Boiling Water

Since Four Foods is taking a well-deserved Christmas vacation, I won’t be participating in my usual weekly series of questions. But I didn’t want to abandon my readers to a whole week without any food related dish.

Last month, I avoided telling the story of the most embarrassing meal I ever cooked. The fact that this story could also go into the “foods you burn” category didn’t encourage my honesty either. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the real blame for the story of my worst meal lies with not only my innate laziness but also with the makers of convenience food for trying to find even easier ways to prepare easy food.

It isn’t exactly a secret that I am addicted to KD, Kraft Dinner, Kraft Mac and Cheese. Call it what you will, but at the end of the day this plastic food is a darn yummy taste of home. Everyone knows how to make this childhood favourite: boil water, add pasta, drain when cooked, add butter, milk, “cheese,” and serve. There are variations of that standard recipe that include leaving out the butter and milk, using cream, or even adding vegetables in an attempt to make this meal healthy.

Then the wise people at Kraft figured out that boiling water and later draining the pasta was far too much work for the average lazy chef. That’s when they added this alternative method of preparation: add water and pasta to a bowl and microwave for five minutes or until all the water has been absorbed. Not only did you no longer have to drain the pasta, but you could also cut an entire seven minutes off your cooking time!

By now, you should have all figured out that I am one of the laziest people on the planet, so naturally when I read this alternative preparation method, I jumped aboard. The math was simple: Bowl + Water + Pasta + Five Minutes On High = LUNCH.

Then, one day my autopilot went wonky. I threw everything in the plastic bowl, set the microwave and headed down the basement of my parent’s home to watch some television. About three minutes later Murphy, our black lab, bounded into the basement and nosed my hand repeatedly.

“Yes, you’re cute. Go away,” I said patting his furry head. But he persisted.

Annoyed that Murphy was disrupting me, I grumbled at him and headed back upstairs to let him out into the garden. Halfway there I smelled smoke. A lot of smoke.

I ran into the kitchen and saw that the microwave was all but on fire. I hit “stop,” opened the door and was greeted with the noxious fumes that only melted plastic can emit. After I let the dog out, I opened all the windows, turned the fan on, and attempted to get rid of all the evidence of my kitchen disaster.

Mid clean up it hit me: I had messed up the equation. Here’s what I had done in my haste to consume Kraft Dinner goodness: Bowl + Pasta + Five Minutes on High = Lunch. Do you see the problem?

I forgot to add the water. Consequently, all the microwave had to cook was the pasta (blackened to a char after only a handful of minutes) and plastic bowl made from a thousand different toxic smelling polymers.

I would like to tell you that I learned my lesson. That is, after this incident, now I always remember to add the water when boiling water and would never cook KD this way again. Moreover, maybe this would have induced me to stop eating the world’s most plastic food as a result. Sadly, none of those lessons ever stuck with me.

To this day, I love Kraft Mac and Cheese. And worst of all, I pulled off that plastic melting catastrophe not once but two more times. What can I say? I’m more than a part-time chef – I’m also a full-time screw-up!