Fire

Yesterday I came perilously close to setting our house on fire. And it was definitely my fault...

On the way home from work yesterday I stopped at Kroger and did our weekly grocery trip. I saw that, at our Kroger anyway, t-bone steaks were on sale. I hadn't had a good steak since I gave up being a vegetarian a few months ago, so I decided to get one for me and one for Lisa. I was VERY excited about it. I came home, made a quick marinade for the steak and let it soak in the marinade and some basil while I prepped a fruit salad and a garden salad. I then went outside to start the grill. I had set the grill perhaps a foot and a half away from the house.

After a few minutes I brought the steaks and a soy hamburger for Meredith and soy chicken nuggets for Natalie down and put them on the grill. A little voice in my head told me to stay with the grill, but I'd left it alone for a minute or two while roasting hot dogs, so I thought it would be okay, so I went upstairs to set the table for dinner.

There's a big difference, though, between a couple of hot dogs and 2 big steaks with lots of flammable fat that have been soaking in flammable marinade. I was upstairs setting the table and trying to reset my cell phone clock, which wasn't working for some reason. I needed to reset it so that I could take it outside with me to time my cooking of the steak. Because I was dealing with a clock, I know exactly how long I'd been upstairs away from the grill: 6 minutes.

Apparently that was too long because while I was turning my cell phone off and turning it back on again I heard a scream from downstairs and then both Lisa yelling for me ("Bryan! Bryan!") and Natalie yelling for me ("Daddy! Daddy!").

I knew before I even made it downstairs what they were yelling about. I knew there'd been a flare up. I wasn't prepared for how bad it was. Almost the entire firebox of the grill was engulfed in flames. I WAS able to get outside (The grill was on the other side of the glass doors leading onto the patio), but after a moment I realized there was no way I was going to be able to open the lid of the grill and move the meat from the flame. Luckily, though, the flames were all headed UP, so I was able to crouch down and bend around the grill and turn off the propane tank. I did have a moment of panic, though, when I stood up and realized that turning off the propane had not diminished the flames AT ALL! It wasn't the propane that was on fire--it was the steaks themselves. After about a minute, though, the flames dropped a little, and I was able to open the lid and flip the steaks off of the hot side of the grill over to the other side, where I hadn't even had the burners on.

We ended up throwing the steaks out, and that really bothered me, but as I said during grace when we sat down to a nice meal of garden salad and fruit salad, thank God that my stupid mistake hadn't burned the house down. It's hard to be bummed about a light dinner when there was the possibility of those flames--which had been licking the basement door--catching the wood in that door on fire and then spreading to the rest of the house.

I still want a t-bone steak, though, so I might go buy two more tonight and try again. This time I'll stay with the grill, though.