Domestic Disaster

Before last week, I thought that I knew all the rules about what not to put in a microwave – potatoes, aluminum foil…all the stuff that exploded and sparked I knew about. I even knew that putting grapes in a microwave made for a sweet show. I was a competent and responsible microwave operator, or so I thought. Then, last week, I discovered that somehow I had missed out on the conventional wisdom that microwaves and eggs in a shell don’t mix. Our stove wasn’t working and I was out of pretty much all my food stock except some spaghetti and a dozen eggs, so I had the brilliant idea of making hard-boiled eggs in the microwave. The thought that rapidly heating the contents in an enclosed shell might result in the said contents violently leaving the shell never crossed my mind. So I placed two eggs in mugs of water, set them in the microwave, and happily let the microwave do its thing. About two minutes later the water began to boil and, while I was standing about 3 feet away mixing tea, I hear a boom like a gunshot and look over to see the microwave door blasted open so hard that it slammed against the hinges and then shut again, opening just long enough to splatter the entire area within a 10 foot radius with the soggy contents of an egg. It really is amazing how much force an exploding egg can generate and how much area the stuff inside of one small egg can cover when spread out. I suspect the fact that the egg was in a mug helped direct the force of the explosion and helped blast the door open so violently. The microwave will never be the same and now, an entire week later, the smell of egg still pervades the kitchen and pantry. I have gleaned several valuable lessons from this episode, and for your own edification I will now leave you with them:

1. Never become so confident in your abilities as a microwave operator (or anything else, for that matter) that you forget to exercise common sense.

2. Things enclosed in a membrane (ie. eggs in shells, potatoes in skins, etc.) should never be heated in a microwave unless two conditions are met: you don’t care a whit about the microwave and how it smells, and you have somebody handy who likes to clean soggy egg matter off of anything and everything.

3. If you plan on exploding an egg for the pure joy of it (and it is well worth the experience provided the above conditions are met), don’t under any circumstances place the egg in water – soggy hard-boiled egg matter is way, way grosser than normal hard-boiled egg matter.