I Was Attacked by a Py(rannosaurus)rex – and Lived!

 

Thanks to those spoilsports in the infectious disease community who do not want to see us all sicken and die, I am prepared for an intimate little Thanksgiving dinner for two tomorrow, rather than the food orgy for 50 we usually attend. I was not prepared for thermal shock.

I was OK with the home-alone scenario until I saw a photo of Penelope being read to in the lap of her Colorado grandma. Penelope is my granddaughter, recently promoted from World’s Cutest Baby to World’s Cutest Toddler. We will probably Zoom with Penelope (and, of course, her parents) sometime tomorrow, just as we will probably Zoom with all the kids and many of our friends and sibs throughout the holiday weekend.

But when everyone’s all Zoomed out, it’ll be just us again, Ami and Papi, as Penelope calls us. We’re expecting to have a good time because we always have a good time when we put on aprons and tunes and trash the kitchen (I’m a very sloppy chef). 

We’ll have a shot of tsipouro to get us in the right mood. We’ll roast the turkey — thighs only — in almond mole sauce just to, you know, do something crazy. More traditionally, we’ll mash potatoes, bake pumpkin pie and roast brussels sprouts. 

We’ll clean up most of the mess before dinner because that’s what we think it means to be grownups. We’ll dress up. We’ll clink our wine glasses to our great good fortune (health, love, income, roof over our heads, etc.), to all those we cannot be with this year and hope to be with next year, and to Joe and Kamala, may they preside and vice-preside in ways that do us good and do us proud.

* * *

One of the keys to a happy Thanksgiving, the culinary experts say, is to prepare parts of the meal in advance. So it was that on Monday afternoon I assembled flour, water, salt and yeast into a ball of dough. Many home bakers have doubtless graduated from the Sullivan Street Bakery no-knead recipe that broke the Internet when the New York Times published it in 2006. I’m still on training wheels. 

The recipe calls for baking a round loaf in a cast-iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic pot. I thought I used an aluminum pot the last time I tried my hand at homemade bread, but I wasn’t sure and we worried that at 450 degrees, the handles, made from a hard substance mined on the planet Zortron, would melt. So I switched to a Pyrex bowl. 

The recipe specifically mentioned Pyrex, right? And everyone knows that the great virtue of Pyrex is that it’s oven-safe. So, following the recipe, I heated the bowl for half an hour, set it on top of the stove, and flopped the dough into it. 

The bowl exploded. 

Shards and slivers littered the kitchen. The ball of dough, no longer contained, oozed, lava-like, down the oven door. We had to let it because there was no way to get at it without touching the glass, which was still too hot to handle. Plus, a series of mini-explosions, like earthquake aftershocks, kept us at bay.

While we waited, we researched. Remember New Coke and Old Coke? Remember some old-timer telling you they don’t make ‘em like they used to? Apparently, there’s old Pyrex and there’s new Pyrex. Old Pyrex, made by Corning a couple of hours north of us in New York’s Southern Tier, could take the heat. New Pyrex, made by some spinoff company, cannot. 

My explosion wasn’t a fluke, as this headline in Consumer Reports shows: “Why Pyrex Bowls ‘Explode.’”  The answer: thermal shock.

“When a Pyrex bowl is heated or cooled rapidly,” CR explained, “different parts of the bowl expand or contract by different amounts, causing stress. If the stress is too extreme, the bowl’s structure will fail, causing a spectacular shattering effect.”

Yup. CR notes that there’s no mention of this dangerous tendency on the Pyrex website. Etched onto the bowl itself were the words “Microwave Safe. No Broiler. No Stovetop.” It didn’t say,  “No Oven.”

It should.

It wasn’t just the stress on the glass that was extreme. There were my thermally shocked nerves. I got out the pricey bottle of Scotch that I’d been saving for a special occasion, deciding that this was it. Then I cleaned up the mess and went up to bed. 

I had just nodded off when I heard my beloved’s voice from below stairs. 

“I found a Dutch oven,” she told me. “It’ll be here Friday.”  

That gave me four days to regain my composure. And I had gotten off easy. One exploding Pyrex victim “suffered burns and deep cuts to her feet.” The Consumer Affairs website has hundreds of such stories. 

More entertaining than reading about the explosions is watching them. If you burn out on football’s tripleheader tomorrow, search YouTube for  “Pyrex explosions.” Unlike interacting with friends and relations, thermal shock is best experienced on screen.