Cooking Can Be Dangerous

By Lynn Rebuck –

One typical evening, while attempting to cook dinner, I accidentally ignited the oil in the deep fat fryer, grated my knuckles into the carrot salad, and melted part of my thumb onto the 450-degree baking dish.  With both hands bandaged, I scrawled a message in crayon on a grocery receipt and tacked it up over my stove.  It has become my kitchen motto: “Cooking Can Be Dangerous.”

My cooking mishaps were so frequent I became a regular on “Rescue 911.”
I started so many kitchen fires that my husband slipped a fire extinguisher into my spice rack.

On my recipe cards, I list the ingredients, cooking instructions, and known antidotes.

My husband went on a liquid protein diet just so he would have two meals a day that weren’t burned.

One night after dinner he complained that the meal portions were too small.  “Oh, stop complaining,” I said.  “The cake’s almost done in the Easy-Bake oven.”

I never needed a dinner bell.  When the smoke alarm went off, the children faithfully came running chorusing “Dinner’s ready!” (I was always worried that if it went off in the middle of the night they would pad out in their footed pajamas and head right to their seats at the kitchen table).

I can cook some things fairly well.  I do alright with food that has been previously cooked and frozen.  I was very adept at boil ‘n’ bag.  I enjoy microwave cooking: it burns everything so much faster.

What I’d really like are fool-proof foods.  Like a turkey that not only has a button that pops up when it’s done but one that actually gets out of the oven itself when it’s cooked.  I need silicone-coated rice that is guaranteed not to stick together.  And I need pies that have flame-retardant crusts.

If you ask me, Rachel Ray is a better magician than David Blaine.  I marvel at her sleight of hand.  At the end of her show, she shows off a colorful, completed, nutritionally-balanced meal created in only 30 minutes.  It takes me that long to open one up of those plastic vegetable bags in the produce aisle.  I am waiting for the cable show that exposes her culinary secrets. I think she has a mini-food processor up her sleeve.
Before I could start cooking this afternoon, I had to take down the yellow plastic “Caution,” tape that some joker put up around my kitchen.  Now if I can find my hard hat and steel-toed boots, I’ll go start dinner. 

Lynn Rebuck is an award-winning humor columnist whose weekly column appears in print and online.  She is a popular speaker and Christian comedian. Visit her website www.LynnRebuck.com for more humor columns and videos. © 2010 Lynn Rebuck March 2010 Limited license use by www.TheChristianPulse.com