Betty Crocker - Kiss My A$$!

A couple of nights ago I almost burned my house down by making rice. I was making some brown rice for the next night's dinner and DID check it several times and made sure there was always enough water in the pot. The heat, however, was too high and it caught. The pisser is, it caught while I was downstairs putting a load of laundry in the washer and I only noticed the smoke when I was coming up the stairs to the sound of my smoke alarm. I ran through the cloud of smoke and grabbed the offending pot to throw outside. On the way out, the burning pot touched my kitchen curtain and melted a nice hole in it. I put the pot down on the cedar bench outside not realizing that it would burn a black circle into the wood within seconds. I aired out the house as best as I could but the stench of burning field was there for good. It still stinks. The pot remains outside on the burnt bench waiting to be either cleaned out (Rich's suggestion) or tossed (my suggestion).

Another story that centres around the stove - last Monday we were all off for the Thanksgiving holiday and I thought it would be fun to make some cookies with Simon. I had bought those ready-made lazy-ass holiday sugar cookies from Pillsbury that are decked out with little pumpkins for Halloween . Everything started out picture perfect: Simon standing at the counter on a kitchen chair arranging the cookies on the sheets and having fun, being so proud and walking with his little pan and oven mitts to show Daddy. And then it came time to put them in the oven. My oven is a gas stainless steel beast that doesn't have a window on the door so you can't see inside it. When I slid in the cookies and closed the door, Simon pretty much concluded that I had taken his new toys away from him and put them out of sight. He was not pleased. What I thought would be a nice Mother/Son moment turned into a full tantrum meltdown on the kitchen floor. I tried explaining the physics of raw cookies and how they have to cook to become yummy and edible but this just didn't take. Fifteen minutes later when they were ready, he tasted one and didn't even like it in the end.

After these two episodes, it's been Kraft Dinner and cold cuts for dinner every night.