Smoke Gets in My Eyes

The other day I decided to make this yummy chicken dish with whole garlic cloves, lemon, rosemary, etc. I added hassleback potatoes, putting a sliver of garlic between every other cut in the potato. For this dish, you slow bake the chicken for 2 hours at a low temperature, then turn up the oven to 400 degrees for the last 45 minutes so everything gets some nice color.

As the chicken is slow baking in my oven, I start to smell those delicious baking chicken and garlic smells. Eventually I start smelling chicken grease smells. Then smoky greasy smells. The chicken fat is melting and overflowing from my obviously too shallow pan and landing on the bottom of my oven. The heat is burning the fat and making smoke. The smoke is coming out of my oven though the sides as well as the little vent in the back.

I start to panic.

You see, I live in an apartment. I live in an apartment that has a smoke detector, which is part of a building-wide system. This system automatically calls the fire department. Also, every apartment has sprinklers.

I do not know what will trigger the sprinklers. Is it smoke for a certain amount of time? Smoke plus a certain degree of heat? Just a certain degree of heat? I also do not know if only my sprinklers will go off, or will all the sprinklers on my floor go off (there are 5 other apartments on my floor and 18 floors in my building). Will the alarm go off and evacuate everyone? Ack!

I turn off the oven even though I have not done the high heat for 30-45 minutes yet. I get a towel and fan somewhat frantically below the smoke detector, trying to avoid a building-wide evacuation. The smoke detector’s red light blinks. Does it always do that or does that mean it’s ready to go off? Why haven’t I been paying better attention so I would know these things?

Eventually, after much pondering, anxiety and towel waving, I sense the smoke beginning to dissipate. The oven is off. All is well. I lower my arms in relief. I take out the chicken. The potatoes are not completely done and the chicken is not nice and brown on top, but it is cooked. I eat one. Yum. Needs a little more salt, but yummy.

My body begins to relax. I have a bright idea. Why don’t I engage the self-cleaning feature of my oven? Then tomorrow I will have a clean oven and can finish baking off my chicken and potatoes and have a satisfying meal.

Looking back, I can only blame the left-over adrenaline/endorphins that must have still been running amok in my system for thinking such idiocy was brilliant.

I turn on the self-cleaner feature of my oven and have the first niggling in the back of my mind that this may not be as brilliant an idea as I think. I should’ve listened to my Spidey-sense. But nooooo. I set the oven to clean and then take a shower. By the time I am out of the shower, smoke is coming out of my oven. Not greasy, chicken-smelling smoke, but dark, acrid, scary smoke.

Duh! When an oven self-cleans, it goes on super-high heat to basically annihilate any crusty left-overs and turn them into ash. Except I don’t have chunks of left-over food, I have chicken fat and olive oil on the bottom of my oven. I see flames. I have created a grease fire in my oven.

Double ack! Triple ack! There are not enough “acks!” in the universe to express my dismay. My trepidation. My intense bout of panic.

I turn off the oven (Thank goodness it turned off. I think some ovens, once the cleaning mechanism is turned on, do not turn off until it is done). I fling open my apartment door and start feverishly fanning beneath my smoke detector with my bath towel.

I start to pray.

The smoke is toxic. Like a tangible entity, it hovers menacingly, burning my eyes so I am tearing. It burns the back of my throat, which has already constricted in my anxiety.

Then I have another item to add to my list of horribles: my bunny!

If these fumes are toxic, which they very well may be, how will it affect my bunny? I run to get a fan and put it on high by his cage, hopefully creating enough airflow to disperse the smoke. I grab another fan and put it in the kitchen. But now I think I’ve somehow made it worse by causing the smoke to swirl around rather than find its way out of my apartment.

I take the fan out of the kitchen and hold it over my head beneath the smoke detector, because my arms are tired of flapping my bath towel around. I wonder if I look like John Cusack’s character in Say Anything when he holds the boom box over his head. Then I think the smoke must be getting to me, because that is asinine.

I pray some more.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the smoke’s tentacles seem to slowly disperse, becoming less black, less gagging, less scary. I am exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally. I am sweating from all my frenetic exertions and need to take another shower. My whole apartment smells like bad grease fire.

So now I have some new items to add to my list of successful apartment living:
(1) Do not make Cajun-blackened steak (first brush with smoke detector going off, luckily sprinklers didn’t follow suit);
(2) Do not broil kalbi (who knew how much smoke some short ribs would generate?);
(3) Bake chicken in deep pan so fat does not drip onto oven bottom; and
(4) Should #3 occur, under no circumstances should the oven’s self-cleaning mechanism be engaged.

I may not be smart, but at least I’m educable.