You know, this only happens when other people are coming to dinner

When Brian and I first moved in together, we spent several weekends driving to yard sales all over Santa Cruz in order to furnish our little house. At one we found a crock pot for fifty cents. It was dark orange, all one piece, and missing its lid, but hey, it was fifty cents, why wouldn't we take that home? It served us well for more than seven years (a dinner plate worked fine as a lid), but this fall I was in Target and spotted a crock pot. It was red, you could take out the bowl to clean it more easily, and it was $19.99. I decided I was a grown up who needed a crock pot that wasn't older than she was and put it in my basket.

Tonight my friend Cyndi and her little boy were coming over for dinner, so in the morning I put some spaghetti sauce together to simmer all day long in the crock pot. We spent the afternoon at the park, and when we came back to the house I put water on to boil for the pasta, and checked my sauce. It seemed a little thin, so I took the lid off to see if I couldn't thicken it up a bit. When Brian came home and showered and hung out in the kitchen with Cyndi and me. Suddenly he got a funny look on his face and leaned over the stove, studying the crock pot lid where I'd set it. I watched him as he picked the lid up.

And then it exploded.

It turned out that I had put the pot of water on the back burner but turned the front one to high, and then I set the glass crock pot lid on that hot burner. The glass had looked funny somehow, and that was what caught Brian's attention. I'm just glad that it exploded right after he picked it up, rather than have had a horrible accident by having it happen when he'd brought it closer to his face for examination. Brian cleaned up the mess while Cyndi and I occupied the kiddos. And then we ordered pizza, because, although we couldn't see any glass in the uncovered spaghetti sauce, we didn't want to find out the hard way.

Anyhow, that's twice in about six months that I've used heat to explode glass. I think my resolution for 2009 will be to not explode glass all over the kitchen while I'm cooking.