WONDER-FULL

Dear Wonder® Bread People,

First, let me acknowledge that I’m aware I eat wrong. You can generally view the day’s menu offerings cascading down the front of my shirt like Niagara Falls after the spring thaw. I consider gravy an accessory and ketchup splotches a classic look akin to Coco Chanel’s little black dress. So it could be my fault.

I checked the package. You said I could put all the toppings I want on your extra soft bun. You DID NOT say that mayonnaise would melt the fibers of the bread like hot butter on a brown biscuit. Imagine the difficulties involved in holding enough pieces of bread together to make a fair-sized quilt while keeping the meat from jettisoning out the back of the bun into the drooling mouth of the hippo-sized terrier waiting in hope beside my chair.

The onions, seasoned and grilled to glistening perfection moments before, oozed down my arms into my lap, and since onions are on the doggie no-fly list, I engaged in evasive maneuvers to prevent them from becoming dog chow. This action resulted in a perky elbow flap repetition reminiscent of the Chicken Dance that is so popular at parties.

As I was waving my elbows to prevent the onset of onion catastrophe and rearranging my fingers like I was playing a flute solo in order to keep my bun from launching into space, a potato chip dropped to the floor. Since it was covered in the sort of barbecue that elicits unspeakable lethal aromas from the dog in question, I shuffled my feet to keep dog and potato chip from joining forces. If I had those moves all the time, I would be champion of my Dance, Dance video.

Meanwhile, my son strolled into the kitchen just in time to catch my Bun Dance, and although your buns are enriched, mine are not, so I regret the video that is set to trend on all available social media.

Wonder People, let’s be friends. I’m not interested in achieving the status of Thanksgiving Queen Sharon, whose burnt Marie Callendar pumpkin pie set the Internet on fire along with her dinner. I just want to know the peace of launching into my lunch without having the bun split down the middle like the Earth in a dinosaur-era meteor strike.

Let's get together on this. All people could benefit from a warning label on your package right beside the picture-perfect hamburger overflowing with condiments.

“Caution: Cracked Buns May Go Viral!"

Thank You.

 

 

A Letter for the Labradors

Dear Dogs,

I realize you have a reputation to uphold. After all, you don’t sleep 15 hours a day just because you’ve got nothing to do. (Oh, wait; yes you do.) The spastic hyperactive crazed dog fit that comes in the twenty minutes it takes me to drive to the store for kibble, hamburger, and Pine Sol is the perfect opportunity to use all that energy you’ve stored up sleeping on my grandmother’s hand-sewn comforter.

The sound of the deadbolt slamming into place in the back door and the pathetic wheeze of my ten-year-old oil-burner valiantly attempting another run at the hill at the end of our driveway is exactly the incentive you need to leave your cozy nest and mount an assault on the trash can that leaves my kitchen resembling the remains of the Bin Laden compound after Seal Team Six came through. The only thing missing is the news team recording misinformation for the masses.

I understand that the Iditarod is run by teams of sled dogs that work with such precision that a single wrong step can throw the whole team off, but those puppies are sock puppets compared to the destruction a pair of Labradors can instigate during a fifteen minute absentee-owner break. If there are mass destruction world records to break, you can’t live with yourselves another second without sliding down the hall on your blubber-filled butts and shattering them like Lalique crystal on a brick floor.

I also realize you are trying to make a point. To the best of your tiny sesame seed-sized recollection, you’ve been nothing but good and true ever since the incident with the television remote. Since you have no sense of time, it’s hard to explain to you that the vet trip for that little snackfest ended just last night. And the one for the pantyhose ingestion drama is still front page news. So even though you’re rallying against oppression, I have to insist that you stay out of the coffee grounds, drop the banana peel, and back away from the scented soap.

And while you’re at it, stay out of the kitty litter. There’s some things that give you breath that even Irish Spring can’t erase.

Besides, a goatee made out of Fresh Step just looks silly.

