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Cooking Catastrophes

August 11, 2008 By


I haven’t participated in the Monday writing prompt in a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago, Mister and I were visiting his parents in one of the most perfect places I’ve ever seen, and last week the topic didn’t apply to me. But I’m back, with stories about cooking. Other people’s cooking. I admit that I’m not the best cook in the world, but I don’t think I’ve ever really messed something up bad enough to make a blogworthy story. I have blogged about other people’s cooking before, specifically my stepmother and mom. My mom is funny. She can be a bit forgetful when she cooks – like the time she made tuna casserole and forgot to put the tuna in. Other times she makes a big mistake. Once, she accidentally reached for the wrong thing in the spice cabinet and ended up putting cinnamon in the meatloaf instead of allspice. She blamed that one on “someone” who was moving things around in her meticulously organized spice cabinet. Oh, and there’s the time she made a roaster chicken and put 4, count ‘em, four bullion cubes in when she was making the gravy. She wanted it to have some flavor, she said. Oh, it had flavor all right. The unmistakable flavor of way too much sodium.

My mom is not the only one with her disasters. My sister, when she was younger and much, much less experienced in the kitchen, decided to make herself a grilled cheese sandwich. What she got was two pieces of blackened bread with cold cheese in the middle. She fried both sides of the bread until they were nice and crispy, then stuck a piece of cold cheese between them. Brilliant. She’s much better at it now, and is even better at making roasting chickens than mom is.

One disaster that I was not witness to, but really enjoy hearing, is Mister’s experience with salmon. He likes to cook with wine, and is quite good at it. Actually, he’s quite good at cooking period. Anyway, he was cooking this salmon and decided to add some white wine. As he reached for the wine bottle, he realized he was out of white wine. He figured since the fish was already in the middle of the cooking process, he’d add what he did have – red wine. How bad can it be? Well, he soon saw the results of red wine with salmon. He ended up serving purple fish. A crayola-like passionflower purple. Very, um, colorful. The recipients of this meal were a bit unsure at first, but as they put on a brave face and started eating it, they realized it was yummy. Very yummy. So yummy, in fact, that they specifically asked for purple fish a number of times after that. It ended up being a popular dish in his circle.

So there you have it – some cooking catastrophes. Some I have been subjected to, others not. What are some of your cooking catastrophes?

Filed Under: Food

Can I Level Backwards?

August 6, 2008 By

Mister announced tonight that WoW is having a referral special. If he refers someone and gets them to sign up for 2 months, then he gets some special limited offer pixel crack. He eyed me suggestively as he told me this. At first I was figuring it would be worth the subscription if it keeps him happy, which then leaves me free to get my blogging fix. But then, later in the evening as he was talking to one of our silly little game friends, he said that he can get all sorts of experience if he refers someone and they play together for 90 days. Hold on a minute here. I have to actually play the game now?

Let me tell you something: I am not a gamer. I never understood the fascination with Super Mario Bros. when it came out, and my friends would play for hours on end. And as for playing the game itself, I didn’t get it. I mean, I understood the objective and all, but I didn’t get why it was fun. Never mind the fact that I have no controller-thumb coordination. We did have an Atari 2600 when I was a kid. I never really got into playing it much – Pac Man and Chopper Command bored me. I did like playing the ET – The Extra Terrestrial game. Just so you all can get a little perspective, Listverse dubbed ET the #1 lousiest video game that should never have been made. Yes, I was the only person in the country that liked playing this game – over and over and over again.

For those of you who still like me, let me tell you what this means: it means that I know, from past experience with games, that I am not going to have fun playing WoW. In fact, I am not going to have so much fun that I will be constantly distracted, leaving my character in areas where it will be killed mercilessly ad infinitum. Can you get a negative level in WoW? I might be the first person to do that.

Mister tries to counter my protests by reminding me that I liked the Wii when we played it over at the MonkeyHouse. Yes, I liked the Wii. It might even be going on my Christmas list. But there’s something different about Wii. On Wii, I’m not playing silly little games and questing and getting killed. We played Wii sports, which was fun. I got to go bowling, kick ass at it, and I didn’t end up with a shoulder injury. I got to play baseball without getting a sunburn or getting stuck in right field. And there are only two buttons to press, so it was really easy (though I still had a bit of trouble from time to time). I also checked out some other sports on the website like skiing and hula hoop, which are available on the Wii Fit. I might even be interested in the Mario Cart. See, the Wii lets you move around a bit, so you get to exercise more than your thumbs. The games’ movements stimulate real life activities, and the relatively primitive graphics are, IMO, ridiculously cute. So yes, I like the Wii. But I am so not interested in playing WoW. Mister has been playing it forever, so I’ve been exposed to it ever since I’ve known him, and other than walking by and randomly hitting the space bar to make the characters jump, I don’t have any interest in it.

So if you’re ever online and come across a downtrodden character at Level -2,948,520, that would be me.

Filed Under: Funny

Like a Fine Wine

August 3, 2008 By

Yesterday I went to open a new checking account. I already have one, but I wanted to have an account at the bank that Mister has his accounts at so it makes things a little easier. Now that my name change is complete and I have the ID to show it, I was ready to go to the bank.

We went to the branch closest to our house and waited a bit. The waiting didn’t bother us so much, because that’s what usually happens when you go to the bank. When it was our turn, we sat down and I told the customer service guy what I wanted. He asked me for my ID, which is standard procedure, and then asked me for further proof of ID because, as he put it, my driver’s license was too new. (In Nevada they put the issue date on your ID, and mine was issued about 3 weeks before.) I told him that I didn’t have anything else with me because the website didn’t indicate that I’d need anything beyond that. He told me he could not open my account without further ID, and I told him that I didn’t need to open an account with his bank.

Mister asked if I wanted to try the other branch, close to the old apartment, and I said sure, I think we have time before they close. We went in and waited, then when it was our turn asked if we had time to open a checking account. It was 6 minutes before closing, so we would have understood if we got turned away at that point. But the customer service lady was happy to help us. We opened my account, and I wasn’t even a new customer since Mister added me to one of his checking accounts a couple months before that. She changed my name on that account, opened my new checking account, and even ordered Mister a new debit card on a different rewards program, all very happily. When we were done, about 20 minutes past closing, we apologized for keeping her there so late and she said it was nothing, she was happy to help us. That’s what we call customer service.

Here’s what I know about retail banking from the friends and relatives who have worked in banking: they have quotas. It’s a sales job – they need to open so many accounts every month. Think about it – how many times have you gone in to make a deposit or withdrawal and had the teller ask you if you wanted to put the money in a CD or open a different kind of account? That’s the sales part of it coming out. So we were very perplexed, and a bit upset, that we would be turned away by this guy for an ID that hasn’t aged enough. I don’t get it – my ID is considered by the state to be valid the second they hand it to me, but 3 weeks later it’s not valid enough as determined by some dude at the bank. I don’t get it – can someone please explain this to me?

Last night I went on the bank’s website to put in a comment, and this morning I had an email saying that they had passed my comment on to management for further review. Looks like the banking dude didn’t have the last word on this one!

Filed Under: Grrr