This morning started dramatically when the bread caught on fire in the toaster. Happy Family Day to me!
My husband shuffled wearily out of bed – he was sleeping in, the poor man – and turned off the smoke detector without even raising an eyebrow and went wearily back to bed, because I’m forever setting the smoke detector off while I’m cooking. The stupid smoke detectors are just too SENSITIVE. Our 40 year old toaster has perhaps had the biscuit. Maybe. (and if my camera’s batteries weren’t dead, I would have caught a picture of the flaming toaster, but alas….)
It’s been that sort of month. We’re all still vaguely sick – the virus that’s made the rounds in town really hangs on, apparently, and I spend much of my time feeling either chilled (because of the winter that WILL NOT END) or kind of nauseated and bleh and not much like making supper, despite being possibly the world’s hungriest person. And yet my inconvenient children still want food, which means that I’ve been relying on my rice cooker that Cuisinart sent me A LOT:
I throw some rice and water in, turn it on and go lay back down – meanwhile, the rest of supper has been cooking all day in the slow cooker and come supper time, the food has pretty much cooked itself. It’s very handy, especially this time of year when everyone is feeling kind of cruddy and it’s cold and you want something warm and comforting for dinner.
I hesitated before posting that picture, because you can see The Baby’s chubby hand as she attempted to put a different lid on the pot. The rice cooker had just been turned on and so wasn’t hot yet, but it’s important to remember that much of the kitchen is a very unsafe place for children – a young toddler was recently horribly burned locally while playing in the kitchen, and hearing that has caused me to review our household rules about children in the kitchen. The Baby helps me measure rice and water into the unplugged rice cooker, but is not allowed near it once it’s hot. The Girl is allowed to use the hand mixer with supervision, but she’s not allowed to put pans in the oven. The Boy is allowed to carefully chop bananas with a sharp knife so long as a parent is watching, but he’s not allowed to do most other things because he’s a SIX YEAR OLD BOY and I don’t know if you’re around SIX YEAR OLD BOYS a lot, so let me tell you: they are an unpredictable people.
That poor toddler’s accident was all over the local news for a while, and a police officer who was interviewed said that the kitchen is not a safe place for children, the end. And it’s really NOT, but it’s a measured risk on our part – doing the best we can to insure our children’s safety while raising them to be people who can competently feed themselves. Having a daily relationship with the preparation of the food that they eat is vitally important, I think – not just to teach them the most basic of life skills, but also to have them respect the labour that goes into food, to see it not just as something that magically shows up in a restaurant or from a box. And before you know it, they go from beloved little nuisances to being actually helpful, there being no pause from their attempts to dump black pepper into the cake batter to being suddenly able to make much of supper, this arrow-fast path to adulthood.