Lady Lunchalot

My culinary career has not exactly been a series of five-star performances. I thought I’d share some of the near-lethal lowlights of my time in the kitchen. Thankfully it has been many, many years since I have almost killed anyone with my cooking!

A near-miss with mercury poisoning:

When I was a kid I stuck our family thermometer in a bolognese sauce because I wanted to see how hot it was. It shattered, leaving glass and a slick of mercury floating in the sauce. I almost gave my entire family mercury poisoning because I was so scared I would get in trouble for breaking the thermometer that I didn’t want to tell anyone!

Surprise breakfast:

I remember being quite little and making bacon and eggs for breakfast as a surprise for my mum. The bacon wasn’t turning out just like mum’s (I was undercooking it) so I kept on feeding it to the dog and trying another few rashers until I got it right. I never got it right, and I ended up feeding about 2kg of bacon to our golden retriever, who vomited the whole lot up all over the driveway. Needless to say, Mum loved the surprise.

Tin can projectiles:

When I was 15, I blew up a brand new stove. Yes, I actually exploded the whole thing. I left a can of something boiling in water, and the pressure built up in the can until it exploded, ricocheting off the ceiling (where it left a can-shaped indentation in the plaster) and shattering the glass top of the stove. The explosion was so loud I thought a car had driven through the front of our house.

I think these stories are a great testament to my mum. She taught me how to cook, and you can see that the woman has the patience of a saint. (Though you should have seen that vein in her neck bulge when I blew up the kitchen).

Cooking is one of my greatest pleasures, and it’s the type of pleasure that I can share with others. If I hadn’t been encouraged to keep on cooking and learning about food (despite the heavy-metal poisoning risks, trips to the vet, and unexpected kitchen renovations) there’s no way I would have as much fun with it as I do today.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Half-Baked Food Thoughts, Blogathon 2006 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.