Thursday, December 5, 2013

It was "One of Those Days"


I hate “those days”. I am sure you also do, as I am sure you have had them as well. Just this past week I had one of “those days”.

It started in the afternoon when I arrived at work. This would be my job at a group home. This is a home where individuals live who score a bit lower on some silly standardized test than you or I might score.

Like the awesome employee that I am, I checked the assignment book and found that I was cooking dinner on this soon to be disastrous day. I like dinner; I like to eat; and I like to cook. I was eager to get started. I flipped through the menu and the dinner for the night was a variation of chicken pot pie.

This brought to light the first problem. All of the chicken was frozen. I quickly immersed the package in warm water to let it start to thaw. Reading the recipe, I looked for the rest of the ingredients and realized we didn’t have the mixed vegetables that were called for.

Despite these two major set backs, I was undaunted I decided to make a substitution on the vegetable.

The kitchen at work has two ovens, and I decided to take full advantage of them this evening. I put the chicken in one baking dish, covered it in creamy goodness to make a delightful gravy and put the dish in one oven. Then I turned on the other oven to pre-heat. This was my critical error.

After a few minutes, the fire alarm went off. I was perplexed and checked the ovens to see what happened. It seems that someone on a previous shift had put a plastic plate with food on it, into the oven. The plate had melted, and when I opened the oven door, I was assaulted by a cloud of noxious smoke.

I turned the oven off and we evacuated the house and waited for the fire dudes to arrive. When they did, I explained what happened, leaving out the fact that I was the one who had not checked the stove prior to pre-heating it.

After the fire dudes, along with a dudette, ventilated the house and declared it safe, we all went back in. I finished cooking dinner; instead of biscuits I made mashed potatoes.

The good thing? Everyone enjoyed dinner and no one succumbed to food poisoning.

The bad thing? A few days later I was looking at the menu book again and realized I had read the menu for the wrong date. I was supposed to make Chili.

2 comments:

  1. Your post made me laugh, once again. Reminded me of my experience not so long ago as I attempted to turn my harvest of carrots into soup. I ended up writing a post about it too. The title is a wee-bit of a giveaway as to how I was feeling at having one of those days too ("Giving my Oscar the Grouch the Boot"). No fire dudes or dudettes involved...but close! :)

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  2. Awesome read Robb. I enjoy reading when you post about the group home.

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