Today I was officially rescued by firemen, I guess

You've heard about the fire alarms.  You've heard about my cooking going awry.  Prepare yourselves: today's post will COMBINE these awesome themes in the Emily+Matt narrative.

So, tonight was supposed to be dinner with the freshmen night.  Most of the freshmen in our entry (9 total) were even rsvped to show up.  I decided to hazard some homestyle macaroni and cheese (mom's famous and beloved recipe) from the Kitchen Master's Guide--maybe third time's a charm?  Um, turns out, no.


Matt came home early while I was still making the roux.  I don't know how many of you have made roux, but the roux for the mac and cheese takes FOREVER and requires constant stirring, heat, and patience.  So I've been stirring and stirring and slooooooooowly adding milk for like half an hour, I'm *so close* to the end of making this sauce, when suddenly...

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. Attention please.  The sound you have just heard indicates and emergency in this complex.

Well, rats.  If I leave for this stupid fire alarm my sauce will be ruined and I'll have to start ALL OVER and get more butter from somewhere and God knows what else.  We've had SO MANY fire alarms.  Argh.  So Matt and I decide screw it, I'll just stay here and finish this sauce.  He closes all our curtains so no one will bust me skipping out on the alarm (which a lot of people do, fyi--we had 3 students admit to not getting out of bed during the alarms between 2 and 5 am).

So there I am, stirring and stirring and stirring and stirring and the alarm is blaring for a while.  The sauce finally has all the milk and is starting to thicken up again when I hear pounding on my door.  I freeze, hoping no one will sense my presence, figuring the firemen must knock on all the doors to make sure everybody's out.  A few moments later, they pound again.  Well, shoot, they must know I'm in here.  But hey, my sauce is done now!  So I turn off the oven and the stove and sheepishly open the door.

There are four firemen standing in our lounge.  I look right past them at the HUGE billowing white cloud in the front of the building I can see through the lounge windows.  Oh, crap.

The firemen were super nice about me not evacuating when I was supposed to (God knows THEY know about our dozens of false alarms these last few weeks) and reminded me not to forget my shoes on my way out.

So it turns out that the afternoon's flash storm had let a lot of cold rain into a large construction hole right outside our building, which had somehow caused a pipe full of hot water to burst in the basement.  So there was an actual legit emergency, nothing immediately dire but definitely evacuation-worthy.  When I got outside I made sure to berate my husband for not calling me, but to be fair he was caught in a conversation with one of our housemasters (our bosses) and so didn't want to get us both in trouble--plus there was no immediate danger (as evidenced by the firemen calmly knocking on my door and remembering my shoes).

This is what it looked like outside:

 

A Steamy Situation

We wound up being exiled from the building for over 2 hours.  The Dean of Students decreed that all MacGregor residents could get a free dinner at one of the nearby dining courts, so we got to experience MIT dining (okay, but not nearly as good as Earhart).  We went with a random group of our students, so that was fun.

But I know you're in breathless suspense--Emily, what happened to your roux and the mac and cheese??!  Well, the roux turned out just fine (thank goodness I stayed those extra 10 minutes during the alarm!).  I mixed up the mac and cheese and put it in the fridge.  It is awaiting the inevitable baking.  I went ahead and fried up the chicken I was going to make for dinner tonight and refrigerated that too.  We rescheduled the dinner for tomorrow evening, which seems to work for most of our freshmen--we're doing it early enough that they will still have plenty of time to get to whatever fun things they had planned for their friday nights.

But is the mac and cheese really saved?  I guess we won't know until we try to eat it tomorrow....

Moral of the story: the ONE TIME you don't leave during a fire alarm, there's definitely actually going to be an emergency.  At least if you're me.

Stay cool,
Emily