In which I set fire to my oven

But not really. Which is to say, yes, my oven caught on fire, but no, it was not my fault. I just needed a dramatic title.

So I was following my usual routine of cooking a lot on the weekend, when I have time, rather than during my 40-hr work week. It was early Saturday afternoon, and I had just finished Anna's baked squash recipe (which was excellent- I did the cinnamon-and-brown-sugar thing in one half and curry powder in the other for a sweet-and-savory experience. I love curry powder.) I also had some bread dough mixed up that had been rising since the night before. I turned the oven up to 450, had the Dutch oven in to warm up, and was just about to put the dough in when I noticed that sparks were coming out from under the closed oven door.

I opened the oven door to find that a small, inch-long section of the heating coil at the bottom of the oven had, in fact, caught on fire. It was glowing bright white in a way that gave me little purple spots in my vision when I looked away, and was also shooting off sparks. Very energetically. First I turned the oven off, but that didn't help. So I proceeded to call my parents' home phone, my dad's cell phone, my roommate, Anna, and eventually my apartment complex in the hopes that someone might be able to help me with my problem. Only Marjon picked up at the time, and she didn't really have a solution either. So I left a panicky voice mail (of course, this is me, so it probably didn't sound all that panicky) on the "emergency number" for the apartment complex.

Somewhere in all this cell phone activity I noticed that not only was the heating coil on fire in an inch-long strip, glowing bright white, and giving off sparks, but that inch-long strip was also MOVING. It continued to move along the coil for about two feet until I finally figured out how to get it to stop. At which point I stopped panicking about what was going to happen when that electric white spot made it all the way back into the inner workings of the oven, and possibly into the wall, and then I would lose all my stuff and my apartment in a huge fire.

You see, my oven has two knobs that control the oven (and four for the stove top).

I had turned the "bake/broil/off" knob completely off, but the temperature knob was still at 450. When I finally turned that knob to zero, the flaming heating coil quit flaming. Thank you, Jesus. I do not know why this worked, because technically, simply turning off the bake/broil/off knob should have turned off the electricity, but apparently not.

Of course one of the first things I thought after the ordeal was over was "man, I wish I had gotten a picture of that for the blog!" So instead, here is what the cooled down oven now looks like:

See all those white bubbly bits? Yeah, those are not supposed to be there. That is where the metal in the heating coil MELTED from the flaming bit. And (I wish I could put in little pointers here but you are just going to have to rely on your imagination), if you look at the second picture, the inch-long electric white sparking bit made it all the way from the bubbly white bits on the right side of the picture to the big white spot on the floor of the oven on the left side of the picture.

And that was my weekend. Anna called me back shortly, so I took my bread dough over to her house and baked it in her oven, and it turned out fine, despite getting to rise for an extra half-hour and experiencing an exciting car trip, which I do not think you are supposed to do with bread dough. Oh well. Maybe it will have exciting bread-dough stories to tell all of its bread-dough friends in baked goods heaven once I finish eating the loaf at lunch today.

Erm. Was that too twee? I think that might have been too twee. Sorry about that. Consider it a testament to how badly I was rattled.

Anyway. So the apartment complex still has not called me back yet, or come by to see about the oven, so I am reduced to cooking in the microwave and the toaster oven. I see a lot of salad in my future.