Kitchen Woes

Having my own kitchen is great! I think I’m a pretty decent cook and I try to include healthy choices in my meals. Like the other day for example, I made mac and cheese AND chicken and cheese puffs for my husband and my brother-in-law for when they got back from working out! It’s calcium and protein people, come on!

The only thing about having your own kitchen in your own apartment is you have to clean the mess yourselves. No more relying on mom and dad to “find” the mess and clean it up for you. One thing my mom used to do is put tin foil on the drip pans to your stove to make easy clean ups. Changing them out a couple times in your life a month allows for a cleaner fresher kitchen!

So that’s what we did; we started the daunting task of putting tin foil on the drip pans on our stove.

How do we do this? I think I saw my dad yanking the burners out first, but that sounds like a one way ticket to becoming a star on Emergency ER. So we become primates; touching the burners, pushing, yanking as if we are seeing a stove for the first time. And VOILA! The burner comes out!

Now the drip pan comes right out and I carefully cover mine making sure it was covered completely and making nice neat holes in the foil to insure proper heating. I look over and see farmer Joe Stephen just threw the tin foil on top and put the burner back on. Cool.

Now I notice that putting the burner back on the stove is just as difficult as getting them out. You have to align the burner to where it sits in the drip pan just right. Apparently there is a “Nook” on the drip pan that you have to set the burner in…the nook that is currently covered by tin foil.

Once you get the burner back into its socket in the stove, it then becomes lopsided and uneven and you have to try to fix it. Stephen did a great job making his pretty even, but mine looked disastrous.

I reach over to see why his is so leveled and mine is more unbalanced than the mind of a mentally ill patient and then I hear it.

Ssssssssss

No, this is not the sound of a snake; this is the sound of my skin being seared off. Stephen had secretly turned the burner on to check to see if the burner was connected properly and then secretly turned it off again without telling me the burner was hotter than Mordor. (That was a Lord of the Rings reference for the nice people who don’t know what Mordor is.)

What DOES one say when they experience the same feeling as a steak going on a grill?

A lot of ugly words that I managed to keep in my head. It was all I could do to only say:

“Ow!”

And of course, “Ow” is just an uglier way of saying:

“Golly gee, I have burned the dickens out of my fingers and I seem to be in a terrible amount of pain!"

It wasn’t just the fact that I burned my fingers by touching a hot stove top, it’s that I PUSHED down on the stove top to see if his stove top was leveled.

The cold running water was glorious! It was sweeter than the sweat of Jesus running on my fingers! My only problem was if I even thought about taking my fingers out from under the running water, my fingers remind me that I just burned the flesh of my fingertips. We just moved into this apartment about a week ago and we don’t have a first aid kit around. We don’t have Band-Aids or Neosporin or the smartest of all, an aloe plant so running sink water was the best option.

Three hours later, I’m still standing at the sink weeping because I’m exhausted and I want nothing more than to crawl into bed and slip into a coma. I would also like to be able to take my fingers out from under the water without the feeling of fire running across my fingertips.

Stephen was great, he stayed up with me the whole time and even went to the store to buy aloe gel. That didn’t help because even the store bought gel has alcohol in it but the poor guy tried so hard to help.

Lesson number one:

Always let your spouse know if you turn the burner on and then turn it back off

Lesson number two:

Buy a first aid kit (including an aloe plant)

Lesson number three:

Don’t touch the burner or your fingers will look like this.

*The pictures are over the course of two weeks. The first picture is an hour after it happened. The next picture is four days after, and the next two are sometime during the next week