I've been cooking at home a lot in the last six months. All of my meals, in fact, or nearly all of them. I've gotten to know my oven and stove fairly well. I know its quirks, how quickly it heats up, etc. I think it might be missing some kind of heat shield between the oven and the stove top. One of the unit's "quirks" is that when the oven is heated past about 400 degrees, the back of the stove top gets quite hot, even though the burners are off. Really hot, actually. I've been known to leave a metal pot on the stove, and had it get hot enough to burn me. More than once. You think I'd have learned.
The other night, I roasted some chicken. It's my favorite dinner, and I make it almost every night. After the prep stage, I really didn't have a clear place to put a few empty pans, so I put them on the stove. I was very careful to make note of them, and I remembered not to touch them, because they get hot. I made myself a salad while the chicken was cooking. When I was done chopping up the lettuce, I set the cutting board on top of the dishes on the stove. The plastic cutting board. It's made of extremely thick, tough plastic, but it's still plastic. Forty minutes later, I walked in to find a pool of plastic in my nicely-seasoned cast-iron skillet. Stupidly, I didn't take a picture, I concentrated on stopping the house from burning down, but I did snap this of the aftermath :
The deep impression was flowing into the skillet, which luckily contained most of the mess. And I was even able to salvage the skillet, it just needs to be seasoned again.
Have I learned anything? I guess. I've added the burn unit to the list of emergency numbers next to the phone...
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