I was around 10 years old, maybe younger, and I decided I wanted to cook.  As I understood it, cooking in its entirety involved putting ingredients into a pan and heating it on the stove until you were ready to eat.  I only wanted to cook an egg that I could put on toast. Piece of cake.  There was a warm pan on the stove, and I cracked an egg into it and turned on the gas burner.  It turns out that the pan in question had recently been used to cook bacon, with a healthy layer of grease left to cool before being poured out.

I will never forget how big the flames looked coming out of the pan. It was like fireworks, and while a part of me was pretty sure that this wasn’t usually how cooking went, another part of me was transfixed by the coolness of what I’d just created.

My brother wandered through the kitchen at this point, saw the fire and luckily was much more interested in keeping our wooden house from burning down than watching a colourful light show.  He put out the grease fire in the sink and was well.  It was nearly a decade before I tried again in earnest.

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This post was submitted by Ed.

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