I should know better. Really, I should. But when I make iced tea, I brew it by boiling water in a teapot on the stove, then I pour the boiling water into a glass 2 quart container with an awesome peach green tea bag. (From Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf) The trouble is…when I pour the water into the jar, I use it all up. And I don’t refill it until I need it again. Why bother? If I need to heat water, I’ll fill the thing. I probably shouldn’t leave it on a burner empty. That’s what got me in trouble last night. I left the empty pot on the back burner while I turned the FRONT burner on to steam some veggies.
That is, I thought I had turned on the front burner. Turns out, I turned the wrong knob. This can be easy to do on this stove, and I tend to double check because it’s just new enough (read that as I haven’t had the stove for 20 years) for me to mix up front and back. Maybe it’s the ceramic top. A gas stove would show you right off which burner was lit, right?
Well, I walked away and waited for the veggies to cook. I heard the usual start-up noises when a burner is getting hot, but then I started to hear some strange cracking sounds. Distractions aside, I jumped up to check and noticed all these spots on the teapot that hadn’t been there before – like grease spatter. Then I remembered the last time I’d used the thing and realized that instead of the veggies, I had been cooking the teapot. The empty teapot.
Fortunately, there was no fire, no damage to the stove, and no burn smell. The tea pot, however, (besides the grease-like spatter) had some of its ceramic bottom cracked and burned away. (Probably that cracking sound I heard.) At first I thought I could save it…
Then today, as I cleaned up the kitchen, I moved the pot and discovered that the little itty-bitty pieces of ceramic had shed onto the counter, and in my haste to wipe them up, a finger got in the way.
Ceramic splinters don’t come out so easily. And they hurt like the dickens as my mother-in-law used to say. Short-lived hurt, but you know it when that sliver finally pops free!
So that teapot is now in the trash, and I won’t be making iced tea again until I can replace it. I kind of liked that teapot–the colors matched my kitchen. But Tiger hated the train whistle sound. So maybe next time we will get one that whistles a kitty-favored tune and warns me when it’s empty too!
