The Fish Pond: Do Not Look Directly At The Potato

One of my favorite shows of all time is Home Improvement, and in one episode Tim builds the Man Kitchen, and in the Man Kitchen is some kind of More Power Microwave, and when he cooks a potato in that microwave he and Al have to wear goggles and body shielding because of the heavy nuclear power output, and Tim admonishes Al "Do Not Look Directly At The Potato." He cooks the potato, it glows a lovely neon green.

Now, anytime we don't want anyone to look anywhere they shouldn't, say, directly into the blinding hot sun, we say "Do Not Look Directly At The Potato."

Saturday night we were back at home in our pigsty after a hard day of looking for new pigsties while suffering from the plague (baby's fever gone, but I. Still. Have. Snot.) and Sunny picked up a potato, and said she wanted to cook it and try it.

Now, since my mother never would let me in the kitchen because "You will make a big mess" I never did learn how to do much in the kitchen; everything I've ever learned I taught myself. Consequently, I never learned how to do very basic things: I have no idea how to hard boil an egg, how to make mashed potatoes, how to make a meat loaf. However, I did know how to make a baked potato, since my mother used to nap in the afternoons and I would have to make the baked potatoes since they take so long to cook.

I am impatient, though, so I wanted to make the baked potato for Sunny to taste in the microwave, and I didn't know how to do that. So I used my trusty friend Google to help me out. One recipe told me to rub the potato in olive oil, wrap it in plastic wrap, and cook it up that way, and expressly said don't poke holes in the potato. That didn't seem right to me, as I had visions of exploding potatoes, so I picked another recipe.

Step one, wash and dry potato. Gotcha. Step two, poke holes in potato. Done. Step three, put potato on paper towel in microwave. Done. Step four, microwave potato for 15 minutes or until done, turning once during cooking. Okey dokey. I did all that, set the microwave for 7 minutes, and then jokingly told everyone "Do not look directly at the potato."

The potato cooked for 7 minutes and I reached in and turned it over. It felt a bit mushy but I trust my friend Google, and if Google says it needs to cook for 15 minutes then by golly, 15 minutes it will cook. I set it for the remaining 8 minutes and went in the other room to deal with a kid crisis.

About two minutes into the second session BigDaddyFish, who was sitting in the kitchen playing computer games on his laptop, starts yelling at me "How long did you put this potato in for????" with a bit of alarm in his voice, and I turned around to see flames flickering in the microwave and great clouds of acrid smoke billowing out of the back of the microwave. The potato had exploded and burst into flame. The kids freaked the fuck out, yelling that the house was on fire and readying themselves to leave and meet up at our meeting place and Trout was trying to figure out how she was going to get Nemo out of the house since he's so heavy and she can't carry him and we're yelling "Just open the door! You don't have to leave! Just open the damn door! Calm down! Open the GODDAMN DOOR NOW!!!!!" as we run around and open windows and the back door, any and everything to get the horrible smell out.

We learned a few valuable lessons:

Our smoke alarm needs an awful lot of smoke to go off, since it didn't. We thought the batteries were dead and checked it later; it works fine. Except if you burn up a potato in the microwave.
My friend Google is wrong. 15 minutes is too long to microwave a potato. If you want a delicately baked potato, 7 minutes is probably enough if you have a 1000 watt microwave.
Kids need to be taught the number one rule of fire safety is DON'T PANIC in addition to the "Get low and go" and "Leave the house immediately and meet up at the meeting place."

The potato was a ridiculous mass of charcoal, and I believe the microwave is history. It is 14 years old, so I'm okay with that. The smell is just awful; we've cleaned it out and BigDaddyFish set about trying to get the odor out, and I told him to microwave a bunch of baking soda. Since he apparently didn't learn from my Google lesson, Google told him to try baking soda (told him) or he could try vinegar. Since apparently the stench is not bad enough for him, he microwaved a quart of vinegar, so now my whole house just smells like nasty charred vinegar. Yummy.

I'm going to go buy a new microwave. Anyone got any good potato recipes?