"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." - Alaska, Looking for Alaska

Monday, January 18, 2010

Attack of the Pizza Dough

There are many excellent reasons why I do not cook. And one is not because I'm a feminist who is trying to break the gender roles. Mostly the reason why I spend as little time as possible in a kitchen is because food hates me.

Now, I know you can argue that food hates everybody. While it does give us energy, the good-for-the-soul food makes us pack on the pounds. But really, food hates me so much that it actively seeks to destroy me.

Last night I was helping my mom make dinner. I am attempting to learn the basics so I am not relying on dining hall hours and Taco Bell for nourishment when I get an apartment this fall. We weren't even making anything difficult...just paninis and instant noodles. My mom was busy prepping the sandwiches for our handy dandy panini maker. She told me to start on the noodles. The instructions were beyond simple, so I thought I could handle it.

Step one: bring water, milk, and butter (optional) to a boil.

Right. Easy. I bring water to a boil all the time for Ramen Noodles.

I do everything perfectly and am trying to break up the butter while the water is heating up. I forget the reason why, but I turn around for, literally, two seconds. When I face the stove once more, the water-milk-butter concoction is rising rapidly to the top of the pan, frothing and bubbling in resentment for not giving it enough attention.

Panic sets in and I can't for the life of me think of what I can do to stop the mess from spilling over. I ferociously twist the burner to medium heat, but even in my distress I know it won't be enough.

"Mom! Help!" I scream.

Now here is the thing about my mom. Her mind is full of 50,000 thoughts, all running through at the same time. So sometimes when you talk to her, she doesn't respond until you are halfway through a thrilling tale about a customer from work, saying, "Sorry, what?"

At the time of the over boiling, my mother's mind was not permitting her to be conscious of the world around her. Futilely, I yelled, "Help! Help! Help!" I could not tear my eyes away from the water now at the brink of escape, still I knew help wouldn't come. This is when, for some reason, my subconscious tapped into my two semesters of college Spanish. "Ayuda! Ayuda! Ayuda!"*

The ridiculous part, more so than my last resort as a girl born and raised in Missouri to start shouting in Spanish as a distress signal, is that my mother immediately responded to a foreign language she could barely count to ten in. Sure, English she can completely ignore, but once the Spanish rolls out she is all ears. Still in my panic, I conserved this nugget of information for later attention-getting use.

My mother ran over and moved the volcano mixture from the burner, scolding me for not doing that before, then asked, "What the hell were you shouting at me?"

I quickly explained what my mind decided to perform, she made jokes at my expense, and we continued on with dinner. Of course with my luck, this was not the last incident of the night.

The noodles turned out okay and I started helping my mom with the sandwiches. She had just bought avocados and tried to cut into one for a spread on the panini, but they were too ripe. I remembered we had a package of store bought guacamole in the meat drawer of our refrigerator and went to get it. It took some digging around due to how packed our fridge is, but I finally extricated it and handed it over.

I started to shove the drawer shut and I think the motion is what set it off. There was an earsplitting bang and I felt a blast of wind. Shrapnel hit my neck and face. I could feel it embedding into my hair. I stood in shock, my hands curled oddly in the air close to my face. I analyzed the fridge and saw the culprit of the bomb. It was a pizza dough can that had been standing upright and sealed on a shelf. Now it was pointed at me, like a cannon after a firing, with dough spilling out of the exploded top.

The shock still controlled me and I stood there, shaking slightly as I stared at the fridge. I could feel my mom whirling around me. Eventually she asked why I was standing there. Excited tears stung my eyes as I said, "Thedoughcanexplodedatme!" My mom was in her own thoughts again and didn't register what I said (that and I was talking really fast and in a high soprano).

I ran to the mirror in the living room to evaluate the damage. My neck was stinging all over and I saw angry red blotches covering the skin there. Small bits of dough were tangled in my hair and dotting my face.

"Oh, the pizza dough exploded?" my mom called casually from the kitchen.

With insane laughter I ran back in, shouting about how the pizza dough was a bomb that tried to kill me. I yanked my high collar shirt out of the way to give her a better view of the red marks and yelled about how much my neck was stinging.

My mother made more jokes at my expense, and my brother told me to shut up since he was online playing Call of Duty.

I took this night as a resolution of why I do not cook. The food is ready to attack me if I come anywhere near it.

*For all you Spanish speaking peoples, I know that's technically wrong. But I only had two semesters of Spanish, and it was a year ago. That was the first version of "help" that came out. Yes, "Socorro!" would have been more appropriate, but what my subconscious wants my subconscious does.

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