The Exploding Baking Dish

Last night, as I was preparing dinner, I – very intelligently, as you will find out shortly – sat the baking dish to hold the casserole on the range. I likely wouldn’t have done this previously, since we didn’t have a flat range, and the range that we did have wouldn’t have had the room. So I guess you could consider that a strike against both a flat range surface and replacing a smaller range top with a larger one.

That alone probably wouldn’t have been an issue. Then I turned on the pan to start cooking the chicken when it came out of the microwave. Unfortunately, I turned on the burner underneath the baking dish. That was probably the problem, though it may have simply been bad enough that it was ‘soaking up’ some heat from adjacent burners.

Alas, I didn’t realize the wrong one was on until some time later, as I was chopping the onions and heard a sudden crash. Actually, a crash isn’t quite the right description. It really sounded like an explosion. I thought surely that the kids had tipped over the TV or the computer monitor or something.

Then I realized it was there in the kitchen with me, so I thought something had fallen out of the cabinet and onto the range, shattering it. Only then did I realize I was standing in a sea of cobalt blue glass. Literally – it was spread all over the floor. Then I thought a bottle of lotion or oil or something had somehow shattered, until I realized that was the color of the baking dish I was using, and started putting the pieces together.

Uh, that is the pieces of the puzzle – not the pieces of the dish. Those were gradually cleaned up and thrown away. And when I say gradually, I mean gradually. It took a long time to clean it up. I suspect there are still some pieces of glass in the kitchen that we haven’t found yet, but I think that we did a pretty decent job of getting it all.

So what did we learn? Don’t place a baking dish on the range? Check. Though it doesn’t make sense – shouldn’t a baking dish be able to take some heat? I won’t do it again, just wondering. Don’t buy a cobalt blue baking dish, but instead stick to a different material (Pyrex)? Sounds good, though I don’t know why it matters. Maybe we just ought to stay away from glass entirely. Perhaps stay away from the cooking entirely, and let my wife do it? Now we’re talking, though there are bound to be pluses and minuses to this approach.