I wasn’t feeling amazing on Sunday so when I popped to the shop to buy some veggies for Sunday Dinner a pack of Aunt Bessie’s roasties found it’s way into my trolley!
I already had a gammon joint in the slow cooker and the veg I picked up from the reduced section was the kind that could be steamed in the microwave so the ‘easy’ roasties seemed like a great option for a change so I could cook Sunday Dinner as quickly and easily as possible and then go have a bath and lie down.
Little did I know that frugal karma was about to bite me in the bum! 😉
I got home and popped the roasties on to a pizza tray (you know the ones with the holes in to crisp up the pizza) and turned the oven on to high. I’ll be honest, I didn’t read the instructions because, even though we’ve never had them before, how hard could it be to cook some potatoes from frozen, right?
Wrong!
After about ten minutes of them being in the oven, our smoke alarms went off and when I walked back into the kitchen it was filled with smoke. I opened up the oven and more smoke literally poured out into the kitchen – so much that it made my eyes start to sting straight away.
I grabbed the oven gloves to get the tray out of the oven but I was too late – within seconds of me opening the oven door the oven had filled with flames that were now shooting into the kitchen. The smoke turned from normal burning food in the oven kind of smoke (trust me, we see that kind of smoke quite often) to a full on thick black smoke in a frighteningly quick time.
It genuinely all happened within seconds and I ran to get my phone and called 999 where the lady on the phone told us to get out of the house. The fire was getting worse at this point and we couldn’t get close enough to the oven to even close the door which seemed like a logical thing to do to us.
The smoke was starting to hurt my throat as we left the house and by the time we got to the front door with the kids and the dog, we could hear the sirens. Two fire engines rolled up outside the house and about twelve firemen got out and moved into action. They managed to put it out reasonably quickly thank goodness and after a 10 minute fire safety talk, they packed up and went back to the station
It turned out that the roasties I put in the oven definitely shouldn’t have been cooked on a tray with holes in – in fact they should only be cooked in a baking tray with a deep rim because of the amount of fat on them. The way that I’d cooked them meant that the fat dripped to the bottom of the oven and in effect, we had a chip pan fire in the oven!
Totally my fault for not reading the instructions and, as Mr Frugal pointed out to me, for buying roasties when I can make them myself for much less money. I pointed out that I wasn’t feeling great and had bought them to make things easier for me and Miss Frugal piped up with ‘That worked out well then, didn’t it?’. 😉
So the moral of today’s story is make your own roasties even if you can’t be bothered and if you must buy them, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!
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