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| 2011 Christmas Brunch - Tony and Amanda Cooked |
Story
one – Amanda and I were home together one weekend afternoon – she
must have been middle-school aged. Amanda mentioned food, and one of
the suggestions for something to eat was a serving of homemade mashed potatoes in the freezer - she could just heat it in the microwave. So Bodie put the container of mashed
potatoes in the microwave – pushed the defrost button and
turned the microwave on. Well, the potatoes went through a couple of
defrost cycles but were still frozen through and through (we weren't
well acquainted with defrosting using the microwave – probably
doing something not quite right). So I suggested that Amanda put the
potatoes in a pan on the stove – they would not take long to heat
through that way. And she said okay.
I
was puttering around the house, but something in my head was asking
me to pay attention. Finally I asked myself what could be wrong –
and I walked to the kitchen, lifted the lid of the pan on the stove
with the heat turned on, and discovered exactly what my brain was
warning me about – the entire plastic bowl with mashed potatoes was
in the pan!
Yes, the plastic container can go in the microwave like that!
Why can't it go on the stove? I proceeded to heat up the mashed
potatoes for my child by removing the potatoes from the plastic
container and putting them into the pan on the stove – what kind of mother
was I anyway?
Story
two – the girls were older at this point. It was summer, and they
were home. One or both of them were driving and they had to go
somewhere. They were both getting ready to go out. And then Sarah
asked Amanda if she was all set to go? Bodie answered that she just wanted to
reheat her cup of coffee in the microwave. Again, with the microwave.
She put the coffee cup in, set the microwave for one minute, pressed
the start button, and walked away. I don't know if it was Amanda who
remembered, or Sarah, but suddenly they ran back to the microwave
because the coffee cup had some metal in the handle!
The
microwave was on fire!
Sarah
unplugged it and carried the microwave down the stairs and out the
back door to the middle of the back deck where she set it down on the
cement. The fire went out. And the girls ran their errands.
The
microwave was kaput.
Story
three – Amanda was in college. In fact, it must have been her
junior or senior year because she was living in an apartment instead of the dorms those years. She had set up a nice kitchen and enjoyed
fixing meals and trying to be thrifty during those lean years of
college. One of the things I had given Amanda for her kitchen was my
crockpot – I had a feeling she would make more use of it than I
did.
One
day when we were talking about recipes, I asked about the crockpot.
Amanda said, “Yeah, uh, about the crockpot – that's a goner.”
It seems that there was a recipe one day that called for a crockpot.
So Amanda set it all up. The first thing the recipe said was to brown
the meat. Bodie put the crockpot on the stove, put the meat in the
crockpot, turned the stove on, and proceeded to brown the meat in the
crockpot on the stove burner! And the bottom of the crockpot fell
out. Recipes should specify if meat should be browned in a pan other
than the crockpot, don't you agree?
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20151203 Amanda Cooking Trilogy
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