Cheating Death

A few weeks ago I almost went to keep my maker company, which tells me that I shall live to a ripe old age as I have always intended to. It all began like all incidences innocently enough!

Tired after a hard day’s work during which I had skipped lunch on account of the amount of work I had to push through my desk that day, I stumbled home more hungry than tired. It was one of those days where my house help doesn’t visit so no dinner had been prepared. So it was me to prepare my dinner this evening or have a date with my maker on account of starvation.

Now one of the lesser known skills that I possess is that I am a great cook particularly anything meat related and I constantly experiment with all kinds of ingredients and condiments both fresh and packaged. I have even told my colleagues at work that one of the reasons that I don’t invite them over for a meal is that once they taste my cooking they shall seek permanent refuge in my house to the chagrin and annoyance of their husbands, boyfriends, wives and girlfriends!

Today I had some pork chops that I was going to dry fry in a frying pan with onions, tomatoes, dhania and other secret ingredients (every chef has a secret recipe only known to them) and then add a dash of soy sauce at the last minute for the darkening of the meat and as a final flavoring. No “pilau Njeri” or that goulash so loved by my tribes’ mates comprising potatoes, meat, peas, carrots, cabbage and boiled maize thank you! All went according to plan and half an hour later I sat down to feast on a delicious dinner of pork chops and pasta.

Soon sated and the dishes cleaned I decided to retire to my sanctum sanctorum (which doubles up as my bedroom, my study and my TV room) to catch up on some reading and watch TV but not before filing the now blackened (soy sauce does that) frying pan with water and then leaving it on the stove to heat up so as to make the job of washing it up later easier after all the goo had dissolved in the hot water. Half an hour later I smelt something strange in the air but dismissed it as probably a neighbors cooking. A few minutes later I noticed smoke in my sanctorum only to realise that the cause must be the long forgotten frying pan warming on the stove.

Rushing into the kitchen I almost passed out due to the thick smoke emitted by the now dried our frying pan making visibility in the kitchen almost nil whereupon I stumbled blindly to the kitchen windows which I threw wide open as well as opened the backdoor for the smoke to dissipate after which I went and put off the stove and rescued the now useless frying pan whose non-stick bottom had melted and was the source of this thick clearly carbon laden smoke.

By now this carbonaceous smoke had spread to the rest of the house mainly to my bedroom which is next to the kitchen and so I had no choice but to also open all the doors and windows in the house to try and get some flow of air circulating to push out this deadly toxin of smoke that now permeated most of the house. Strangely in all this drama none of my neighbors appeared any the wiser to my misadventures that night which I can only conclude was due to the fact that I never panicked and did not start screaming wildly. Two hours later with all the smoke now cleared from the house, the possibility of asphyxiating in my sleep only a lingering thought and all back to normal save for a lingering smell of something burnt………...and the frying pan relegated to the outside verandah to be trashed the next day I went to bed.

Now, imagine for a moment that I had fallen asleep before I had realized that I had left something heating on the stove, there would have been only two outcomes, death by carbon monoxide poisoning or death from being burnt alive had the frying pan then heated up to an extent that it triggered a chain reaction of an exploding gas cylinder with the attendant mayhem.

The grim reaper came calling that day and my date with my maker would have been sealed save for the good luck that caused me to stay awake long enough to realise that all was not well!

Expect me to be around for a long, long time folks……!