Daily Prompt
Scorched
Write a new post in response to today’s one-word prompt
Scorched Earth
Ever since wars first started there has been a scorched-earth policy. The military powers plan is to leave nothing behind that the enemy may find useful and that would help them or sustain them in any way. This included water supplies, food supplies, power grids, anything that the enemy population could use. At the Geneva Conventions of 1977, papers were signed to help stop the scorched-earth policy. It would be awful hard for NATO forces to enforce any type of scorched-earth policy. If there are any future wars, the scorching no doubt will be very severe, with mushroom clouds circling the globe afterwards
I have walked around in Death Valley as a visitor and got a good sense of what scorched-earth is from the rays of the scorching sun bearing down on it. Any life that can survive in Death Valley California has the worlds best survival instincts. Only tough critters survive in a place that resembles a scorched frying pan.
A scorched frying pan is still something that gets my temper boiling, until it is scorched and dry. I have become very familiar with scorched quick cooking pans. A watched pot never boils, just walk away for a second! With gas turn the flame down, the boiling stops. With electric turn the temperature knob down, it still glows red until it boils all over. My wife never cooked with electricity and she seems determined that she will not learn how to do it properly. The word properly, is possibly impossible when you’re cooking on an electric stove.
To save the homemakers from themselves No stick cookware was developed from some space-age material, your eggs and bacon or whatever your cooking will slide right out of the pan like magic. Slide right onto your plate, slick and clean, as a picture of a breakfast set up at a restaurant. There is only one problem with the new non-stick cookware on the electric range, not made for hot temperatures. Just forget to watch your temperature one time and that no stick surface has become a sick, sticky surface, you will never again see an egg slide from that pan. If you don’t buy a new pan you will start having black eggs and bacon or black fried potatoes or black whatever you put in it. Next weeks menu boiled eggs, topped with bacon bits, or oatmeal.
It shouldn’t be that hard to cook with electric ranges but you have to be right there. Johnny on the spot, one hand on the control knob and both eyes on the pan and the burner. When you turn that burner on, it starts to turn red, your no doubt already in big trouble, it cools down slowly. If you leave a burner hot with no pan on it, best leave a CAUTION HOT BURNER warning sign on it.
We have been living here for over three years now. I have lost track of how many pans have gone up in a cloud of black smoke or how many times I pulled the circuit breaker on the smoke detector. It seems like it’s impossible to learn to cook on an electric stove after cooking with gas all your life. We seem to have accepted that fact anyhow. I don’t order my eggs and bacon any special way, I know exactly how they’re going to look on the plate when they get in front of me I will have blackened bacon and eggs again. Blackened or scorched food is said to contain cancer-causing carcinogens but I suppose at this late date we can’t consume that much cancerous carbons.
My Mixed Blog 
Haha — I’ve cooked with electricity for most of my life, and I far prefer it to gas. And having lived in Southern California most of my life, I’ve associated scorched earth not with wars, but with wildfires. Driving through the countryside, it’s very easy to identify “burn areas,” from the burned vegetation with the new growing up in its midst. An interesting post — thank you!
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