Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving day is sunny and hits 45° before falling back. I’m at my computer when I become aware that I smell smoke. My thought is: smoke? I spin my chair around and look behind me: living room, dining room, and kitchen are filled with clouds of smoke. Holy crap! I have a fire! I jump up and run to the kitchen where the smoke is thickest.

I have a pot of vegetarian chili simmering on the stove, and I momentarily think I must have inadvertently set the burner to maximum heat and the pot has boiled over and the food is burning, but no; the temperature knob is set to simmer and nothing is boiling over. I turn the burner off anyway.

I am still in emergency mode. My house is on fire! But where the hell is the fire? Is it inside my kitchen wall? Was it started by electrical wiring? If it’s inside the wall, how is all this smoke getting through the wall and into the room? It’s a funny feeling to think your house is on fire and you’re powerless to do anything about it. Suddenly my brain clicks into gear and I know what is happening. You’ve probably already guessed.

Let’s back up to the day before Thanksgiving, a day that was cold and rainy. I had gone to the grocery store to pick up a half dozen items, and the store was slammed. It might have been the day before the Apocalypse. Or the day before a zombie invasion. It was so crowded it was difficult to move around. But everybody was in a good mood. I got stuck behind a lady who was gabbing and waving at other people she recognized instead of moving along. So I said to her, in a voice loud enough that she would know I was addressing her, “Are we moving forward?” And she half turned toward me and said, “We don’t know.” We both laughed. It was that kind of atmosphere in the store. Busy busy, but people were making allowances for the situation.

I bought my half dozen items including, for a new batch of experimental chili, a can of diced tomato with green chilies, a can of Mexican style stewed tomatoes with jalapeño, cumin, & red pepper, a can of red kidney beans, and a can of black beans. I had a white onion at home that I would dice and add to the pot, along with chili powder and my secret spices. I remembered I had some pimento cheese at home, so I bought some sandwich rounds, also called sandwich thins. I rarely eat bread, but I can pry apart a sandwich round and put pimento cheese on one half and get half the carbs of a slice of bread.

The next day, Thanksgiving Day, I make my chili and put it on the burner to simmer, and I decide to toast one half of a sandwich round for pimento cheese spread. I separate the halves and put one piece in the toaster, I seal the bag and put it back on the shelf, I clean a couple of utensils I used in making the chili, and I go merrily on my way to the computer. Meanwhile …

Yes indeed, I forgot about the bread in the toaster, and due to a mechanical issue, my toaster does not eject bread when it’s done. It sits there toasting away until I manually popup the bread. From seeing smoke and running to the kitchen, to remembering the bread in the toaster, probably no more than ten seconds passed, though it seemed longer.

I unplugged the toaster. The bread inside was almost completely converted to ash. A black fragment of toast still glowed like a fireplace ember. I opened a door and a window and went upstairs and switched on the whole house fan. It’s powerful draft cleared the air in about five minutes, though a faint whiff of burnt bread lingered in the air for a few more hours.

I hope your turkey day was enjoyable, with less charring than mine.