There was a general rule of thumb at our house and that was when our
parents were away we would ratchet up the danger a notch. They would
head out the door and all of the sudden we would be stuck with the
notion to use power tools, jump off high places, or as I am about to
relate in this little tale of woe deep fry bread on the stove. In
many mobile homes there is a half wall between the kitchen and living
room which allows for spectation of the kitchen activities by those
not in the kitchen. Vital to the catastrophe I am relating there was
also a sink with a spray head common to that was al within reach of
our stove. We were going along frying some nice donuts and had made
quite a few when my brother Matt and I we distracted by the switching
of raw dough and reviving plates. In that time the oil got hot enough
to smoke slightly which sent my little sister in to action she had
been standing behind the wall and when she saw the oil smoke, and to
be absolutely clear it was only that thin white smoke that oil often
gets in deep frying operations, she grabbed up the spray head and
turned on the water and sprayed water into the pot of superheated
oil. If you are familiar with the middle ages, and I have no reason
to doubt that you are, one of the classic castle defense maneuvers
was to pour boiling oil onto invaders. I'll tell you why they did
that, it is because it ranges from extremely painful to fatal to be
hit with boiling oil. This ties back to the story I was just relating
because when Mary sprayed the oil it erupted out of the pan
splattering Matt and I with four hundred degree oil. The good news
was that on the continuum of boiling oil injuries we were able to
keep them on the extremely painful end of the spectrum, the bad news
was too fold, first we had bad burns that left Matt and I permanently
scarred in the abdominal region, maybe forever ruining my shirtless
modeling career and secondly, there was a huge mess of oil splattered
all over the kitchen which we had to clean up ourselves because Mary
was off somewhere crying because of the beating she got for being an
idiot.
