Burning the mid-day oil...

Today 8th June is the day when i had my second experience with the wrath of the forces of nature.
First one was just 2 weekends back which is described in this post.

It was a bright sunny morning and i woke up quite late. Have to leave in teh evening for Scotland so decided that i will pack my bags now itself and leave directly from the office in the evening. Around 10:15 or so we decided to cook breakfast. (We = Ghodi and me)

Plan for today was to cook egg rice. As usual Ghodi started with the rice and his beloved pressure cooker. Right amount of rice, right amount of water and we kept it on the hot plate to cook. For 15 mins there was no whistle. Then he forcibly made it give out one whistle and we were already wondering why it was taking so long. Then the 2nd one too didnt seem to come. Again we forced one and then decided to take off the cooker from the plate. It was 25-30 mins already by then!

On opening it we realised that the rice was literally burnt inside the cooker and it was very obvious that there was a leakage in the lid of the pressure cooker. We didnt have more time to wait and hence decided to ditch the rice idea and instead cook some curry to eat with bread.
Cabbage curry was the only choice and we already had onions cut and ready, just a matter of cutting cabbage...

I took the utensil in which we usually cook curry, washed it and without thinking anything kept it on "a" hot plate. I started cutting cabbage while Ghodi was busy cleaning his beloved cooker. Cabbage was cut in 5 mins and so far so good...

I proceeded as usual and wanted to put oil in the utensil. Generally poured 1 BIG spoon of oil in it and to my shock, it started burning!!! I didnt know what to do and cursed the fire by saying to Ghodi, "Abey saala isme aag lag gayi"...Ghodi rushed to the scene...

But the fire GOD had not liked me calling him "Saala" already and the fire was much worse now!!! It was a proper fire and panic took over us. Still managing to think something i quickly picked up the utensil from the hot plate. Now the fire was in my hand!!!
We managed to keep our cool amidst that and didnt venture the water way of extinguishing a fire. Very very scared we were blowing air into the pan all that we could! The fire went off for 2 seconds but when it came back it was too bad!!! It came on my hand and i had no option other than to drop the utensil!

It fell on the kitchen carpet and fire was still there in it! We managed to extinguish the fire somehow, well it went out on its own coz the oil got over i think! :P but it had left a very very bad sign! The kitchen carpet got burnt and bears 2 circles of dark brown colour on it! Finally i picked it up and slowly poured water in it and allowed it to cool in the sink.

We realised that there was too much smoke in the kitchen and the fire alarm could start any moment. Quickly we opened both windows and were frantically waving napkins to drive out the smoke. Ghodi even tried covering the fire detector with a napkin so that smoke doesnt reach it..Genius! :D
Finally we succeeded and the alarm didnt ring. The whole hostel would have to be evacuated if that had happened!!!

Some after effects:

A shiny steel utensil was literally BLACK. Next 20 mins were spent on washing it. We finally succeeded quite a lot and it is light grey now. :D
Worse.. It was not ours! :P

After this we realised that tea was still boiling on the other hot plate and it was time to remove it! We totally agreed that today everything was going wrong and we shudnt cook today! Slightly childish but it was a good decision i guess! :P

We spent the next 10-15 happily sipping our tea and laughing about the incident. The next half day was spent telling friends and family about the incident. Thank GOD that noone of us was injured and also that the fire alarm didnt ring and we were saved from the embarrassment! :-)

The kissa has made my day though and feeling very very proud that we managed to stay cool in all this! :-)

Here i come Scotland! :D