EnchilaNO

Thanks for the "best enchilada recipe you will ever have in your entire life" Lauren Lowrey, but I will never make it again.

Sunday night I thought it would be nice to make dinner for my parents, and keeping with the mexican theme of the weekend (FSU/Ga Tech tailgate was mexican themed), I thought I'd try out an enchilada recipe that my good friend Lauren gave to me. I'm mixing, I'm shredding, I'm chop chop chopping - and the knife slips. Bye bye finger.

Ok so perhaps that is a little dramatic but there definitely was a slip and it definitely sliced my poor finger. When it comes to blood, I'm like Sandy when Frenchie goes to pierce her ears at the sleepover. So it was all I could do to slap on a band aid and pass out in bed.

Monday, attempting to be resilient while donning my bandaged finger (is there anything more unattractive?), I said I would attempt to make the enchiladas again. Back to the onions I go. I've got things going, I set the oven to 400 degrees, things are looking good. I accidentally spilled some garlic onto the oven so it starts to smoke a little bit in the kitchen. My mom asked what was burning and I told her the garlic that got on the burners, but lady, quit worrying because it will burn off in a few minutes. The whole time I thought it was strange that the slight smoke from the burning garlic wasn't letting up after a few minutes, so I set the oven fan. After rolling my beans in the tortilla and putting them in the dish, I open the oven door and saw...

croutons?

what's that red goo?

what is happening?

It took about 5 seconds to put it all together, but apparently my mother had put croutons in a red tupperwear bowl and set it in the oven to keep them fresh. I'm not too sure where this reasoning came from, but nonetheless, I didn't think to look for anything in the oven before I preheated it. And there they were, those little croutons, sitting on the oven rack with red goo dripping everywhere. I wanted to take a picture for documentation purposes, but I didn't think my dad would be too amused be that. He didn't seem to be amused at all to be honest. Long story short, we ended up being able to clean most of it off using a spackler thing, and yes I did cook my enchiladas in the tupperwear-fumed oven after that. I am absolutely horrified at the thought of the poisonous fumes I inhaled last night from the result of melted tupperwear. This small moment of forgetfullness could have the potential to leave to brain damage, possible sterility, cancer, loss of eyesight - basically any disease I am diagnosed with in the future I will forever attribute the night of October 12, 2009 to my ailment.

I googled "melted tupperwear in oven" and here's what I found: Thankfully my dad is super smart and he did exact this, but without the google aide.

How to remove melted Tupperware:

1. Do a frantic Google search. (Check, a day later)


2. Following the instructions of some guy on the first website you come across, snatch up a wooden spoon and try to scrape up the mess. (found these instructions)


3. Observe that the mess is a lot more liquid in consistency than it first appeared and that the wooden spoon has done nothing but paint pretty swirls through the blue goo. (the melted red goo actually was quite pretty and it looked a little bit like taffy)


4. Note grimly that you missed the part where the guy breezily tells you to throw away your now-ruined wooden spoon. He doesn’t know how much you hate throwing perfectly good things away; it's not the wastrel's fault.


5. Realize that as the plastic cools, one of two things might happen. The plastic might turn into a malleable sheet that will easily peel off the oven floor. Or, the plastic will fuse itself to the oven and will have to be re-melted, meaning: more toxic fumes, additional brain damage, and further increased chances of sterility (not that you're absolutely dead-set on having children, but, you know, burning bridges and all that).


6. Scan kitchen utensils and triumphantly seize meat cleaver.


7. Wield cleaver like car windshield squeegee thingy, carefully drawing melted plastic toward the edge where you hold a wad of paper towels to sort of scoop everything up—careful, that stuff is hot; not that I burnt my fingers or anything, but this is what I as a sensible person would assume.


8. When the majority of the plastic is scraped off, finally, use a pot scrubby thingy to buff of any remaining residue.


9. Proudly examine floor of microwave, which is now looking cleaner than it has in a very long time.

Never will I make enchiladas again.