Smoke

Foods class on Tuesday was a smoky one.  I'm teaching a unit on food safety which goes hand-in-hand with food borne illness.  I had the students use  meat thermometers to panfry a bone-in chicken thigh to 165-degrees.  Nothing too crazy as it was this semesters first day in the labs.  Before I could flinch, hot oil was popping out of pans and the smell of burning chicken skin was filling my classroom.  Associates left my classroom to stand in the hall as the smoke was getting heavier and thicker.  The students had burnt the outside of their chicken, but the internal temperature hadn't reached 165.  So they kept cooking.  Teachers and students began stopping in to tell me smoke was filling the hallway.  I felt like Gfunk as I replied, "It's not my fault we don't have a good ventilation system in here".   

My students laughed through the smoke as they searched for box fans and snow blew in my cranked-open windows.  I prayed and prayed the schools' smoke alarms wouldn't go off. 

I know my students will have oodles of successful labs this semester.  They will learn to properly cook pasta, emulsions, proteins, sauces, yeast breads, muffins and cakes.  They will become masters at all of it.  Most of it they'll forget by the time they graduate.  However, something tells me they'll never forget chicken must be cooked to 165 degrees to kill salmonella.

Ironically, the smoke alarms didn't go off.  Slightly frightening considered the amount of people who stopped by asking if there was a grease fire in my room. 

Yet on the flip side, certain smoke alarms can be a little too sensitive.  Certain ones like the smoke alarms we installed in our house.

This wasn't the first time the alarms have gone off for no good reason.  And when one alarm goes off, they all go off.

You can see how seriously we take these matters.

Luckily, the fire starter reached high enough to shut the darn thing up.

Ironic.