Playing with fire...

Do you ever have days where you wonder if you are fit to be an adult? I am 28 years old and could have benefited today from adult supervision! I don't know where my brain was. I had fully THREE heat/fire related fiascos and all three were my own fault!

Sigh...

Fiasco #1: I was hoping to share a new recipe with you all for hot Cinnamon Pecan Quinoa Breakfast Cereal today. I have grown weary of my standard scrambled eggs and fruit and was super excited to try out this recipe. If you don't know what Quinoa is, hold out for future posts. I get on a bit of a soap box about it! Anyway... I put the quinoa on the stove to boil and left the room. I have done this on many occasions with no incident since quinoa cooks just like rice. However, my recipe called for water and milk (I used soy) and this addition of milk changed everything. I came back upstairs 15 minutes later to a kitchen filled with smoke and a horrible, bubbling, charred mess on the stove! Despite the chilly 30 degrees outside, I employed the fan, opened the kitchen window and door and it still smelled like smoke 5 hours later! YUCK!

Fiasco #2: While waiting for the kitchen to air out, my roommate and I went for a walk and then drove over to the gym where she is a member to sit in the hot tub. Now, this is a very fancy gym and they have an outdoor hot tub with a huge rectangular fire pit next to it. We were sitting and chatting quite happily in the tub when, quite unexpectedly, the smell of burnt marshmallows starts wafting towards us. Just as I heard another guest mention the smell, one of the men in the hot tub very calmly remarked that someone's towel was on fire. I turned and sure enough, I had set my towel on the side of the fire pit and when the pit turned on at noon (as I later learned that it does every day), my towel caught on fire. It was a strange moment, sitting there and wondering what to do about my flaming towel. I have never been very good in crisis. All common sense seems to abandon ship and I freeze. One of the men jumped out and grabbed my water bottle and scooping water out of the hot tub, put out the fire. I was a bit embarrassed! Who in their right mind drapes a towel over the top of a fire pit??! But I confess that I was also intrigued. Why in the world would a burning towel smell just like a toasted marshmallow?????!

Fiasco #3: You might think that I would have started to get an inkling by this point that this was not my day to be near powerful heat sources, but no. I decided to boil some water for tea this evening. It was an innocent enough venture. But on this most unlucky of days, I accidentally turned on the wrong burner and instead of heating my tea pot, I melted 1/2 of the plastic trivet that was sitting there! Okay... not exactly 1/2. But I am irritated and feel justified in being slightly dramatic.

I have decided to confine myself to my bedroom for the rest of the evening. I don't think I am safe to be roaming the house.

I will most definitely be attempting the quinoa cereal later this week and I am hoping to post an update that doesn't include smoke, ashes, flaming terry cloth or melting plastic!