Well I've got good news and bad news

First the good news: the Anadama Bread, the first bread baked by the newly formed Bread Baker's Apprentice group (no, I am not a part of it, I was too late, again,) is fabulous.

My children loved it - one even asked for a slice of "that amazing bread" at dinner tonight.

And that is with mine not rising quite as much as I think it should have, it just didn't seem to want to go any higher. So my loaves are a bit on the small side, but that's okay, good things come in small packages!


The bad news?

Today, I killed my bbq.

With a fire extinguisher.

I had to! I really did! It was not a ploy to get a new one, it seriously was flaming and flaming and flaming, with nothing on it anymore, no gas on, nothing, and the flames were getting worse!

Good thing I'd taken my chicken off when it started. Or we'd have had no dinner. Except for the bread.


I was cooking chicken, legs and thighs, on the bbq. I had all 4 burners on, not because I needed the flames but because I was creating an oven. I'd grilled the chicken pieces on a high heat, to get my grill marks, and then had lowered the temperature on the two middle burners to low, but left the outside ones to medium, and was cooking the chicken slowly. When I was ready to start basting with sauce, I put a double layer of tin foil on the grill and placed the chicken on the foil, before I added even a drop of sauce. I wanted the sauce to get sticky, not to burn.

Since I didn't want the chicken to stick too much to the foil, I was keeping a pretty close eye on things, so I noticed that there was alot of flaming going on at the back half of the bbq, in a spot where nothing had flared up before, and where there was nothing over top of the flames. Just to be sure, I turned down the heat some more and moved the foil closer to the edge. Just to be sure.

Well, the flaming started getting worse, and spreading. Not from the burners, from something else on the bottom.

Now I will admit, the bottom tray of my bbq was not pristine, but it wasn't a huge mess either. I had scrubbed down my bbq in the fall before I shut it down and moved it into the garage prior to our move. It has been used maybe 8 times since we moved, so it hasn't had a chance to have a huge build up of gunk in the bottom.

Getting nervous, I turned the gas off entirely, removed the chicken and moved the foil as far away from the flames as possible - by then I had to, the foil was starting to light on fire and burn! How hot does fire have to be to make tin foil burn?

Closing the lid, with no gas, did not seem to make a difference, the flames were, again, just getting worse and worse. And higher.

So I had to take out the fire extinguisher.

Can you use a bbq once you've used a fire extinguisher on the burners? After a very good scrub, that is.


On the bright side, my children were across the street playing with a friend, so they never saw the flames, and were no where near when the extinguisher came out.

I think I will be without a bbq for the rest of the year. (Sigh.....)