A Kitchen Story

(Note: This story was going to be published last week. However, due to my brother needing me in Dallas for reasons you can probably find on his Blog, it was delayed)

Last week I was contemplating dinner. Instead of the usual short drive to subway or jimmy johns for fast food, I decided to cook myself up a little something nice. Being the stereotypical late 20’s bachelor my dinner choices are greatly limited to the lack of supplies that typically found in such a kitchen. My infrequent grocery store visits mostly result in the purchasing of three items: yogurt, TV dinners, and bottled water.

However on this evening I was determined to make something of nothing. After extensively going through my freezer, fridge, and pantry, which wasted 45 whole seconds of my life, I had a chicken breast, one egg and a bag of rice, none of which were probably from 2011.

I break open my new/vintage 1982(year of my birth) Southern Living cookbook that Mom gave me for Christmas, and started charting a course. My very, very short course.

Now I’m no Emril Lagasse, but I like to think that I can work my way around a kitchen. I have had a decent amount of practice in my years, and the chicken and Rice, with a hard-boiled egg and a few choice spices recipe I found seamed very simple and should not be a problem.

My friends often remind me that I can get a bit OCD at times, so I immediately began calculating exactly how long everything would need to take to cook to ensure that all items hit the plate at the same time for a nice evenly warm meal.

The rice went on first because it took 15 minutes. Next it was time to brown the chicken and prepare a Chicken bullion cube for extra flavor with several extra spicy ingredients to get it nice and warm.

Now I had originally planned to boil my loan egg, but at some point I realized that my rice was cooking in my egg boiling pot. No problem, I would just use the short cut. I would just put the egg in a bowl and nuke it in the microwave for one minute.

Next I ran into a few problems. My rice started boiling over because I had the temperature too hot., and my phone rang. As soon as I got both of these things taken care of all taken care of I took off toward my IPod deck to change the song that was not on my cooking playlist when…

KAAAABOOOOOOMMMM!

Its sounded less like a 12-gauge shotgun and more like a Civil War cannon.

Apparently my dear little egg was not removed from its shell, and the blast actually blew the microwave door completely open.

Momentarily there was a dark fog, and when the smoke cleared (literally) there were remnants of egg from ground to ceiling of my kitchen. The smell was… well it was a blown up egg, use your imagination.

My wonderfully planned out Chicken, Rice, and Egg meal had just been reduced in total ingredients by 1/3.

Almost a full day later my right ear was still ringing from the blast, and it occurred to me that microwave hasn’t been cleaned in months, maybe years. I know that the Good Lord speaks to us in different ways. I just pray that the next time, for the sake of my eardrums and blood pressure, he uses his inside voice…