Where There's Smoke

Where there's smoke, there's fire, they say.

I say, where there's smoke, the smoke alarm goes off. And when the smoke alarm goes off, chances are, I am in the kitchen.

Embarrassing as it may be to admit, I have the unique distinction of testing the smoke alarm in two households.

When we were still at my brother-in-law’s place near Kings Road, I was heating up sausages for breakfast one morning. I had done sausages before, both cooking and reheating. The window was closed and the kitchen hood was on as usual. However, for some odd reason, the pan was particularly smoky that particular morning. It was so smoky that I tripped the smoke alarm.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP, the alarm went incessantly.

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law rushed to the kitchen. I turned the gas off and opened the window. Dadoffive opened the sliding door near the dining area leading to the garden while Mumoffive got a blanket and fanned the smoke away from the vicinity of the smoke alarm.

After a while … silence.

My kind sister-in-law was so nice about the whole thing. She calmly stated, “Oh, I’ve been wanting to test that smoke alarm. It’s nice to know that it works.”

Surprisingly, none of the children got out of bed to see what was happening. When they came down for breakfast, they did say that they all heard the alarm go off but nobody paid any attention to it. This reminded me of those fire drills at the office where everyone takes their sweet time getting their things and going down the stairs when the alarm rings during the scheduled drills. In this case, the children didn’t even bother to take their sweet time, they just went right back to Slumberland.

When we moved to Northern Views, one of the things in the checklist was the smoke alarm. I had indicated “NOT TESTED” on the Remarks column since I couldn’t tell if it was working or not and quite frankly, I had no intention of testing it. Little did I know that today was going to be the Smoke Alarm test date.

Smoke alarms are not a common household accessory in Manila. In fact, many of the usual appliances here such as the dishwasher and the kitchen hood are not always present in Philippine households. I was happy that when the smoke alarm in Northern Views went off, I knew what to do.

Some people know that there are days when I say to myself, ‘I want to bake something’ and other days when it would be ‘I need to bake something.’ Baking is therapeutic for me somehow. I like, no, I love to bake. It had been a long time since I have been able to bake anything so I knew that sooner or later, the latter would be coming up. The problem was I only had one cookie sheet that fit the oven in Northern Views. I had forgotten my smaller cookies sheets at Cebu Avenue and most of the ones I had with me were too big for the oven. So I finally decided to pick up the cheapest cookie sheets I could find. I got a couple at K-Mart yesterday so I was good to go.

Well, at least I THOUGHT I was.

I guess it was stupid of me to try out a new recipe when trying out different flour, different butter, different sugar, different vanilla, essentially different ingredients in addition to using a different oven, different pans, etc. I thought that if I followed a local recipe using ingredients purchased from local stores, I would be fine. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

The cookies were a DISASTER! The minute I opened the oven to check on my first batch of cookies, the smoke alarm went off.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP, my alarm went.

(Yes, the smoke alarm at Northern Views works, too.)

It was doubly embarrassing because the only other person in the house at the time was the Croatian fixing the shower floor upstairs. Naturally, HE didn’t say anything but I’m sure there were thoughts going through his mind as the alarm beeped. Especially because the alarm went off about two or three times more as the other batches of cookies went into and out of the oven.

(So embarrassing!)

The cookies got burnt in spite my lowering the temperature and the baking time. I had to scrape off black bases to get them to look half decent and potentially edible.

Definitely the oven was too hot. Possibly the oven is too small to use both the middle and the lower racks. Perhaps the cookie sheets were too thin. Maybe the home brand ingredients aren’t the best for baking.

I honestly don’t know. All I know is that I am not giving up on baking just because I baked my worst ever batch of cookies and have become the official smoke alarm tester.

Until I am able to figure out what went wrong, I may be stuck with burnt cookies which will probably all end up in my hips. Perhaps this is the reason why Cookie Monster has no waist.