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A few days ago, I was talking about an expression with one of my students. He was telling me that he had been working on a project. But then he had new, more urgent things he needed to do. Therefore, the first project had to wait. But it was important to him to return to it. It was not complete. He was still thinking about it.
I said, “Oh, so you had to put it on the back burner.” He was confused. I explained that this was an expression in English. I asked him to imagine he was cooking several things at the same time. One item might be a delicious sauce. The sauce is on the front of the stove, closest to him. It’s not quite ready. However, there are other foods like meat and vegetables that need to be cooked quickly and constantly stirred. Therefore, it makes the most sense to move the sauce to the back of the stove since all it needs is time.
When you move something to the back burner, you don’t want to forget about it. You will probably even keep thinking about it, letting your ideas “simmer” while you handle more urgent things. But eventually, you definitely want to get back to that delicious sauce, or important project, on the back burner.
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