This is not my own kitchen disaster, but that of my ex's then-20-year-old son. On this particular day, ex had gone out of town for a few days, and I had left for work at 8:00am. I had originally planned to go directly from work to an activity, but some little voice in my head told me to go home first. So I went home, at about 6:00pm, and as soon as I opened the front door I was greeted by a cloud of black, oily smoke. I ran for the kitchen, to find a pan of what appeared to be charcoal briquets on the still-on burner. The briquets had originally been pork neck bones.
This was a small house. From the kitchen to the guest bedroom was less than a dozen steps. I had started hollering ex's son's name as soon as I opened the front door, and when I yanked open the door to the guest room after grabbing the pan off the stove and turning it off, still shouting, he was dead asleep. In a supremely non-etiquette-approved moment of rage, I upended the pork neck bone briquets and ash over him, screaming in rabid fury, and he finally blinked at me blearily before rolling over and going back to sleep. The smoke detector between the kitchen and the guest room was silent, despite having worked when I tested it only a few weeks prior, so I suspect it burnt out its battery trying to wake him up.
The $100 pan that he had "cooked" the neck bones in was a lost cause, and I finally got the kitchen renovations that were years overdue, since we were most likely going to have to repaint anyhow to get rid of the oily smoke residue. I couldn't sleep in the house for 2 days; it smelled like there had been a house fire, and I feel very lucky that there wasn't one.
