I’m not what you would call a gourmet chef, but if I ever ended up on some cooking battle show, I’d have to say my style is steeped in “Bachelor Cheffery.”

When I left home to go to college, I was forced to cook for myself for the first time.  Being of meager income, my meals mainly consisted of ramen, pasta, bulk frozen chicken breasts, cereal, eggs, and other simple staples.  I never really kept a lot of food around, because I hated going to the grocery store and would only get necessities for survival (i.e. beer).

However, like many single guys, I managed to accumulate an inordinate amount of condiments and spices.  I had more ketchups and mustards and barbecue sauces and dressings and such than you could shake a stick at, and my huge box of bulk dried spices would take that stick and beat you with it.  The bonus of this style of cooking was that you could take plain, boring items and make them interesting so you would actually want to eat them.  Ramen comes with those little flavor packets, but if you add a little szechuan sauce it became edible.  I became adroit at taking random ingredients that you would never think would go together and making food.

I put sliced brats in the stir fry, mac and cheese on the pizza, and basil and oregano on everything.  Hot sauce and salsa would go in the eggs, Hamburger Helper would help more than just hamburger, and ranch dressing was my best friend.

Occasionally, my cooking style has led to mishaps.  While usually this just results in making terrible, terrible food that no human without a cast-iron stomach should ingest, it has rarely resulted in kitchen destruction or anything catastrophic.

Except for the one time where I defied the laws of physics.

This was a day where I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired for lunch, so I took one of those bags of noodles with all the spices and stuff all in one and dumped it into a small pot of boiling water.  I know they say stir constantly, but seriously, I’m not going to stand there for three minutes and stir things.  So I walk away for a couple minutes, and when I come back, the pot of water is on fire.

Let me repeat:  the pot (a metal container) of water (a substance used to extinguish fires) is on fire (the opposite of water).

I sat there and stared at the flames shooting out of the water, thoroughly confused.  Was it something on top of the water that was burning? No, I didn’t add any oil, and it looked like the fire was coming OUT OF the bubbling water, not on top of it.

I called my roommate into the kitchen, and we both stared at the burning water for about a minute, trying in vain to determine what caused it.

In our wonderment, we forgot that smoke alarms are loud and annoying, so I took the pot off the burner.  When I dumped out the water, I found all the noodles had become stuck to the bottom of the pot.  Actually, “stuck” doesn’t accurately describe what happened to the noodles; they had morphed into a hardened adamantine lump which was welded to the bottom of the pot.

My only theory is that the noodles got stuck to the bottom of the pot, and as they were in direct contact with the metal, were able to heat up to the point where they could burst into flames.  When the water started boiling, a little air was able to get down to the superheated noodlekindling, and viola! we have fire!

Either that or God just wanted to see my face when he made water burn.