Kitchen Adventures, Part Two

I decided to cook steaks for my husband this evening. I decided to cook the steaks on the stove top. I don't know why; someone else out there might have thought that cooking steaks on a stove top was a bad idea. When it comes to cooking, that little voice in the back of my mind that tells me when something might not be a good idea is a selective mute.

Everything was going great, I thought. I even threw on a couple of pork chops so I wouldn't have to cook the next day. Larry was sitting in the kitchen reading the paper, and Zane was playing with his trains in the living room. Life was good. Since I prefer my steaks medium rare, my steak was cooked pretty quickly and taken off the heat. However, my husband is one of those "medium well" folk, so his steak was taking awhile, and I noticed that it was smoking a bit. Then I got distracted by thoughts of a side dish.

"Uh...honey?" I heard from behind me.

"What?" I answered, busy with some random vegetable I found in the freezer.

"Don't you think that you should turn the vent on?" Larry said. I looked up.

Enough white smoke filled the kitchen to elect a new pope. I hurriedly turned on the vent, opened some windows, and turned on a couple of ceiling fans. Too late. The smoke alarms went off. Larry started cracking up with laughter.

Our house came with an alarm system built in, and we pay someone to monitor our house so there's someone to call the proper emergency response people if we aren't there. The monitoring company, ADT, always calls first before they contact the authorities. So the phone rang, in our house full of smoke, with the alarm beeping and all the windows open. Larry answered the phone, still chuckling. I didn't hear the first part of the conversation, just the end.

"We are all fine. It's just my wife's cooking," Larry told the ADT person. He was still chuckling as he got off the phone.

I think that he can do the cooking next time, don't you?