Where There's Smoke

Yesterday I made pecan sticky buns.  They were...  mildly disappointing.

I KNOW, right?  Pecan sticky buns!  That require two sticks of butter!  How could they go wrong?

Meh.  I don't know.  Maybe it's the fact that Karo syrup grosses me out (I love to eat pecan pie, but I've never made it and adding Karo syrup as an ingredient is just unappealing to me).  Maybe it's that I substituted wheat flour for 1 of the 4 cups of flour the dough requires (I do this in cinnamon rolls with no problem and it makes me feel healthier when I'm eating my two sticks of butter).  Maybe they just need to be microwaved a few seconds before serving.  Sigh.  I don't know...

Anyway, I followed a recipe to make 30 mini sticky buns but I don't have mini muffin cups (I do have a miniature kitchen, so perhaps that is why I don't have space for such nonsense) so I used regular muffin cups.  It probably would have made 15 regular sized sticky buns.  But my muffin tin only holds 12.  So what do you do?  You make it work, right?  

Not quite.  Although I was feeling quite proud of myself after cramming the dough into 12 muffin cups (these will be generous sticky buns!), there was a minor disaster.  Turns out that dough GETS BIGGER when you heat it.  And if you don't think this through, you just might find yourself in a situation where the dough and karo syrup/sugar/pecan mixture overflows the muffin cup pan and splurts onto the floor of the oven.  Where it sits quiet and unassuming until it gets close enough to the coils of the electric oven that it CATCHES ON FIRE.  Just as a friend of mine came over to have coffee and sticky buns with me.  Welcome!  Please do not mind the flames in my oven.  That's just our sticky buns!

Anyway, the buns turned out okay (mildly disappointing, but really not so bad).  The oven, though, was a sticky, doughy mess.  So today I am making chili to take with us as we venture back to visit the grandparents and I decided since the oven was coated in a sticky pecan filling that I should use the self-cleaning feature.

Do you know how the self-cleaning feature of the oven works?  It makes the oven so freaking hot that it burns away all the gunk inside and reduces it to a little film of ash that you can wipe away when it cools.  It takes 3 hours.  I started when I got home from work at 1:30, so that it would be all finished when David got home and he would appreciate me for the Stepford wife I pretend to be about three days out of the year.

So I was stirring the chili on the stovetop and mentally planning our packing list for the weekend, and reminding myself to bring the charger for my kindle when my eyes started burning.  Smoke was POURING out of the oven.  And, once again, there were SMALL ORANGE FLAMES inside the oven door.

I stood by nervously as the flames flickered themselves out, so disaster appears to have been averted.  I just hope the smoke does not flavor the chili and make it taste like ass.

One time I was babysitting my cousin and I was making her macaroni.  I left the packet of powdered cheese on the stovetop next to the pot of boiling water and the packet of cheese started smoldering.  I noticed the bad smell.  So I put out the (super tiny) fire with no problem and later ripped open the (slightly charred) bag of powdered cheese and stirred it into the boiled noodles.  My cousin took one bite and said, "This tastes bad."  I argued with her that it tasted just fine.  Then she made me take a bite.  It tasted like smoke and burned plastic.

Which is also how my house smells right now.  I have the back door and windows open and the ceiling fans going.  Good thing it's 50 degrees outside.  Cooper and I are huddled together under a blanket.  I should get up and go stir the chili but then I'd have to get out from under the blanket.  I bet my hair stinks like smoke.

On days like this, I think I'm really not equipped to manage the level of grief that comes with the loss of a child.  I mean, I can barely manage myself, let alone major kitchen appliances.  How am I supposed to get through something like this?

And then I remember that I've been getting through it for over a year now and there's nothing to do but keep going.  Wait it out.  Keep in mind that time will make things easier if not better.  It's a burden that never gets lighter, but you start to think you can manage it, that maybe you are competent, and maybe you are getting your shit together, and maybe you have learned a little something about yourself and the people who truly matter to you in the process.  And THEN you have the kind of day when you can't even make sticky buns properly and your oven is flaming and and your house is freezing and your kitchen is full of smoke and all you can do is huddle under a blanket with the dog and wait for the worst of it to pass.