A fully engulfed potato saved our lives. Probably.

One of the suckiest parts of the pandemic is that I now have to look at Pinterest. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’m not a Pinterest person. But the beloved freezer meal group I do monthly at a local grocery store has been on hiatus since last March because of COVID-19, so now I have to do all meal planning myself. This forces me to occasionally look at Pinterest to find recipes and such. 

Pinterest recipes inevitably lead you to food blogs. These involve some woman trying to look like she has a perfect life giving you a casserole recipe, but not until she first writes about how it reminds her of something her grandma made and an experience her grandma’s grandmother had at Ellis Island. Looking at them on a phone is the worst because there are a billion pop-up videos (“Watch this irrelevant 1.5-minute video of how I melt butter!”) and ads you can’t escape. I accidentally clicked on an ad for birth injury lawyers while trying to see a zucchini recipe today, and now sad baby photos won’t get out of my Facebook feed.  

It was on one of those food blogs last week that I swore I read you should bake a potato in the microwave with a wet paper towel around it for 20 minutes. I pretty much only bake potatoes in the oven, so I committed this to memory and went on with life for a few days until I wanted a potato. I did what I was pretty sure I remember that blog saying: wrapped a wet paper towel around it and set the microwave for 20 minutes. As it was cooking, I went into the adjacent living room to play with my kids. 

A blaring noise soon pierced the calm. It was our smoke detector. 

“What’s wrong with the smoke detector?” I asked aloud as the kids looked confused. 

Then I walked into the kitchen, staring at the detector. It turns out that was not the issue. I next saw the layer of smoke on the ceiling. Then I turned to my left and saw flames in the microwave. I screamed and turned the microwave off, yanking on the door handle. My husband came running downstairs as soon as he heard the smoke alarm. He saw the flames and jetted into the garage to grab the fire extinguisher. The children were screaming. It was chaos. I stopped him before he could use the fire extinguisher. The potato sat engulfed in flames on its ceramic plate, but that seemed to be as far as it went. So I poured a cup of water on it, and that was that. Flames out. 

The smoke was still thick enough, however, that the smoke alarm kept blaring. So we opened windows and doors in the 20-degree night to try to get it out. My children thought this was amazing. They grabbed blankets and burp cloths and stuffed animals and emulated us as we tried to waft the smoke outside. They danced around with glee at the excitement. They asked why I put out the fire before they could see it. They acted like me almost burning our house down with a potato was the best thing to happen to them since Christmas. 

As the smoke dissipated, I became curious if the entire potato was burned. Maybe just the paper towel around it and the skin were singed? Maybe I could salvage some! I tried cutting it, but the knife wouldn’t go through. My husband tried, and we found it was basically a charcoal briquet through and through. Then we discovered the microwave didn’t work anymore. I’m not really sure how. As far as I can tell, only the potato was on fire, but the microwave didn’t take kindly to it. 

My husband is an electrical engineer, and he was bound and determined to fix the microwave himself. It’s an over-the-range kind and has been in the house since we bought it 10 years ago. As he dug into it, he realized the previous homeowners had cut a hole in the top of the microwaved and jury-rigged ductwork into it to vent it. Then they secured said venting with discarded baseboard pieces. 

So really, he should be thanking me for ruining that thing. How many micro-waves went straight into our brains with that set-up? Am I a walking 5G access point now? How did it not catch on fire a long time ago? I shouldn’t be surprised. The previous homeowners seemed intent on setting this house ablaze. When we moved in, we saw they’d nailed an extension cord in the wall around the perimeter of the garage, with the nails going straight through the cord. When we redid the basement they had shoddily finished, our contractors pointed out three scorched spots in the insulation courtesy their DIY wiring. How many more code violations are just one flaming potato away from discovery in this place?

The house smelled like charred tubers for days. My face masks and hair. Our coats and cats. But it was worth it. Thanks to my brave - albeit unintended - actions, we how have a new and properly installed microwave. I’ve probably saved all us from further radiation and brain cancer and stuff. And maybe even a fire way worse than a potato. Not all heroes wear capes.