Burners Replaced with Afterburners

Have you ever seen the movie Top Gun? Honestly, I haven't seen it in a while, but I remember that it showed a few jet-fighters taking off, with their afterburners lighting up and launching the aircraft into the sky. I was recently reminded of this part of the movie after using my repaired cooking range. The flame on the burners was really weak, so I complained to the school, and they got it 'fixed'. And by 'fixed,' I mean cranked up to eleven. I swear to almighty Zeus, the flame is a bright green when I turn it on high.

For the first meal I cooked up some snow peas with eggplant and then pork with black tree fungus (it tastes better than it sounds). I started the meal by burning the garlic to a deep, cancerous brown, followed by a hasty scrape onto the serving platter. Although oil got everywhere, I continued cooking.

I threw in the snow peas, and they died upon impact. A few moments later, the entire bottom of the pan became engulfed in flames, which quickly spread to the snow peas (poor things...). By the time I pulled the pan off the portal to Hell, the flame had shot up about two and a half feet! I swear, I thought that it was trying to escape out the exhaust fan.

After that debacle, I started on the black tree fungus for the second dish. All was going well until about a minute into the frying, when the fungi started exploding like popcorn! Fungus was flying all over the kitchen, rocketing from the wok at an alarming rate! By the time I was done with the stuff, half of it was on the floor.

Afterwards, all of the adrenaline in my system made it hard to use my chopsticks. On the plus side, it boils water lickety-split, so dumplings and tea are now that much easier to make...

Cullen