An Eventful Small Group Meeting

Last night, it was our turn to host our small group meeting.  To give you a little background...At the end of every "semester", we discuss as a group some tweaking that can be done to better meet everyone's needs & preferences for the following semester.  One of the tweaks for this spring was to have a different family prepare the entire meal once a month, so that everyone else can just come and enjoy the fellowship without  having to cook.  Since we were signed up for January, our family had the first turn for this endeavor.  The plan was for everyone to arrive around 4:00 pm, start the Bible Study at 4:30, and then eat and visit from 5:30 to 7:00.

I didn't initially intend to do as much cooking as I ended up doing, but Marcus had to go into work on Saturday, so the boys and I were at home all day with very little housework or homeschooling to do.  The boys enjoyed a free-play-at-home day (and were extremely good and low maintenance all day!) while I enjoyed a cooking & baking day.  I started out by making two pumpkin pies, followed by two apple pies (which the boys helped with).  Next, I prepared the Italian sausage/beef/marinara sauce that would later go in the lasagna.  It took about 45 minutes to do the stovetop part of the meat sauce, and then I poured it all in the crock pot to cook for four more hours.  Later that afternoon, when the meat sauce was done, I spent another hour layering the two lasagnas.  On Sunday afternoon, I made the green bean casserole (with from-scratch cream sauce!) and finished cleaning the house.  I intended to cook chicken nuggets (for the kids) and crescent rolls during the Bible study.

At about 3:45, the first family arrived.  Marcus and I, as usual, were still in a flurry of last-minute preparations (especially since the kids and I had just woken up from our nap about 30 minutes earlier).  As the second and third families were arriving, I turned the oven on to preheat for the lasagnas.  A few minutes later, our very sensitive kitchen smoke alarm went off and I realized that there were some apple pie drippings that were burning off the bottom of the oven.  Since we didn't have time to cool the oven down for a full cleaning, we opened the doors and windows and decided to let the drippings burn off.  Just this situation (a smoky, stinky kitchen) with twenty guests in my house was enough to put a serious damper on my well-planned evening.  But this was just the beginning.  After several minutes of smoke seeping visibly and steadily through the cracks of my oven, I opened it slightly to see an open flame burning impudently in the bottom of the oven.  I grabbed the kitchen fire extinguisher off the wall and handed it to my best friend, who wisely suggested that we should first remove the lasagnas from the oven.  By the time I had the two casserole dishes out of the oven, the flame had subsided some and Quenta was able to blow it the rest of the way out.

Marcus was the next worker on the scene.  He quickly removed two screws from the base of the still-hot oven so he could slide out the bottom panel and see what in the world was catching fire in our oven.  It turned out to be just what we thought, a small pile of apple pie filling that was just large enough to ignite and make a LOT of smoke.  Marcus and I cleaned the burnt mess out of the bottom of the (still-hot) oven while the other adults did their best to keep the ten preschoolers out of the kitchen and under control (no easy task)  When the oven was as clean as we could get it, Marcus put everything back together again and replaced the screws.  Glad to finally be back on track, albeit 30 minutes behind schedule, I turned the oven back on and put the lasagnas back in.

Within five minutes, to our chagrin, there was once again an open flame burning in the bottom of the oven, this time much larger and alarming.  We quickly removed the lasagnas and had the fire extinguisher in hand, but Marcus was able to subdue this fire with cups of water.  At this point, thinking there was something serious wrong with the oven, we began to discuss the logistics of getting pizza.  While these discussions were going on, Marcus began disassembling the oven once again, only to discover a mostly-burned hot pad that had been accidentally "installed" into the bottom of the oven during the first hectic reassembly process.  In Marcus' defense, it was a crazy environment to be doing any kind of repair (10 preschoolers running around!), and the hot pad was a very dark color just like the base of the oven.  Marcus is typically extremely thorough and methodical about fixing things, and he had never done anything like that before.

Anyway, now that we knew the cause of the second fire, we decided to herd the kids into the play room and go ahead with our Bible study while Marcus cleaned up and reassembled the oven a second time.  From this point, the evening actually went very well, despite the rough start.  The adults had a good discussion while the kids played downstairs with Mr. Tim (who later said he was cured of wanting a third child).  The lasagnas finally enjoyed a peaceful, smoke-free hour in the oven, and I was able to make the chicken nuggets and crescent rolls as the discussion was winding down.  The kids ate their meal first (due to limited seating) and then we sent them back downstairs to watch a movie while we enjoyed our meal and dessert.  The lasagna turned out to be the best I've ever made, which we all jokingly attributed to the secret ingredient of burnt hot pad smoke.

So I survived the first fire in my kitchen (and then the second fire in my kitchen) with twenty people in my house.  Thankfully, they were all very good friends, and everyone thought the whole thing was hilarious.  I guess that is better than the first kitchen fire happening when nobody was home :)