I thought I should share one of the entertaining stories from our cooking experiences this weekend. At one point, we were using all of the burners on the stove to speed up the process. The smoke detector started going off, but at my old apartment last year, this happened all the time. I was manning the stove at that point, so I started yelling for people to fan, open windows, and open the door. I thought it was just because it was getting too warm in the apartment from all of the burners going at the same time. Wrong. My roommate said "Om, you know its on fire right?" No, I didn't. The fire was right behind a huge pot, where I couldn't see it. It was a small fire, but it was definitely a fire. I tried to blow it out. It would blow out and come right back. So, I started thinking about what to try next. (While one of my roommates screamed "Put water on it", someone screamed "no", and someone else screamed "take pictures.") I knew baking soda was good to put on a stove fire, but we didn't have any. I thought about using the fire extinguisher, but the fire was not that big, so I did not want to resort to that yet. Finally, we decided that flour was similar to baking soda, so we would throw that on it. It burned for a couple seconds after the flour was put on it, but then it went out. Success! Aside from having a smoke filled apartment for the night, everything was fine. It just gave us a good story to tell. Also, in case you were wondering, you should put a metal pot lid over small fires on the stove. I had never heard that before, and we couldn't think fast enough to figure that out. But Google knew what to do.
