Chaos and Pain - a Love Story

Tonight was a night of really stupid kitchen tricks. One of the things I really love about "cooking with gas" - the thing that makes me really pretend I know what I'm doing... is flipping things in a frying pan.

The first night I cooked in my new kitchen I had the ultimate experience of the culinary virgin -my frying pan searing under the blue flame - the heat at its maximum. I flipped some vegetables like I actually knew what I was doing. I tossed them just at the right time, they travelled around the curvature of the pan, dueling dragons, caught at the edge, whipping around, flipping over and brought to an instant stop. Total control.

Since then, every once in a while I get carried away like I'm on camera.... and I toss something over a flame generated by 15,000 BTU's of gas. And most of the time this is okay.

But now and then I have a brain fade. Caught up in the moment I forget that I haven't actually put anything in the pan other than a quarter pound of butter - which, after melting on high for 2 minutes, I feel compelled to toss.

Now, the interesting thing is that a quarter pound of frozen butter, heated for two minutes in a pan on 15,000 BTU's, doesn't actually melt in its entirety. In fact, as best I can judge, only 80% of it melts - which leaves a good solid cubic inch of butter swimming in foaming lava.

Under normal circumstances this would be okay. The novice cook would generally have the wherewithall to let the remaining butter melt - at which point they would add whatever it was they had planned on adding. But the would-be delusional home chef, lacking this wherewithall, jacked up on three Liberty Ale, envisioning himself front-and-centre in Kitchen Stadium, his buddy and long-time mentor Kevin Brauch commenting on his youthful style - his flare - forgets that there's nothing to absorb the 2 ounce piece of butter as it performs its culinary tripple lutz, landing in the aforementioned lava and creating an explosive buttery wake.

Bringing us back to the home chef.... and his dog! Now, I've noticed that dogs, like house mothers, have an aversion to swearing. And when a two ounce piece of butter is deposited into a 1 inch pond of molten lava, with velocity - and there's human flesh within a 6 inch radius - there's a reasonable chance that there'll be some swearing.

I'd like to think that my favorite expression under such circumstances is more of a hybrid than true swearing - a little cussin' and a little "lord's name in vain" sort of thing! "Jesus Fucking Christ" were the words I think I used; "that was fucking stupid", followed by a few simple "Fucks".

I didn't think it was that bad... and actually the dog seemed to recover too.

... but the problem lay in my regular dining partner who had fallen asleep on the couch. Now, most of the time this would also be okay. But when the dog sought refuge on the back of the couch the shortest route was over the dormant lifeform of my regular dining partner. Generally I think this would have been alright. But beside the somnolent dining partner was a glass of wine. And this is where the whole thing seemed to come unravelled.

The second "fuck" compelled my best friend to think he could scale my regular dining partner and hide atop the couch; but lacking perspective - he is still a puppy after all, he fell a few inches short. The sudden encumberance of a 20 pound dog caused my dining partner to roll left in the direction of the wine.

Unfortunately the weather in Ottawa, unusually on this first week in June, was a little cold - they were calling for frost. And so earlier in the evening we had decided to have a fire. Again, this typically wouldn't have been the cause of too much concern... had it not been for delusions of grandeur, an errant piece of partially frozen butter, some poorly chosen expletives, a sleeping wife, an exhuberant dog, and a strategically placed glass of wine which, when nudged.... at velocity... demonstrated a perfect trajectory in the direction of the fire. Which created a mess.

And yet fate intervened. Wine, unlike the brandy that I had stored near the frying pan, doesn't have enough alcohol to cause much damage. So there's some mess to clean up... some broken glass, but it doesn't clause alot of flames! The brandy, on the other hand - which to that point was an innocent bystander in the whole thing - waiting to fulfil its role in deglazing the pan, is pretty flammable. And one of the other neat things about "cooking with gas" is that there's alot of open flame. And hot butter, landing on open flame, spilling into a small dish of brandy, also near open flame, is fraught with peril... albeit pretty spectacular.

I keep thinking that I need to get a fire extinguisher. If I wasn't such a procrastinator I'd probably have one by now. But the cool thing about an old house, other than the fact that it is made with an amazing amount of wood, is the nine foot ceilings. So when a frying of hot butter, with a just a dash of brandy, catches fire, the reactive chef is able to pull it off the flame and hold it in the middle of the kitchen while it burns itself out. However, if his arm has been scalded with splattering molten butter his reaction time may be impaired and the silver mesh of the $2500 Heartland hood vent may get a little tarnished.

In hindsight, three hours later, what I find amazing in all of this, is the timing of the sequence. We're talking seconds - from start to finish. Oh sure, there was some clean up that cut in to dinner. Policing up all that broken glass for one - and the wine; I figured the least I could do was to pour another glass of wine for my regular dining partner. After all, I'm not an idiot.