Kitchens, Etc.

My kitchen and I aren't really getting along anymore.

It's OK, because I think we have a mutual disrepect. It knows that I hate it. It knows that I swear at it under my breath and sometimes right to its face. I know that the second I leave the area, the kitchen and all the appliances and cookware talk about how much of a bastard I am and how they are going to "make me pay". But I'm a human. I'm superior in thought to cast iron pans and blenders. Well, most of the time.

My issues with the kitchen are various and sundry. And also in no order of importance.

Not one to harp on biological inadequacies for karmic reasons, but the kitchen is a little...small. For our needs anyway, since Xteen and I really like to cook. People come over and they call our kitchen "cute" and I hear the cabinets snicker at me. It's cute in the same way that the Problem Child was cute. When it's not your kitchen, it's just precious. When it's yours, it's a demon seed.

One of the problems is that the cabinets can't hold our wealth of cookware. And, for some reason, every pan that I use most often, ends up on the bottom of all the other pans, which results in a panalanche every time I try to get at them. And this is why I think my kitchen is out to get me.

Whenever I clean a pan I have used, I haphazardly, yet with purpose, throw it into the cabinet on top of all the other pans, with regard to only ease of access and balance on top of the other cookware. I scoff at ridiculously feng shui-ish concepts like "how they nest" and "are they with other members of their cooking family". Frig off.

So, when I go to bed, all the pans get together and decide to mess with me. They disorganize themselves in the cabinet overnight, so all the pans I use most regularly are now on the bottom and piled on top are various and useless cookware, like the "used once-every-five-years" colossal turkey roaster and that one mutant-sized pan that comes in every collection. You know, the one that says it sole use is for cooking smelts and fiddleheads, but not at the same time. That one. So, our non-stick, our skillets, our grill pan. All buried. The 86-gallon stock pot. That one's right in reach. Calphalon. Fine cookware by day. Conniving instruments of sabotage by night.

Next up on the list of complaints is our dishwasher. Somehow, we are able to fill this thing up in one meal. However, the son of a bitch takes about 30 minutes to unload. And it's not a big fan of brevity. It's entire wash/"dry" cycle lasts approximately seven and a half hours. There's a reason why "dry" is in quotation fingers. And I'll get to that later.

Actually, I'll get to that now instead. We have to run the dishwasher pretty much before we go to bed, or before we go on vacation because of the tremendous amount of time it takes and the fact that it's as loud and annoying as Sam Kinison. So, last night, we ran it when we go to bed. Xteen usually wakes up before me and she unloads it. I wake up to find 95% of the contents of the dishwasher load on about three towels that are spread out all over the kitchen counters. Every single item on the towels is soaking wet.

So, I say to Xteen, "Why's everything on towels?" And she, also recognizing that they are soaking wet, proclaims, "Because they are soaking wet." To which I incredulously gasp, "WHY??"

Silly me. I thought that a 6 hour dry cycle would, I don't know, DRY the fucking dishes!!! Apparently, all it does is cook whatever is in there, because if you try to empty it as soon as it shuts off, anything you touch will be three degrees less than the surface of the sun, yet still, miraculously, soaking wet. Everyone else's dishwasher dries their stuff. Mine mocks me.

Finally, yesterday, I got in an all and out brawl with two identical twin potholders. In the afternoon, I started to cook some lentil soup for lunch. I put the potholder down near the stove while stirring the soup, without realizing that, while the stove and the potholders usually have a simpatico regarding their disdain of me, that they must have had some kind of squabble among themselves, because, I smell something burning.

I look down and find the potholder engulfed in flames, like a tinder stick. Apparenly, the stove didn't like potholder so close because of their spat and flicked out a flame, which barely touched said potholder. Now, if I were designing potholders, I wouldn't soak them in jet fuel as part of their manufacturing process. But, as it turns out, I didn't buy the flame-retardant potholders. No. The ones I got were flame retarded. Bit difference.

I tried to salvage the potholder, but I could not resuscitate it. Xteen told me to "let it go". I threw it in the garbage.

Fast forward to dinner. I'm using the deceased potholder's twin brother and boy, is he harboring a grudge. Instead of saying, "Dear Dim. Please know that I appreciate you efforts to save my brother, yet his demise was not due to you. It was because of that asshole stove", it decides to lash out at me.

Unbeknownst to me, I spill exactly two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen on this miserable thing. To put that in perspective, I think even the dishwasher would have been able to dry the amount of water that was on this thing.

I grab the broiler pan from the oven and immediately feel the thermal force of a thousand suns in my right middle finger. Apppropriate, since I throw the pan down and, while examining the already forming blister, extend only that finger to the stove, potholder, and the standing mixer (it was looking at me funny).

Considering how quickly and painfully I conducted that heat, you would have thought that I was soaking in a pool during a thunderstorm, licking a metal flagpole, just as someone tosses in a plugged in toaster.

Now, I'm splitting time between the laptop and the kitchen, getting a tomato sauce dinner going. I'm trying to play nice. We'll see how it goes...

- Dim.

Update (4:50pm): OK, I guess we're playing for keeps now. The gloves are off. The cookware has enlisted the aid of the actual food itself in its devious plot. I go to stir the sauce and it spits at me. Two scalding hot drops jump from the pot and onto my hand. That's it. We're throwing down.