Thursday, November 19, 2009

Learning How to Cook


(don't know where  the idea for this post came from, maybe from Debbie at In His Pasture, her post about the biscuits brought this to mind...)

Imagine if you will about 26 years ago, a young wife and mother, in her first home.  She and her young husband have scrimped and saved and done without, and finally put a down payment on a tiny but new home.  She is so proud of her little house. It's small, but new, and she got to pick out the colors, the carpet, the flooring, the wallpaper and paint. They bought it at just the right stage. It's a pretty little house - 3 little bedrooms, 2 little bathrooms, a little kitchen, a little living room, and a little utility room.  She has a new washer and dryer, a new queen size mattress set and she even found some garage sale bunk beds for her little son's room.  She is expecting baby #2.  She's planted some flowers and some tiny shrubs in the front flower bed, and her husband has put together a little swingset in the back yard and a little sandbox for their little boy to play in.

For their Christmas present that year, the young wife's in-laws have bought them a new-fangled contraption for the kitchen - a microwave oven!  She is so proud!  They've been on the market for a little while, but she knew nothing about them.  She was so excited to begin using her microwave because she knew now she was a thoroughly modern housewife. 

She planned a wonderful dinner one evening for her husband who worked hard all day.  He came in about 5:30 and sat down to watch the news on their little TV set and hold their little boy in his lap.  The young wife was so content in her little kitchen and feeling all Susie-homemaker-ish and everything was perfect in her world.  She needed some boiled eggs for what she was preparing for dinner and she thought to herself, 'well, it would be so much faster and more efficient if I give my new microwave a try and boil my eggs in it!'

So, she placed a couple of eggs in a little dish in the microwave and set the timer.  Then she went back to work on her meal preparation smiling to herself.

BAM!!!!!

She practically jumped out of her skin and screamed like she'd been shot!  Her husband came running into the little kitchen yelling, "what happened????"  There she was holding her hands over her little ears with a horrified look on her face.  There was fragments of EGG all over her, all over the little floor, all over the little walls, all over the ceiling, all inside the microwave!!!

She burst into tears!  The egg explosion had blown the door open to the microwave and had blown the eggs to kingdom come and back again!  What a mess!  Their little boy stood there looking dumbfounded.  Then, her dear sweet little husband took her shoulders in his hands and guided her out of the kitchen.  She sobbed into his neck, and he put his arms around her trying to keep from laughing.  "It's NOT funny!" she said between her sniveling and snubbing.  "I know, honey, it's not," he smiled. "Don't worry about it. I'll clean it up."  And he did!

I found pieces of egg in places that I never knew it went when we got ready to move to another house 5 years later....