Where There is Smoke… There is Fire

I am not a big meat eater, but hubby loves steaks and beef. So, he bought a big piece of beef tenderloin. Since I really love this guy, I do things that will make him happy, so I thawed the beef for dinner.

Ordinarily, I would have asked him to grill the beef, but he was busy teaching his online class. As mentioned, I’m not a big meat eater and since I limit the amount of beef in our diet, I have to look up preparation instructions, and I found a great recipe for making a sauce for basting the beef in the broiler.

I don’t know how other cooks do it, but I have no way of knowing when beef is done, so I enlisted the help of a meat thermometer that measures rare, medium, and well done. I know you beef eaters are familiar with these thermometers. The closest I ever came to this type of device was the Purdue turkey red popup button.

I prepped the sauce, set the oven on broil, placed meat on broiler pan, salted said meat, set timer for 2 minutes and inserted meat in broiler. The recipe did not address thickness of meat, it just instructed to turn meat every 2 minutes. After 4 minutes, I recognized that a 2-inch thick piece of meat will need to cook a little longer than a traditional size steak. So, I inserted the thermometer and began to turn every 3 minutes.

As instructed, after 6 minutes, I began basting the beef. You cook’s out there know that the basting juice overflowed onto the foil and that’s okay, but it began to smoke. Apparently, the folks at Frigidaire knew that cooks sometimes get distracted and don’t carefully watch their food, so they build in safeguards that detect smoke, heat, and fire.

Let it be known that I was faithfully watching the stove as smoke began to come up through the burners on top of the stove.  When I opened the oven door to baste, more smoke poured out, but the thermostat showed that the meat wasn’t done yet.

Frigidaire also recognized that cooks might not understand that where there is smoke…. there is fire. So to get my attention, the stove started a loud beeping noise and displayed a code F 10 on the screen. At this point, hubby had arrived in the kitchen to see what was causing all the smoke. We opened the oven door and flames were shooting up from the basting sauce!!

As I stood there trying to figure out what to do, he immediately grabbed the hand-shaped potholders and pulled the pan from the oven. Instructed me to remove the meat while he took the flaming foil outside.

Several morals to this story…

… when it comes to beef… let him grill it

… where there is smoke… there is fire

… the F in the F10 code means fire

By the way… the meat was not burned and it was delicious