Love,
Mom

Supper Stalker

Tonight when I went into the kitchen to start supper, my teenaged son followed me. I’m so far into menopause, hot flashes have quick-fried my brain; I thought he was there to help.

“What a nice change,” I beamed. “You can help by putting away the dishes in the dishwasher.”

“I’m here for a snack,” he answered, collarbone deep in frozen foods. Can I have a milkshake?”

“I’m starting supper right now.”

“I know,” he answered,” testing a frozen breadstick with his teeth. “I just need a little something to hold me.”

“What constitutes a little something?”

“Got any roast beef?”

“If you can hold on a second, I’ll throw a pig on the spit.”

“Gee, Mom, that’d be great. Would you make fries?”

“I was kidding. If you need a snack while I’m cooking supper, you have to make it yourself.”

You would have thought I’d said GameBoys give you cooties. That kid left the kitchen so fast, the vacuum sucked three popsicles and a corn dog with freezer burn out of cold storage.

There may be better ways to handle the situation, but this plan cleans out the refrigerator, defrosts the freezer, and rids the kitchen of unwanted pests.

Locked Out and Loaded

Dear Lock People,

I can see why you are very proud of your product. I, too, would aspire to make the very best lock ever to nestle in throwaway packaging if I were in your place. Keeping things safe and secure is your business.

However, I am writing because I sense a flaw in your vision. Although it is essential for the very best of products to lock, I find it can be just as important for such an item to unlock, thereby instilling a sense of calm in the person standing outside the door with several bags of groceries, who wants to come in out of the rain and deposit the bags on the kitchen counter just inside the door.

From my vantage point on the steps I can see:

1. The kitchen counter, bare of grocery bags.

2. Two large dogs and a small salami-shaped dog, who sense my presence outside the door.

3. The garbage can in the act of performing a one and a half gainer, which is due to the fact that the dogs are very excited that I am outside the door. Labradors express great joy by flinging coffee grounds throughout the house in a sort of native doggie dance of abandon.

Looking down, I can also see that the gourmet ice cream, double chocolate Moose Tracks, that I bought as a reward for cleaning out the refrigerator and starting on a new exercise regime has begun to melt and is, even now, performing a kind of scientific experiment with the bottom of the paper bag.

I now regret choosing paper instead of plastic in an attempt to throw myself in with the ecologically-minded set who have actually already abandoned paper for recyclable bags made from reconstituted shower caps.

I also regret my new exercise regime, which consists of one sit-up, performed with the aid of two inquisitive Labradors striving to certify my identity as I became one with the dust bunnies and a small, insistent splinter on the floor. Because I accomplished the sit-up and passed the canine equivalent of a TSA patdown, I now have semi-soft Moose nuggets in my shoe.

In case you have questions of user error in mind, I have already checked the key in my hand to ascertain that it does not fit:

My car
My husband’s car
My diary

I am also pleased to announce that I discovered that the reason the door wouldn’t open when I pressed the button marked “unlock” on my key fob is that the unlock button only works on the doors to the car, which is presently flashing its lights and honking its horn in a psychotic attempt to alert passersby to the fact that I'm locked out of my house with overloaded bags of food, free for those who don't mind jacking a gallon of warm milk and six thawed Lean Cuisine dinners featuring limp pasta from a hysterical woman who resembles your mother on the day you decided to move back home.

In typical fashion all this serves to accomplish is to draw the attention of the cat, who skitters toward the door and finds, to her delight, the puddle of Moose Tracks that is oozing down my leg.

So just now I am trying to shake the cat off my leg, juggle the groceries, coerce the dogs to turn the deadbolt, and ram the key far enough into the lock to solve all our problems. If I had an extra limb, I would use it to do a Google Earth search on my iPhone to find your exact location.

