Is that…smoke?
My wife just coined, as a phrase, the category title this little anecdote falls under. Look for more of these as I, or people I know, do things that make you go “huh?”.
I decided to cook some chicken that has been sitting in my fridge since Saturday. It’s now Thursday and I have zero desire to wait until is goes bad, starts to smell, and have to throw it out .
Since it’s later in the evening, about eight o’clock or so, and I have no fresh charcoal, I’m going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: the oven.
I break out the Shake N Bake. Makes chicken taste great, it’s REALLY hard to screw up, and it’s quick. So I turn on the oven and let it preheat. I open up the chicken and wash it. I pour the Shake into the little plastic baggy that comes in the box. I shake the chicken.
I lay the chicken out on our shiny new IKEA cookie sheets. The sheets are nice and big and accomodate six legs and six thighs. Cookin’ it all in one batch. Score.
I put it in the oven and set the timer for forty-five minutes.
About ten minutes from the end, the smell coming out of the oven changes. It morphs from a pleasant aroma of chicken cooking slowly for my convivial pleasure to one of…what the hell is that, anyway?
I open up the oven door. Is that…smoke?
Sure is.
Uh-oh.
I turn on the range fan and open every window in the house. It’s forty-five degrees outside. I disable all the smoke detectors because now they’re going off and the kids are in bed. I return to the oven and open it again. How? How is this thing smoking like this?
Then it hits me.
Grease.
The grease from the chicken is running off the cookie sheet and onto the bottom of the oven, where the fire below (did I mention this is a gas oven?) has heated it to a temperature Milton would be proud of.
Apparently, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to use the new cookie sheets THAT ARE FLAT AND HAVE NO LIPS.
Welcome to my new category, “Check The Dosage.”
