A really hot meal

It started when we found some long lost cuts of tenderloin in the far reaches of the freezer. After days of macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, chicken fingers and hot dogs, this was a welcomed find. It took two days to thaw the pork in the refrigerator. On the second day, I got home from work with the kids before Jon and began my attempt at making a dinner for my family. It was going to be a healthy dinner. It was going to included vegetables and wasn't going to include macaroni and cheese.

Right before I got pregnant I was a vegetarian and lot of my adult cooking experience comes from that period, so pork is kind of a mystery to me. I know it has to be cooked to 160 degrees, but that's about it. After a quick internet search, I found that the easiest way to cook pork was to broil it. So that's what I did. I put the pork in the oven on an aluminum foil-lined baking sheet and placed it pretty close to the heating element as suggested by the web site.

There was just enough aluminum foil left over to cover the baking sheet.

It couldn't have been more than two minutes later when I smell the smoke. At that exact moment, the smoke detector went off confirming that there was, in fact, smoke coming out of the oven. I was in the kitchen with both Ryan and Sophia. Fortunately, Ryan was in his walker, so with one hand I pushed him out of the kitchen and put myself between Sophia and the oven. With the other hand, I opened the oven door and saw that there were flames coming off the edge of the aluminum foil. In an oddly calm panic, I pushed Sophia out of the kitchen and turned to grab the fire extinguisher. As I reached for the fire extinguisher, the exact opposite thing I thought was going to happen, happened: The flames died down and extinguished themselves.

After finally convincing the smoke detector that there was no fire and it could stop it's blasted beeping, I took a look at the remains of what was supposed to be our healthy, normal, family dinner. The pork was only slightly charred, but the foil was destroyed. There must have been some cardboard stuck to the aluminum foil, but I can't be certain. I didn't see any cardboard before I put it in the oven, but that's my best guess about what happened. The pork wasn't completely ruined, so I put what I could save in a Pyrex baking pan and baked the pork. After all that hoopla, we did have pork for dinner, but with macaroni and cheese.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a contest sponsored by the American Egg Board.