I destroyed another pot today. I'm not very good at this whole kitchen cooking thing. I'm not even normal-makes-food-taste-gross bad cook, I'm like, bend-the-laws-of-physics-to-make-things-impossibly-terrible kitchen destructor. Case in point, I melted a stainless steel pot.
Granted, it probably wasn't actually a steel pot. It was sold to us as one, but considering the whole melty-ness of it, Dad says it probably has an aluminum bottom. Still though, I didn't know pots could do that before today.
I was only trying to make spaghetti! Unfortunately, my attention span is.....less than great. Actually my attention span might be non-existant. I was thinking about how absolutely starving I am, and was like "There's sauce in the fridge, I'll put on spaghetti! Spaghetti is awesome!" So I fill a pot with water, and put in about twice as much as I needed on the reasoning that I'd probably forget about it and let half of it boil away before I remembered. This is standard practice for me when boiling water. It's not really a good omen.
So I go back to the living room, intending to reply to a message on MSN and then getting the noodles from the pantry. But of course I get distracted, and completely forget about being hungry and having the stove on. I only remember when Mom gets out of bed and goes, "Hey, what's that smell? Are you cooking something?" You know that moment where you can just feel the "oh shit" expression forming on your face, right before you drop everything and run? I do.
So I drop everything and run to the kitchen, and find that our new stove is apparently much hotter than our old stove. The water has completely boiled away, the bottom of the pot is glowing orange, and when I pick it up to move it off the hot burner only half of the bottom of the pot came with it. There's pools of molten metallic liquid on the burner, and the pot's got these silver stalactites hanging of the bottom.
So I try cooling the pot in a saucepan of water, but it doesn't seem to work very well. The pot keeps screaming at me. So I give up and put it upside-down on another pan on the back of the stove -- no, that one wasn't on, I only turned on the one burner this time. Mom and Dad come in and marvel at the incredible way I destroyed the kitchen this time. None of us even knew pots could
do that! Especially not really good, supposedly stainless steel pots.
Luckily, my parents are awesome. Once I was at a friend's house and she accidentally let a pot boil dry. The pot wasn't really damaged, but her mom still freaked out about it and they got into a screaming match over it. Compare my parents, they see that I've completely ruined one of the best pots in the house and they immediately start laughing about it. As long as nothing's on fire, they're happy. And at least this time I didn't scorch a hole in the floor! I should tell that story someday, it's a pretty good one.
Long story short, Mom shrugged it off and went back to bed and Dad told me to get my camera because this was kind of totally awesome. Now I have a spiky-bottomed death-pot and an old Wowbutter jar with the giant lumps of metal we picked off of the burner that Mom told me to keep as a souvenir. And also pictures to prove it happened. I'd say this was probably my best cooking-fail yet.
