What? It's not Delurk
Week? Well, I'll be horn swaggled.
My bad.
Actually, I'm pretty excited about what's been occupying my time, but I cannot speak of it just yet. No, I'm not pregnant. No, I'm not writing a book. So, in other words, probably boring to you. But, very exciting to me!
Speaking of exciting, something bad happened to me last night while cooking dinner. (Aside from the usual kind of bad where I have to repeatedly smell the chicken breasts and hold them up to the light because did I take these out to defrost yesterday? ...Or was it over the weekend?)
I was in a tense mood - mostly because I didn't fulfill my writing commitments yesterday and that tends to cloak the evening with failure - and was attempting to cook
Mediterranean Chicken with Herbed White Beans (link to my recipe site -- which I should probably start using for more than my
rebellious playdate cocktail recipes) in our new tiny kitchen.
Remember
the old kitchen? I could lay across the counter and take a nap while waiting for the pasta to boil.
New kitchen not so much.
It's so itsy bitsy in its original 80's counter space that I'm starting to seriously eye the unused portion of the backyard that the kitchen window opens onto. Would it really hurt anybody if the salad sat out there for
just a minute?
Anyway, this tiny kitchen is bringing a whole new level of joy to the the 5:00 Savannah witching hour. Because now instead of whining
from the couch about how she misses daddy and hates beans and she sure hopes we're not having that rice with the little dots in it again and why can't she just have Fig Newtons for dinner and when is daddy going to be hoooome, she comes into the kitchen and stands behind me to do this because a wall now separates the couch from the kitchen.
In other words, I was a little distracted.
I put a tablespoon of olive oil in a saucepan on the stove. I swear it was only there for a minute or two. But, apparently, it was longer because when I looked over at it, there were thin wisps of smoke coming out of the pan.
Oops!
I grabbed the pan off the burner and swirled the oil around. The oil didn't look burned, so I set it down on a cold burner for a bit.
This would be the point where I should have dumped the oil and started over. Because did you know that oil stays hot for quite awhile?
Huh.
And that the last thing you should probably do, other than to maybe pour it directly in your eye, is to throw
frozen crushed garlic in there?
Yeah, well it is.
The funny thing is that it took about a minute to start hurting. And then...
...please take me Lord. Because The Pain.
I ran upstairs with a pack of blueberries tucked under my arm and asked Mama Google what to do next. She was pretty scary and I started to get woozy when she kept saying the word "blistering". So, I lied on the office floor feeling sorry for myself until Chris came home.
Aaand I decided to just keep it on ice for the next hour.
Then I remembered a
crazy bit of information. My uncle is a firefighter! My aunt worked for the Burn Foundation! And guess what advice they gave me?
"Whatever you do, don't ice it!"
Of course.In other news, the chicken was delightfully tender. Perhaps due to the addition of my filleted arm flesh?
You'll also be delighted to know that this was not in fact my first kitchen mishap. And my last one? Almost burned down a house.
Which I then accidentally locked myself out of.
While running to get help.
I think I'll share that one next time. I have to go salve up.
***
Update: So, it appears that you would actually like helpful information as to what to do with an oil burn. Ah, I see. Let me share. 1) You should run cold water on the burn until the stinging starts to dissipate.2) You should pat it dry and cover in a dry bandage.3) You should never apply ointment or ice as they both seal in the active burning that's still going on under the skin. (Which makes sense since the pores have absorbed the oil.)
4) Optional: Take off the bandage for all the Drop Off Moms to see at school hoping it will result in a sympathy coffee invite. Which it will.
