Martha Stewart, I am not.

On Sunday I made a box of red beans and rice (cue my mother groaning, as she makes this stuff from fresh ingredients, not from Zatarain's). It takes 25 minutes to cook, so I sprinted to the grocery store thinking I would be perfect on timing. Well. Ran in after 30 minutes to find the rice slightly burned and the kitchen a tad smoky (sorry, Charlie!). So not wanting the smoke alarm to go off, I ran the pot outside to the balcony. Charlie started barking at me, so I set the pot down to play with her for a few minutes - figured the stuff needed time to cool anyway. Perhaps I failed to mention that I set the pot down on one of the plastic wicker chairs that the owners of the apartment left for me to use. Annnnnd the pot was totally melted to the chair. Like I could pick the chair up by lifting the handle of the pot. Oops. Somehow peeled the pot from the chair, but now there's a lovely circle of melted mess on the chair - plus melted plastic on the bottom of the pot, which I assume would start a fire so I had to throw it away. And as I mentioned before, the meal itself was burned - so a giant FAIL all around.

This photo looks creepy, but you get the gist of the circle of doom on the chair. Sigh.