And do you know what I’m thinking, Lock People? I’m thinking that if I had your Quality Control guy right here in front on me, I would whittle a key out of whichever part of him was most likely to conform to the crooked little slot that is barring me from tracking melted Moose Tracks, wet kitty, and a squishy thing stuck in the treads of my hiking boots into the kitchen and through the coffee grounds and orange peels to get to my dancing dogs.

Do you know what else I’m thinking? I’m thinking that the packaging for this handy doorknob/lock combination, which the Captain tossed nonchalantly in the garbage a year ago when he was installing this product, said “Lifetime Guarantee.” And I’m wishing I had read the fine print then to see which mayfly’s lifetime you used as a basis for this guarantee, because that's exactly how long yours is going to be once we meet to assign blame.

But for now, I am going to kick the door with my shoe until my son, who is downstairs engrossed in perfecting his score on the Let’s Sweat section of Just Dance, feels the vibration and experiences the tsunami it starts in the toilet in the guest bathroom.

When he finally opens the door, I am going to call you on the telephone and invite you over for ice cream.

And coffee grounds.

And you know what? You may keep this invitation to use at any time.

It has a lifetime guarantee.

A Chicken in Every Pot

It’s not that my son is a picky eater, but he would starve to death before the noon rush at any grocery store in America.

He once perused the morning buffet at a luxury hotel restaurant (We have teenage boys. To us luxury means any hotel that doesn’t make us pay a security deposit when we check in.)for three quarters of an hour before demanding to be taken to McDonald’s. Nothing says Breakfast of Champions like a McBiscuit with the outside crust peeled away.

His specifications are exact. He does not eat ugly food.

Ugly food is defined as any food that comes in contact with any other food or food-like item during its processing or preparation. Therefore my kitchen is under constant supervision. It’s like living with a member of the Board of Health who doesn’t clean his room or brush his teeth until threatened with government action.

“Mom,” Son #2 peered in the pot of steaming, frothing liquid and wrinkled his nose. “Are you boiling chickens again?”

“Sure am.”

“Didn’t you just boil a chicken at aunt KJ’s house this weekend?”

“Yes, I was helping her out in the kitchen.”

Son 2, in disgust, “Do you have some sort of addiction to chicken boiling?”

“Jeffrey, I’m going to make chicken salad.”

“Are you sure this isn’t some kind of cult ritual or something?”

“I’m sure. Back away from the chicken. It needs to boil another hour.”

“Do we need to have an intervention?”

“No. This is not a bizarre ceremonial rite. You have to stew it before you can make other things with it.”

“Like what? Some sort of nasty chicken potion to smear on your victims? Does it eat their flesh? You know, like zombie chickens.”

“Son, if you don’t like chicken salad, you don’t have to eat it.”

“You’re trying to trick me. You’re going to feed me some kind of boiled chicken serum to make me do your will.”

“That’s ridiculous. I create the potion for making you do my will out of the parts I take out of the chicken.”

“What?”

“Like the heart.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yes, I am. I’m not going to waste a perfectly good bird just to make you obey me. Besides, it doesn’t work.”

He pondered this tidbit. “That’s because I’m not eating it. I shouldn’t even be breathing in the fumes. They’re probably poisonous. Or hallucinogenic.”

I didn’t know words with that many syllables until I was in college. “There are pizzas in the freezer. I don’t care if you eat chicken salad or not.”

Where’s the feet? Are you wearing a chicken claw around your neck?”

“For goodness sakes. That’s the Mother’s Day necklace you and your brother gave me. The pictures are a little fuzzy, that’s all.”

“Sure, Mom, if that’s your real name. I’ll be wanting to see some identification at dinner.”

“Get out of the kitchen.”

“Oh, now you’re worried, aren’t you? You’ll probably try and disguise the chicken in my food.”

All the boy eats is frozen pizza and Captain Crunch. It’s hard to disguise chicken parts as rogue Crunch Berries.

“That’s right. Beware of anything you eat or drink. It may be contaminated with chicken broth.”

