Undomestic Goddess

The following conversation actually took place. Truth be told, it took place a few times.

Guy at Bar: So do you cook?
Me [thinking]: Great. Another one on the hunt for a domestic trophy wife.
Me [speaking]: I can certainly find my way around a kitchen.
Guy at Bar: Do you have any specialties you’d like to make me some time?
Me [smiling]: Reservations. 

My punch line usually earns some laughs. I laugh the hardest because I know that no matter how much I practice in the kitchen, reservations will always be my best skill. I make a mean milkshake and hot fudge sundae thanks to my years working at the local Dairy Queen in high school (Not messing. Ask my sister.), but beyond that, I’m a bit culinary-challenged.

And I’m okay with that.

I can follow recipes, and I’m fairly good at doing what I’m told when I have a more experienced chef in the kitchen with me, but the extent of my creativity reached its limit the other day when I put a sprinkling of Mrs. Dash in my scrambled eggs.

So you can imagine how I was entirely unsurprised tonight when in my latest attempt to make something other than frozen pizza with salad, the fire alarm went off.

I decided that tonight, I wasn’t going to have any old salad. I wanted chicken in it, and I wanted it to taste good, so I marinated the chicken in a mix of various dressings I found in my fridge. My mom used to do this when I was younger, so why shouldn’t it work for me? When the chicken was ready, I put it in the oven (which I remembered to pre-heat – go me!) and set the timer to 25 minutes. This gave me 25 glorious minutes to finish cleaning the dishes in the sink and get them put away before sitting down for dinner. In the middle of the dishes, I smelled something odd. It reminded me of burning plastic, and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, so I ignored it. Clearly, if I ignored it, it would go away. The smell didn’t go away, but there was no smoke, so I continued with the dishes. The next thing I knew, both fire alarms in my apartment were going off, full blast. I ran over to the oven (2 steps, total, so it wasn’t quite a run) and opened it, fairly convinced that that would stop the fire alarms.

Then I remembered that I stored cookie-cooling trays in the drawer under the oven. Plastic-coated cookie-cooling trays. Bingo. I bought the trays at a liquidation sale at Linens and Things with visions of myself making chocolate-chip cookies from scratch and finally graduating from the slice-and-bake.

The trays were hot, so I took them out using an oven mitt (that matches the tea towels, that matches the sink rug, that matches the little ceramic decorations above the sink and oven. Just because I don’t use it that often doesn’t mean my kitchen doesn’t look good.). All the while, the stupid fire alarms were still blaring. I opened all the windows, ran around like a chicken with her head cut off for a hot minute, and then it hit me that the alarms have buttons on them to shut them off. Duh.

Between remembering the cooling trays to remembering the button, about 3 minutes passed. That’s not enough time for the oven or my cooking chicken to sufficiently cool down, so after I averted the crisis, I turned the oven back on and continued cooking my chicken. My delicious, juicy, marinated chicken that added the right touch to the pretty fantastic salad I made.

And tomorrow night, I’m making reservations.