Chopped

Have you noticed that it’s hard to find three funny things a day? Yesterday’s funny didn’t happen until I was almost ready for bed and decided to watch clips of the presidential debate. That’s enough comic relief for an entire week. Laughter is awesome but it’s keeping me awake at night.

So, I’m upping the ante. I’m calling it a win if I laugh out loud three times a day at other people’s humor instead of putting so much pressure on my funny bone. If I can find one funny thing on my own daily, that should be plenty.

With that in mind, I did the unthinkable this morning and cooked a meal for myself. I used to love cooking and baking and making healthy foods from scratch. Now I don’t. You can add cooking to the long list of things I loved to do before Rob died that have landed in the dumpster now. Turns out that’s super common. As a popular grief coach puts it, “Every corner of my universe has been affected by this enormous loss. Nothing feels the same now. I have to unlearn almost everything I thought I knew and relearn a completely new way.”

I knew this was true instinctively, but it was so weird when I first noticed it. Especially the cooking thing. When you’re grieving, it’s important to get enough rest, water, good food and exercise. These are also the last things you want to do when you’re grieving.

As a result, my new microwave is threatening a coup and fast-food employees working the drive-thru know me by name. This is not good, and I have the extra pounds to prove it.

Still, you have to find a win wherever you can. I was headed out the door with my purse over my shoulder this morning to get another sweetened iced coffee with extra cream and probably a couple of baby donuts as a chaser when, hand on the doorknob, I stopped and asked myself, “Is that really what I want? Is that really what my body wants?”

Sometimes a superior kind of laziness wins out over a basic version, and I make a better decision. I knew that in the time it takes me to drive to Dunkin, make my order on a Saturday morning, and come back home, I could have scrambled some eggs with all the extras, browned up some potatoes (from a bag – I’m not a gonna be extreme here), and enjoyed a hot breakfast in peace. Good food, nourishing food, food I already own and have already paid for.

The cheapskate in me won out and I put my purse away. I’m not sure it was my best decision.

I pulled out the bag of ready-to-cook hash browns and put them into my new non-stick skillet. I covered them with foil to speed things up and then—here’s where you may want to look away—nature called. It was serious.

Now, I know it’s a bad idea to leave a pan on a hot burner to cook while you make a pit stop in the bathroom, but I don’t have a choice anymore. I don’t have someone in the house I can yell to for backup in the kitchen. It was a risky move, I’ll admit. I’ll also admit it just now occurred to me that I could have turned the burner off for five minutes. See? At my age, the synapses are misfiring, and dicey behavior overwhelms common sense more often than anyone needs to know. No, I didn’t fall down in the bathroom, hit my head on the granite countertop, and wake up in a room filled with smoke while a herd of firefighters carried me out into the yard. How embarrassing. You have such an imagination. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, just that it didn’t.

I made it back to the hash browns in time to turn them over, nicely browned, and began to work on the eggs. All scrambled up in a bowl with salt and pepper and lots of onion powder, I did my level best not to make a mess. This is the main reason I don’t want to cook anymore—I don’t want to clean up after myself. I don’t want a dirty stove top or island or dirty dishes in the sink. I don’t want crumbs on the floor or any evidence at all that life is messy. When I pick up supper from Chick Fil A, like I did last night, the dishes go right into the trash and there’s nothing left for me to do except turn on Netflix.

The hash browns all finished, I planned to use the same pan for the eggs. To save on dishes. I picked up my shiny new non-stick skillet, tried to put half the stuck-together potatoes onto my plate and the rest into a bowl for tomorrow, and dropped them on my clean counter instead because nicely browned browns don’t want to stop holding hands with each other. The pan was hot, the potatoes were hot, they slid out of the non-stick skillet as slick as snot and covered the counter from end to end. Frustrated, I left them there to think about what they’d done.

Drippy, eggy fork in my left hand, bowl of liquid breakfast in the other, I realized I’d put an empty hot pan on a still cooking burner without any oil or food in it. I also had no more hands available to fix this problem and I didn’t want to put anything down because everything was drippy and eggy and I didn’t want to make a mess. Smoke was coming up from the new, empty pan. I had to do something. I set the bowl of eggs down and grabbed a rubber spatula to slice off a pat of butter for the pan. Half the stick of butter stuck to the spatula, which is too much even for me, but my left hand was still holding the drippy egg fork.

Why God didn’t give us four hands instead of two leaves me inclined to believe in evolution instead of divine design.

I put the fork down on the counter, which was desecrated by potatoes anyway, picked up the fork I’d set aside for eating my breakfast, and quickly fixed the butter situation. The butter hit the pan like an ice cube in an angry volcano and before I could pour in the eggs it began to bubble and burn. I sighed, gave the eggs one last whip with the drippy fork and, with both fork and bowl in my left hand, poured in the yellow liquid anyway. I’ve heard browned butter eggs are chic. And here is where I made a costly error and was reminded again of why I don’t want to cook anymore.

I’ve lost my mojo.

I also lost my fork. It slipped out of my hand and into the skillet of eggs where, before I could blink, it disappeared into a pool of bubbling yellow. Chic browned butter eggs are one thing, but omelets aren’t supposed to come with a fork cooked into them. I grabbed the rubber spatula which was no help at all in rescuing the fork because—rubber. The fork fell in again and I had to leave it there to cook while I put the empty mixing bowl in the sink, and when I came back my scrambled breakfast was nearly set. I snatched the drippy egg fork from its resting place on the potato-covered counter, wedged it under the superheated scrambled egg fork in the pan, and in one quick flip watched it fly into the air, do a triple reverse backward twist and slide down the lower cabinets just before it hit the floor. I gave it a 7.9 for style and returned my attention to the eggs.

The kitchen was a disaster area. Egg was all over the counter, running down the side of the cabinets, and pooling a bit on the floor, but not too much since half of my omelet was still attached to the hot fork. The butter dish, smeared with a rejected slab of butter, needed to be washed now, and the stove top was splattered with an overspray of oil from the potatoes and yellow drips from my sloppy egg maneuver. The sink was filled with a pile of dirty dishes not even seen in the kitchen of Chick Fil A, and there were dots of ketchup all over the island from a bottle that I forgot was nearly empty before I decorated my hash browns.

The food was delicious. And it was free-ish. And hot. But it wasn’t worth the trouble or the nutrition.

I watch a lot of cooking competitions on tv, but not once have they ever given credit to the people responsible for damage control in the kitchen. They barely even show you the pile of dirty dishes in the sink or the way the counters have been desecrated in the process. I want to see a show where dishwashers compete to see who makes it through without dropping a dish or getting chopped. Now that's something I can aspire to.

Honestly, though, I don’t want to cook a meal for one and have to do all the clean up, too. It’s not satisfying anymore. If you’re gonna destroy something as clean and organized as a tidy kitchen, you should at least have an audience to applaud you for the effort and tell you the food tastes good.

The only way to keep the mess to a minimum without trying to serve a cheesy fork omelet to yourself is to pick up your purse and head to McDonald’s where Buffy recognizes your voice in the drive-thru and keeps your debit numbers on speed dial. They even have a trash can in the exit lane where you can deposit all your used dishes.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

With thanks to Mike Mozart for proof that cooking isn't for everyone. The pic seen above can be viewed in its unbroken state at the following link: Broken Eggs, by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMe… | Flickr