“That’s it. I’m making a pizza.”

It’s amazing how people who won’t eat freshly thawed meat by-products will roast a frozen, artificially colored and flavored disc to a golden brown and slam it down like filet mignon just because it says pizza on the box.

I think I’ll make some chicken soup. They say it cures what ails you. And in this case what ails me is a free-range teenager who’s chicken to try new food.

Alfredo Agony

*Yep, I've joined another blog carnival. If I have to suffer, I want to share it with you. Today's humor topic is Injustice. Let's watch the fun.*

Injustice is a lot like a cat. Its path is unplanned and chaotic, but when it settles in your lap, it's there long enough to turn your legs into pincushions unless someone starts up the electric can opener and whirs your way to freedom.

That’s how I feel about the Alfredo sauce. Not the cat part; there’s no cure for that short of finding someone with a more comfortable lap or a bit of string stuck to their shoe. But from years of experience as the youngest of four children, and therefore susceptible to various methods of sibling torture, I have intimate knowledge that injustice is tolerable only when it is ruining the lives of people I don’t know.

When it hits me squarely in the grocery store shelf, it’s unbearable.

The trouble is that I’m not the type that spends a lot of time in the kitchen for fun. For me cooking doesn’t have the allure that, say, cruising down the Autobahn at a number divisible by 150 or stalking Johnny Depp on Twitter might have.

So in the interest of compromise, which is acceptable whenever it benefits me personally, I like to visit the “bottled for your convenience by the loving hands of somebody else” section of the store for a couple of jars of Alfredo sauce for a quick, pre-Twitter meal.

I’ll even go as far as opening the jars myself when I get home instead of asking the “What’s For Dinner” twins to do it for me. Teenage boys are nice to have around the house when you’ve got leftover pizza on hand or there’s some obvious body humor jokes that have been seriously overlooked, but when it comes to kitchen labor, they’re about as useful as a bonnet on a tom cat.

My doctor tells me that eating the stuff is kind of like caulking your arteries, but I don’t know much about caulk, either, except that it’s not near as good as the white sauce when you add it to noodles. It’s just one of nature’s little jokes that something so good to eat fills the body’s passageways with the stuff that Elmer’s is made of. But that’s injustice for you. Once you get a little patch, it spreads like tacky clothes in Ashley Olson’s closet.

If it’s that bad for me, I want to get it on sale. The savings offset the petrified artery situation. But it’s when the little glass jars of goodness go on sale that I have a problem.

I suspect my family is holding the newspaper hostage. Or perhaps once the newsprint hits the breakfast table, Scottie beams the whole thing down to a planet filled children who rip out the comic sections and stuff the rest behind the couch. So before I find out the stuff is on sale, it’s all sold out.

You’d think you could count on your family when time is short and price reductions are on the line. But the priorities in my house vary widely according to random factors such as the amount of gasoline in the car or the availability of high-speed Internet access. When it comes to something as mundane as the grocery store circulars, interest polls reach a new low, and the newspaper ends up as kitty litter.

So when I aim my little grocery cart toward the pasta aisle, there’s nothing there but an empty shelf and an echo.

I guess it’s take-out for supper again. But there’s an Italian restaurant right down the street. I think I can live with the injustice.

Doggerel in the Kitchen

Once upon a weekend sunny
Tried to think of something funny
Searching through lines of illegible notes.
While I scrambled, thumbing pages
Looking for the laugh of ages
Came there then a scratching sound
Pawing at the kitchen door.
“Darn the doggies evermore!”

I was deep in concentration
Humor lost to contemplation
Dialogue from his Playstation
Which as parents we deplore
Curious, stilted conversation
Made me chuckle even more.

Then the doggies made their entrance
As it is in every instance
Muddy feet on my clean floor
Paws and tails were wildly flailing
Patience in persistence failing
I succumbed to waily wailing
As they muddied up the floor.
“Darn the doggies evermore!”

