Tonight, my wife burned dinner. Well, perhaps “burned” is not the appropriate word.
The dinner was supposed to be a wheel of brie, surrounded by puff pastry, and topped with caramelized bacon and maple syrup. It can be served with crackers or eaten from the puff pastry. It’s quite delicious and not expensive to make. The most expensive part is the maple syrup because you have to use real maple and not that stuff that comes from a bottle that looks like a plump old woman with a screw cap for a hat.
My wife forgot to pinch all of the puff pastry closed and the maple syrup leaked out like a New England volcano — if New England had volcanoes. They don’t, I know, but use your imagination.
Maple syrup spewed from the open top of the puff pastry and hardened, sealing the mostly uncooked puff pastry to the pan, leaving the brie a congealed blob visible from a gaping maple-encrusted gash from the top of the pastry.
As modern art, it was magnificent. As dinner, however, it was not in the cards for me.
I have discovered that, left unattended in an oven, authentic maple syrup will harden into a resin that is spatula-proof, fork-proof, and as I was tempted to find out, bulletproof. This mound of culinary disaster just wasn’t coming off the pan.
Not only had she forgotten to pinch all the pastry, my wife admitted, she had forgotten to put foil on the pan. Supposedly, this was a non-stick pan. We realized that this was not the case. This was definitely a stick pan. A stick with the force never before seen in nature pan. I will not mention the manufacturer’s name of said pan, but I am telling you, they are getting a rather stern letter in the mail. Non-stick should mean non-stick, unless maple syrup has some chemical bonding agent in it that I and most of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts are not aware of. It’s probably something Canada thought of. They are pretty smart up there and always like to laugh at us anyway.
For about 30 minutes, we chipped away at the maple resin which had turned a ghastly color and seemed to harden more as we chipped away at it. Using simple utensils was not working so I suggested something from the tool box we keep under the kitchen counter. My wife put the kibosh on that because she said I would mar the non-stick finish on the pan. My argument was the non-stick finish really wasn’t doing its job because we had a definite-stick emergency on our hands at the moment. Not only was the company hearing from me in the morning, that genius who came up with Teflon in the first place was gonna get a talking-to as well. I put the chisel and hammer away at my wife’s request.
Our kitchen smells like the entire state of Vermont has caught fire. It’s maple-y. It’s burn-y. Imagine pancakes or French toast. In Hell.
My wife has the kitchen window open and the guy next door came over and asked if we were making pancakes. We told him of our ordeal and he said he had a simple fix. Reheat the pan, the syrup would soften, and we could take the mess off the pan. This did not work. The melted syrup spread and hardened after we took the pan out of the oven and set it on the counter. I went back for the chisel and hammer. My wife and I hacked at it for a little while and finally gave up. We went out for a cheap dinner at the mall.
I have a question, though? Does a baking pan go in the trash or the recyclables?
Joe Weaver, a native of Baltimore, is a husband, father, pawnbroker and gun collector. From his home in New Bern, he writes on the lighter side of family life.
