I normally have tons of cooking adventures to write about, but this week the most adventurous thing that happened to me was burning my arm quite badly while making Rice Krispie squares – and the irony was that I was making them because I didn’t want to make anything more complicated. Oh ha ha, me!
It’s a pretty dandy burn, actually, and has been great for freaking out my kids, but it also has been reminding me that there are lots of bad things that can happen in the kitchen. Knives! Boiling water! Broken glass! Falling off of the chair that you’ve pushed up to the cupboards to get the stupid trifle dish down! And since I cook A LOT and I’m accident-prone to begin with, you may gather that I also have more than my share of exciting kitchen incidents. The funniest – in retrospect, although NOT SO MUCH AT THE TIME – was the time I blew up an entire sink full of dishes by first heating them up on the stove and then throwing a bottle of frozen water on top (ta da!), and the scariest BY FAR was the time The Boy (who was only 2 at the time) pulled AN ENTIRE DISHWASHER on top of himself. And just the memory of that – ACK. He was okay, but STILL.
There are the safety rules that we all know (at least, I hope we all know them): keep pot handles turned in towards the stove, for example. And then there are things that SHOULD be well known kitchen rules, like "always make sure you close your upper cupboards so that when you reach down to get something, you don’t brain yourself as soon as you stand up." If I had this nicely embroidered on a sampler, maybe, I would have far fewer kitchen accidents, but alas, it’s hard to find an olde time vintage sampler with "Close Your Cupboard Doors, You Moron." embroidered on it by some gentle hand.
Here’s how our kitchen renovations are going along so far:
Oh yeah. That’s my bedroom AGAIN. We haven’t been able to start our kitchen renovations yet, which means that my husband has been doing tons of smaller renos around the house, and that we FINALLY have the beginnings of a nice bedroom! When he started painting yesterday, we weren’t sure if the ceiling was pink or if it only LOOKED pink because of the walls. The answer is kind of obvious now, isn’t it? So we’re going to have that all finished by mid-week, which will be nice – especially nice, since we’re camping out with the kids right now. And having a nice bedroom will be our tenth anniversary – ten years this Friday! – gift to ourselves.
The kitchen renovations should start – I HOPE – in August. What should we make sure to include in our plans? Is there anything in your kitchen that makes your life much easier? Open cupboards or not-open cupboards? And most importantly, what colour should we paint it? Our theoretical kitchen renovation thanks you.