I lost my pen and grabbed a pencil
Wrote a tale with hands prehensile
Shining like the Christmas tinsel
Of the doggies at the door.
Lashing through the kitchen wildly
Hit a spot to put it mildly
Slid across the kitchen floor.
Dog ballet; I laughed still more
They crashed into the outside door
Thank the doggies for this lore!

The Man Hunt

I'm hunting men this Christmas
The one I want the most
Is really most elusive
Down here so near the coast

The weatherman says eighty
So again this year you'll find
Me at the kitchen window
Building snowmen in my mind.

Best wishes for a very merry Christmas and a blessed and peaceful New Year!

Bad Bread and Broken Hearts

We all know one. The woman who collects men like other people collect salt and pepper shakers or old teapots or odd nicknames. I have a friend who is cooler than a julep and sweeter than sugar cane. She attracts men like fruit tea attracts flies. She’s had more husbands than Paris Hilton has party dresses for housepets. At a time of life when I’m shying away from getting a dog with a long life span, Raelynne’s going through suitors like a paring knife through parboiled potatoes. She’s met the perfect man. Seven times.
"I’m cutting my losers,” Raelynne fumed as she strode into my kitchen bright and early one spring afternoon. Raelynne rarely rises before noon on the weekends except in cases of extreme emergency such as news that Brad Pitt is filming nude scenes next door. She nestled into my kitchen chair like it was a vat of warm chocolate.
“You mean your losses?” I asked, pulling up a stool. If she’s up and around at lunchtime on a Saturday, there’s probably a story worth making coffee for. I popped a roast into the oven, set the timer for four o’clock, poured myself a cup of Maxwell House, and settled in to listen.
“No, when I say losers, I mean losers. I’ve reviewed my list of current relationships and found there are individuals there who no longer offer any value-added services.”
"Value-added? Sounds like romance is dead. Who's been voted off the island?”
“There's Lance,” She poured a cup of coffee from the pot and stirred in an ice cube. Raelynne says life is too short to wait for coffee to cool. “I asked him to stop by Oscar’s and bring deli sandwiches with him when he came over to do that flower bed under the living room window yesterday. Don’t you know he took so long trying to decide what kind of bread to get, he only had time to do half the flowers before dark. And to top it off, he brought pumpernickel.”
“So let Lance shop some other bakery for his hard rolls. Who else?”
“Well, there’s Sam. He’s a dear, but he's a stripper. I keep finding one dollar bills in the strangest places.”
“So much for Sam and his singles. What ever happened to Steve?”
“Oh. Steve. Well. . .” She paused and traced the ivy design on her coffee cup with one newly purchased Raspberry Rose fingernail. “I’m afraid he had a character flaw I just couldn’t deal with.”
“What was that?” I asked, spreading strawberry jam on an English muffin.
“He was in love with me. He kept asking me to marry him. I finally ran out of excuses, so he had to go.”
“But I thought you cared about him.”
“Best man for growing roses I ever met. Vacuumed my house every Tuesday, took out the garbage every weekend, and never raised the lid on the toilet that he didn’t wipe under the rim before he put it down.”
“Sounds like love to me. Why didn’t you marry him?”
“My dear girl,” Raelynne looked shocked. “What would I have told all the others?”
I thought about my own Romeo. He’s put up with a lot more than bad bread and garbage duty over the years.
Romance isn’t dead. It’s just making the rounds.

