New Saucepans & Narrow escapes

It was a cold, rainy night, in June last year. I was 37 weeks pregnant with Felix. Scott was working late and I had kept dinner warm for his arrival home. Not thinking straight (as I tend not to when I'm 37 weeks pregnant) I placed a saucepan of pasta inside a slightly larger saucepan of water and popped them on the stove top to gently simmer. A good way to keep residual heat flowing through the food, without drying it out. By the time Scott had eaten his meal and I got around to rinsing the dirty plates and pots, it had been a couple of hours. My clever, gradual, heating method had backfired. The saucepans had welded together. Tight. As I wrenched and pulled, nothing was going to budge them. The combination of water and steam had expanded and locked those babies together, like something out of a high school lab experiment.


Enter my resourceful husband... aka Mr Science. He had a grand plan to put both saucepans back on the stove top, to create a surge of steam and release the pressure that had built up between them. Well, release the pressure... it did. To such a degree, we blew up the kitchen. Or more so, the glass range hood above our stove top and the cupboards above the glass range hood. The explosion was mega! For many days, weeks, months later, I ran through the what if's in my head. I will always count my lucky stars that Angus was already snug in his bed and that we both decided to clear the kitchen in those few minutes it took for the saucepans to become... ahem... detached. Thousands of pebbly fragments of glass rained down over 3 separate rooms of our tiny home and the trapped boiling hot water from the bottom saucepan splattered the roof and walls of the kitchen. It took hours to clean up the glass... and we were STILL finding bits in obscure places months later. Our saucepan mishap taught us many lessons that night. Never underestimate the power of steam being the main one. It also raised a few questions... how were we about to become parents again? We blew up our own kitchen... Hmmm!


The saucepans were never quite the same and I have been managing with their battle scars ever since. Almost a year on. But the time has definitely come to retire the old faithfuls, that have served us well, for the past 9 years (I like to get my money's worth). So this week I am joining in with Maxabella, to be ever so grateful for brand spanking new saucepans. A whole set of them. On sale. And Scanpan, no less. Grateful for saucepans AND narrow escapes... I will never forget how close we came to a disaster almost too frightening to comprehend.

My lovely new set of saucepans... may be just the inspiration I need to get my cook on!

image from here