I baked a sweet potato in the toaster oven the other day. Lately I've been microwaving them, but this time I decided to bake it since I wasn't planning on using the toaster oven for anything else. I'd forgotten, apparently, that sweet potatoes leak out a lot of sugars while they're baking, which creates surprisingly large foamy blobs that char to black, and threaten to take over not only the entire toaster oven, but The World.

I should have taken a picture — this is a blog, after all — but you'll have to make do with a verbal description: it was Pure Evil.

The sweet potato came out fine, although the Finsters ignored it, as is their wont. But the toaster oven looked such a mess that we seriously considered replacing it. We're not the type of "Ugly American" that throws things out every time they get a little dirty. But really: Pure Evil. So we went to the store to look at the options.

That's when we remembered that most new appliances that have something to do with heat are made with PTFE, a.k.a. polytetrafluoroethylene or Teflon. And when heated "too high" — a temperature that has a surprisingly large range for scientific study — the resulting fumes are deadly to birds, and can cause flu-like symptoms in humans. You can read more about PTFE on Wikipedia, or any of your favorite search engines.

Some of the toaster ovens on the shelves were marked as having PTFE coatings, and some weren't. But to be safe, we decided against a new one. As it turns out, with a few hours of soaking, the toaster oven wasn't too hard to get clean. (Of course, when I say "clean" I mean "relatively free of the Blobs of Pure Evil and other large and mysterious food and food-like substances.") One less appliance goes into a dumpster. And the Finsters are much safer.

That is, until the Fill The Holes In The Ceiling Guy calls back to set up his schedule. Sigh.