Roast Rage

Contrary to the biased opinion of teenaged boys in the 17-19 age bracket who crash into my kitchen at an hour past minute rice, shedding sweaty soccer gear, band instruments, and rented video games, My name is not What’s For Supper. Likewise, I am not the seating hostess at Denny’s, nor am I the Sample Girl at the food court.
Now I understand my mother better. She used to stare longingly out the window while mashing potatoes and mutter, “If the world were to end today, I would have to serve biscuits to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse before I could go to glory.” I thought she was batty. Really it was roast rage.
Pondering the matter while I munched on the crunchy brown parts of the chicken crust last night, I decided that there are some actions that could tend to make me snippy in the kitchen. So I have thoughtfully prepared a menu of activities for potential combatants to avoid when I’m engaged in actual food preparation. Break one of these rules and I can’t guarantee what will happen with the potato masher.
* Don’t kiss me when I’m making gravy. Gravy is a narcissistic beast and fully capable of expressing jealousy in the form of oddly shaped lumps and unappealing consistency. (This one is directed more toward the head of household who is filled with joy and the love of life whenever he smells food in the final stages of preparation. I don’t see much of a problem where the teenaged boys are concerned.)
* Don’t tell me the potatoes have lumps, but you like them that way. The potatoes won’t be the only thing that’s served up with a few extra bumps that evening.
* If your main objective is to stand in front of the stove and steal samples from the chicken plate, don’t offer to help me in the kitchen. If you want to be of assistance, save me the trouble and stick your bottom lip in the cheese grater.
* Anyone apprehended peeking into pots boiling merrily away on the stovetop and making the same sound I make when I step in something gooshy will come away with a better understanding of the term "cauliflower ear. "
* Sampling the meatloaf and saying, “You know what would make this good?” is grounds for assault with a meat mallet.
* Don’t report the fun everyone else is having in the living room, scream for me to come watch the new Geico commercial, or exclaim “Oh, you missed it!” while I’m carefully browning the crescent rolls. Pillsbury didn’t spend all that time packing dough in that little can for me to let it go up in smoke while I’m dashing into the next room to watch a lizard talk.
For those of you who can't remember the rules, feel free to ask questions. I'll be in the kitchen. Sharpening my potato peeler.

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

If I see one more women’s magazine exhorting me to walk myself thin, I think I’ll hurl a bucket of brownie mix. If walking made me thin, my weight would register in the negative numbers by now.

Today I walked to the car and back three times. When I made the first trip back to the house to get my car keys, I heard my husband humming and starting the water for a shower. Rounding the corner back into the kitchen, I spied a blue sleeve hanging from the top of the refrigerator (don’t ask), and grabbed the overshirt for my son to wear for “Blue for Spirit” day.

“Here’s you a blue shirt.” I chirped, sliding into the driver’s seat.

“Grunt,” he replied. Since I happen to know that a single syllable grunt is teenagerspeak for “Thanks Mom, without you I would be like a wireless game controller with dead batteries,” I was overcome with maternal love. Until I realized he had also forgotten his shoes.

Sending that boy back into the house is like watching an Infomercial for the Thighmaster and waiting for plot development.

I jogged up the hill and took the steps to the back door two at a time. It took me three laps down the hall, through his room, and around the kitchen table before I found two shoes that matched. I decided not to ask about the cross-trainer in the microwave. In the shower, Hubby was midway through "The House of the Rising Sun" with accompanying voice-produced instrumentals.

“Ready to go?” I asked wearily as I climbed into the car, sucking up some early morning effervescence from the caffeine-loaded diet soda I kept in the drink holder.

Grunt.

“I love you too, Sweetie,” I beamed and reached for the keys. The keys that were still in the house where I’d dropped them to get the Spirit Shirt. Shouldering open the car door, I trudged the winding trail to the kitchen door and snagged the keys.

Back in the car, I sank again into the driver’s seat. Sweat was battling hairspray for control of my ’do. “Let’s go. We’re late.”

Grunt.

“Do you really need your band instrument every day? Aren't the notes the same as yesterday?”

Raised eyebrow.

I opened the car door and looked up the steep, rock-strewn hill toward the house. Then I whipped out my cell phone. A musical, waterlogged voice answered.

Why should I reap all the benefits of walking? Last night over dessert, I noticed Hubby has some love handles that definitely could use some work.