A Beanie Disaster

What an odd post with which to break my extended silence! I unearthed this antique from my drafts folder and thought you might enjoy a touch of humor. 

You are familiar with Teflon, right? That non-stick coating on cookware that is said to cause cancer and birth defects? I cooked with it for years and never worried about ill side-effects. Then I went to a Princess House party. Princess House sells beautiful dishes and cookware. And their non-stick pans don't have Teflon.

"Did you know that parakeets die if they are around when Teflon gets overheated?" the consultant asked. Knowledgeable ladies around the room nodded in agreement.

I went home and did research. Who wants to cook on something that will kill you? Teflon is safe, according to research I found, unless it gets very overheated. And even then the chances were low enough that I kept my skillet. That was a year ago, but apparently the dangers of Teflon had left their indelible footprint in my cerebral cortex.

A few weeks ago as I was cooking dinner, I fried bacon in my Teflon pan, dumped out most of the grease, and sauteed green beans in the already-hot skillet.  It was when the beans were nearly finished that I smelled something hot. Strange. It was far worse than a burned food smell. This was more acrid. More awful.

I sniffed in the direction of the pan and wrinkled my nose. It must be from the Teflon getting too hot, I thought. This is probably the smell that kills parakeets.

In the vain hope that my beans would smell fine though my pan didn't, I quickly dumped them into a bowl. A few stuck to the bottom of the pan, but I let them there. No child of mine was gonna get a brain tumor from contaminated beans if I could help it.

My kitchen smelled terrible. The beans in the bowl far away from the pan smelled terrible. I pitched the whole lot of them on our garbage heap and quickly made a salad as their replacement. But as I worked, I felt confused. Had the pan really gotten that hot? Nothing had burned. The only thing I could think of was that frying bacon and beans back-to-back kept the pan too hot for too long.

It was when I was washing dishes after our meal that things became clear. Just before I immersed the pan into the sink of soapy water, I saw the culprit. Stuck to the bottom of the pan was a blackened potato peel burned nearly beyond recognition. Sandwiched between the pan and burner on my electric stove, the peel charred out of sight.

Thanks, Teflon. There went my beans.