Kids! Get Out of the Kitchen!

Last night I noticed little wisps of smoke coming up from the oven vents.  I was roasting a chicken, you see, and the drippings were falling into a dry Pyrex I had under it and smoking there.  I didn't want my precious chicken -- the one I had brined for 18 hours* in a mixture of pineapple juice, ancho chilies, five limes and ten hand-smashed garlic cloves -- tainted by too much smoke, so I asked my husband what to do.  He kindly suggested adding a little water to the pan.

I filled a mug with tap water, opened the 400 degree oven, and began trickling the water into the Pyrex.  I don't know what happened next, but there was a loud explosion and I was teletransported across the kitchen where I hovered in the duck and cover position over my children as we witnessed, in horror, the chicken bursting forth from the oven amid a rain of glass.

"Did you use cold water?" my husband asked, incredulous.  Liv, terrified, laid down under the dining table and cried.  In the past 12 months, my kids have been subjected to no fewer than three kitchen calamities.  In the first, a plastic-handled knife caught fire, resulting in a drizzle of toxic plastic ash wafting down over their high-chair trays while they tried to pick it out of their food, mystified.  In the second, I left a grease-soaked paper plate next to the burner where my husband was cooking bacon, and a mini-inferno ensued.

The good news is, my kids have become accustomed to the sound of the fire alarm and very quick to respond to the cry: "Kids! Get out of the kitchen!"

*It's worth mentioning that even after the last of the shards had been DustDeviled from the linoleum, I voted for rolling the dice on eating the (potentially glass-packed) chicken.  If S. had not forcibly intervened and picked up tacos, I would have done it -- that's how invested I was in the brine.