Burnin' Down the House

Today was an eventful day. I found a great church, got a bed, and tried to burn my house down...twice. I think some sort of fire or near fire accident is obligatory when moving into a new place ( I must say my sister managed to have a much more dramatic experience than I, but I guess that's good since she's married to a firefighter and I'm not). For me it all started when my roommate and I decided to make tortilla de patatas and bruschetta for dinner. We both spend some time studying abroad in Spain a few years back (not together) and she asked me if I knew how to make tortilla (note: Spanish tortilla is kinda like a glorifed onion and potato omelet). "Sure," I said, "I can totally make it for you." So we went to the store to pick up potatoes and some other things we both wanted to buy. I think we were gone for about 40 minutes or so. Yeah, um, but before we left we had put some water on our gas range to boil because some tea sounded nice, so we came home to find it still on! Ah! Luckily nothing happened except that the water had boiled almost completely away, so tea wasn't really an option unless we wanted to start over. Ok, so onto the the REAL almost fire incident. We began making the tortilla, chopping up tomato and garlic for the bruschetta, and I stuck some bread in the oven to toast. I put it on broil, but the oven didn't seem to be getting very hot and the bread wasn't toasting. After checking a few times...yeah...I TOTALLY forgot about it. I was more focused on the fact that it seemed like the tortilla was taking forever to cook. Then the smoke alarm starting going off and you'd think this would have reminded me about my bread, but no, I thought, "Oh no, the tortilla is burning!" So we flipped it over, and it really didn't look burned so we were a bit puzzled. Then we noticed the smoke starting to pour out of the range...and I realized it wasn't from the stove, but from the oven! I threw open the oven door and smoke billows out, burning our eyes and turning the whole apartment hazy. I throw the pan into the sink and turn on the water and at this point my roommate and I lose it laughing. We run to the windows, find the fan, and furiously wave our towels in the air, gasping for breath since we're totally cracking up. And of course I'm feeling totally humbled since my confidence in my cooking ability has been shattered by the fact that I can't even toast bread. We ended up making more toast (and set my cell phone timer just in case we could possibly forget) and dinner was actually pretty good. In the end, we decided the whole thing was a great bonding experience "The night we tried to turn down the house...twice." Yeah that and that we should probably get a toaster.