had been about 4 inches of plastic ended up being about 2. Note: Never store non-oven safe things in the oven.

On a side note, the lady that was supposed to be coming over, the reason for my lazy storage of the containers, canceled and showed up on Thursday.

Scott ended up taking all the racks to work and using a blow torch to get the plastic off of them. I scraped the bottom and the sides. Once I got most of it off, except for that paper-thin layer, I had to use the self-clean cycle twice. Plus it took a lot of cooking before the smell faded. Hopefully, the plastic fumes won't have toxic effects on us. :)


No comments: