Today I learned that our smoke detector fails to detect smoke, even when faced with an angry black cloud of burnt legumes. I basically blame Mexico for the impromptu lesson, here's why:
Jenn and I came to the realization recently that we hadn't prepared homemade Mexican food for as far back as we could recall. Even when you consider that my powers of recollection rarely extend further back than three or four days (a week if I'm well rested), anyone who knows me - or at least has met me in passing - will point out that this long of a burrito-hiatus is an inexcusable, shameful oversight on my part. You see, I love Mexican food nearly as much as I love cookies. There is nothing at all like the sense of satisfaction that comes from licking up the remains of two plates of nachos which were lovingly prepared and vigorously devoured.
And so it was that we agreed to make fiesta potatoes tonight. For those who are not familiar, this meal basically involves a baked potato piled high with the usual Mexican fixings: beans, cheese, sour cream, salsa, and guacamole if you can get your hands on some. While we picked up the needed ingredients up the hill at the grocery store, I left a pot of soaked black beans simmering (or so I thought) on the stove top. Since they need to boil for a few hours (after being soaked overnight) in order to be soft enough to eat, I figured we'd be home in plenty of time to prepare the rest of the meal before the beans would be finished.
You, Jenn, and the rest of the world realize that this line of logic was doomed from the start.
Too little water + too much heat = disaster.
Had I been more clever, I might have placed the beans in a crock pot earlier in the day, feeling quite confident that the use of this device for the job likely wouldn't result in me debating just a short time down the road whether throwing all my clothes away and shaving my head will eliminate the acrid, offensive stench of smoke in the apartment. As you can imagine, I am not (or at least was not) that intuitive, and so it came to be that we arrived home later than expected to the faint smell of smoke downstairs in the parking space and Jenn's proclamation that "it smells like something's burning". I ran up the stairs and into a cloud of dense, roiling black smoke. The foul smelling blanket of vaporized black beans was so thick I couldn't see my own knees, much less the rest of the enshrouded apartment. I saw no flames though, and briefly marvelled at the silence in the house. When I attempted to take a breath and hold it long enough to assess the damage I discovered, for the first time in my experience, how impossible this is to accomplish when you share a confined space with something that has been on fire for quite some time. Thus, I bent down below the cloud, coughed out the useless breath I'd just taken, inhaled a deeper one (this one with fresh air in the functional parts-per-thousands concentration rather than per-million as at eye level) and dashed around the house turning off the stove, confirming that the incinerated black beans posed no further threat to life or property, and opening every window we had before stumbling my way back down the stairs to where Jenn stood awaiting news of the damage. When she asked how bad it was, I replied, "On second thought, forget Mexican. Let's go out for Thai food tonight."
And so we did.
