Kitchen Klutz!

I would love to someday be considered a gourmet cook.  But sometimes I wonder if it skipped me to be a SAFE cook!  Before I got married, I lived at home with family and had an expert Grandma and mom cook that I should have definately soaked up more advice from and time with in the kitchen.  But since that didn't happen for one reason or another (school, relationship, having FUN out of the house), I ended up starting to cook a few years into my relationship with Dwight.  I'd make Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas dinner, and occasional recipes.  Then after marriage, being on my own forced me to try it all.   I've realized that even though my food comes out good, there's often some mistakes or general klutziness that happens before the finished product. 

Of course, the standard set-the-fire-alarm off has happened to many.  But I wonder if any of you have left your stove burner ever so slightly on, so that gas leaks out?  Mmm-hmm, I'm guilty.  The scariest part of that incident is that I returned home from work around 5:00 pm the NEXT day, to realize my whole apartment smelled like gas and that we'd slept with the burner slightly on.  SCARY!  After a panicky call to my husband at his work, I aired out the place and went promply to Home Depot to buy a gas detector.  Of course I got teased with the "you tried to kill us!!" from my husband, but he was so calm and sweet about it.  Phew! So this may explain my current OCD with checking all of my burners every night. 

Significant kitchen mishap #2:  I learned real quick that potato peels and garbage disposals are NOT friends.  I peeled enough potatos to make a large pyrex baking dish of cubed potatos with sausage.  One of my favorite, delicious dishes and so easy to make.  Except that I peeled TONS of potatos and figured, "whatever, gotta get rid of 'um somehow," and proceeded to turn on my garbage disposal only to make a gross pond of brownish water in my sink.  This gave me anxiety through the roof, because we were moving from our aparment in three weeks and the last thing I wanted was a broken garbage disposal or a plumber bill.  Thank goodness for google and my husband--I learned from google that it is a plumber's nightmare and I learned from my husband that I should tell everyone to marry a handyman!  Gahhh! Lesson learned.

However, my most scary and ridiculously idiotic mishap came after we just moved into our new rental house.  We now have the old school coil electric stove, instead of the gas burners that almost snuffed us out in our old apartment (!!).  And we also have no microwave.  This combination proved fatal to my awesome large pyrex mixing bowl.  I was mixing together a quick batch of homemade chocolate-chip cookies to bring to my parents' for lunch, and when it came time to add butter, I realized it wasn't soft enough.  So, foregoing logical thought, I dropped a stick of butter into my pyrex mixing bowl, cranked the coils up to HIGH, and figured, "oh it'll just take a sec to melt this butter down a bit."  I placed the pyrex on the stovetop, and within what felt like seconds of me turning away from the stove, I heard a POP!! and turned around to see that my pyrex was completely blown to shards, and butter was promptly melting on the stovetop. 

*Sigh.*

The worst part of the ordeal was not losing my pyrex, or having my husband stifle laughter because I was very emotionally disturbed by my mistake.  It was leaving the lid to a delicious homemade pot of soup off to let it cool. 

The soup was right next to the pyrex.  Yup, go figure.  The soup had to be thrown away because the shards were small in some spots and I cut myself just trying to clean them up. 

At least we'd already eaten big bowls of the soup for dinner that night before I decided to blow glass up at random!

Well, on a positive note, I've taken these random "lessons" to heart and these particular mistakes won't be repeated.  I've decided to not let my klutziness and general airheaded demeanor not get in the way of my love for food and cooking.  Let's just hope these adventures diminish in frequency over time!

:-)