Scalding Heat

The other day I went to have iftar at a sister's house in London with a bunch of other sisters. My friends and I decided that we want to make murtabak, a type of Malaysian stuffed pancake (as how Wikipedia described it lol). After much considerations, we thought of making the fillings beforehand and cook them at that sister's house so we can save time and the murtabak can be eaten as fresh as possible.

Initially, everything went well. Well, quite. Londoners have a comparatively smaller house than non-Londoners hence the appliances that they fill up their house with are fairly limited. The sister didn't have a large pan for us to fry the ready-to-be-cooked murtabaks so we had to fry them one at a time. It took a while but we managed.

Running simultaneously in the kitchen (or the living room, I should say) were the preparations for the main dishes and whatnot. One of the things that were going on was two large rice cookers, cooking 10 (or more) cups of tomato rice. Everything was manageable until suddenly one of the rice cookers went out and caused a short circuit to the power plugs of the whole house. The lights and the electrical stove were fine though. Just the power sockets. Several attempts were done to fix it but all came to a failure. We had to resort to cooking the rice manually on top of the hob.

There were 4 hobs on the stove, with one not working so well. Now the rice occupied a good two thirds of the whole thing. Since the main dishes were yet to finish, they had to stop the process of our cooking the murtabak since it's just a side dish and we already made enough to feed the people for iftar. So we stopped.

After iftar, before our maghrib prayer, our murtabaks were high on demand. What served were cleaned, and we had plenty of uncooked ones left. Someone came up with the idea of cooking them in the oven simply because unlike the hobs, the oven was available. The murtabaks needed to be cooked that very night anyway, otherwise it would be spoiled. And it seemed like a good idea since we could cook several in one go and we didn't have to attend it the whole time. So we did just that.

It didn't turn out as how murtabak should be, of course. It looked more like a stuffed pastry than a stuffed pancake. We called it "murtabak puff". Nevertheless, they were still good in taste and by the time of suhoor, all of them were wiped off the plate.

What an actual murtabak look like

What our murtabak puff looked like

One of the incidents whilst handling the puffs in and out of the oven was that the tip of my finger accidentally touched the oven tray. It was just for a fraction of a second but my skin suffered from minor burn. A similar incident happened to me again when yesterday, I was with my friend, baking a cake. This time, my skin went purplish red after a few hours.

I know I might sound like a spoiled kid never getting rough or even a scratch but no. I just find it weird for me to get burns a couple of times over the span of just a few days. I've always considered myself being sensible enough around hot objects since I never get burnt scars before (but scars from other activities, plenty). The effect it has on my skin (decolourisation, pain, etc) still dazed me a bit. I mean, that's just a tiny burn from a fraction of a second in contact with a hot object. I cannot imagine what Khabbab, one of the companions of Rasulullah had to face - when he declared that he became a Muslim, he was tortured (like many other early companions) and one of the most distinct tortures he had was to have his clothes taken off and dressed in iron armor and left on the ground in the middle of the city where the sun was in zenith and the ground was scorching hot.

And I can never imagine myself being in contact with burning fire, let alone living in the hellfire. Just the thought of being killed in a fire gives me chills. My skin can't even handle the heat of the world (not even the maximum of it. For goodness sake, it was just a 170 degree oven temperature). Nauzubillah, may Allah protect us from anything that would lead us to be thrown into Jahannam and never allow the flames of Hellfire touch our skin.