"J. Clarke" wrote:
Another lesson--if you run water into hot steel or aluminum pan sometimes
the bottom will develop a curvature and the pan won't sit flat anymore.

With the advent of the internet comes a number of pans put on the stove and
left unattended for "just a minute" while email is checked, et cetera. In
theory, this works fine; in practice, it leads to burnt pans. After a few
of these, I discovered that cold water in the hot pan would reduce the
amount of discoloration and resultant lack of smoothness in the pan.

Of course, the cold water in hot pan technique had quite unexpected results
on a copper bottom SS pan:
http://66.36.231.224/~jonnycat/Ecko.jpg

Jon