We bought a fire extinguisher last weekend. Actually, two: one for the apartment and one for my car. This purchase makes me feel very much like a young professional. It's the kind of boring-but- responsible thing I would never have spent thirty bucks on in college.
There's actually already been a fire at our apartment. It happened less than a week after we moved in, back in 2006. See, in my old apartment, the compartment below the (electric) oven was a storage space, so I kept cutting boards and baking pans down there. When we moved to Cambridge, we put the plastic cutting boards right where they'd always gone--in that little drawer below the (gas) oven. Or, as Cambridge Oven likes to call it, the Broiler.
This wasn't a problem at first, because our pilot light was out. When we noticed that the oven wasn't working, we called the super and had him come light it. Unfortunately, I didn't watch him do this, so I didn't realize that he'd just lit a flame in my storage space. What I did notice was that he'd left the cutting boards, placements, and everything else that had been so neatly put away sprawled on the counter. So I bundled them up, tucked them into the broiler, and shut it up tight.
When the fire alarm started blaring, I ran to the kitchen and saw dark streams of smoke pouring from the vents behind the burners. Was I cooking something? I wondered. Pizza? I don't remember cooking pizza. (Oh, the mind.)
I peeked in the oven and saw big orange flames roaring in the broiler below. A few of the cutting boards had caught fire, and there was melted plastic everywhere.
As the 911 operator struggled to understand my address (there was a lot of background noise), I donned oven mitts, grabbed the burning/melting mess, threw it in the sink, and blasted it with cold water. Then I shook a whole box of salt out on the puddle of burning plastic that remained in the drawer, and ran around the apartment opening all the windows wide. When the fire department arrived, one guy said, "Wow, you really got this place aired out!"
Afterward, my friends came over and helped me clean up. It was the first time they'd been over, and I was disappointed with the circumstances. Destroyed in the fire were a cooling rack, three Isaac Mizrahi placemats, a french bread pan that I'd given Stephen for his birthday (sob), and a beloved Silpat (double sob). But. It could have been a lot worse. I mean, an oven is as good a place as most to have a fire, right? It's made to keep hot, hot things contained.
And now I've got a fire extinguisher! Which means it will never, ever happen again.
