Whoops

A couple of months ago, I finally got a wok. After my cooking class in China, I really wanted to start using one, and cooking Chinese food in my little fry pan just isn't the same.

Today, in light of the Chinese New Year, I decided to have Chinese for dinner, and so I decided it was finally time to season my wok. For those of you that don't know, if you have a carbon steel wok, you have to "season" it. Old woks get really dark, because the oils and flavors have built up over time (supposedly, this is a really good thing).

Everything was going well, until after two turns of adding oil I decided to turn up the heat to kind of "sear" the oil in, as one particular site suggested. This wouldn't have been a problem, except for the fact that the wok was SO hot that when I touched a paper towel to it, to spread some oil around, the towel started to smoke. I quickly took it away, but didn't realize bits of the towel had apparently come off into the wok. So when I added a bit of oil from the bottle, the inside of the wok caught fire.

Fortunately, the fire went out on its own. I just hope there's no damage to the wok. I'd hate for tonight's stir-fried vegetables to taste like paper towel.

Oh well, at least I know my smoke alarms work....