"I think our oven is on fire."

Yes, these words came out of Brady's mouth very calmly one night while we were cooking stuffed peppers for dinner. "I noticed that," was my just as equally calm response. We immediately shut off the valve for our propane tank and watched the flame that you could only see in the reflection in the back of the oven disappear. It was a close one. But we were scratching our heads trying to figure out what the eff we missed to cause this. And then it came to us like a ton of bricks...

Our oven wrapped in plastic.

Since we have installed our shittily put together oven (once we disassembled most of it, then fully put it together correctly and installed it, the oven lost a lot of it's original shittiness) there has been a sticker located on the stovetop under the burners informing us in ALL CAPS to remove the plastic before use. When reading this sticker for not only the first but the 1,000th time, we would always look at each other and say, "what plastic are they talking about!?!" We assumed, and we all know what happens when you assume something, that they, the manufacturer, were referring to the pounds of plastic that was wrapped around every component on the wobbly, crooked, extremely expensive piece of cooking equipment we finally decided to purchase. Well, on this particular night we finally realized that the packaging plastic was NOT the plastic the sticker was referring to. We learned the hard way that WE were the idiots the label was warning us about. We are the idiots who left the thin and perfectly coated piece of WHITE PLASTIC that was covering the bottom of the stove but looked like a normal stove top since it was THAT perfectly smooth and the edges were perfect, UGH! 

The clear as day warning label

I still cannot believe we were not able to figure out that our beautiful stainless steel oven and stove combo was lined with a gaudy piece of WHITE PLASTIC that looked like a sore thumb but we just accepted it for being a part of the (shitty) oven. We didn't even try to pull it up. If we did we would have found the beautiful stainless steel stove top awaiting to be uncovered. But no, for weeks we cooked and heated up this piece of plastic that I'm sure coated our food that we willingly ate while we enjoyed our beautiful home cooked meals. Honestly I am writing this entire post with a huge grin while constantly shaking my head and laughing secretly to myself in disbelief. Yes, even after 2 weeks of this incident, I am still in disbelief. 

The warning label - doesn't it look like
that white is supposed to be there?!

Back to our fire... We see this big yellow/orange flame coming from the back of the oven but when you looked at the front all you saw was the normal blue flame that was in both the broiler and burners. It took about a minute for us to put it all together but when we did we came to the same conclusion at the exact same time. I believe our non-reactive behavior was us not being surprised to see what was happening in front of us and our disappointment with ourselves on why we didn't figure this out until that moment. 

Well, this helped us answer a few questions we were having with the oven like, why is it already becoming tarnished after a couple uses. Why, because we were burning plastic under our beautiful stainless grates. Chalk it up to living and learning. Seriously, NEVER a dull moment with the two of us on a boat!

Before the fire

After the fire