The Dangers of Cooking

Hello everyone! I hope your weeks were more fantastic than the thought of a thousand and one kittens mewing the tune to the Eagles' "Hotel California."

A very quick announcement: You will notice that there is a link titled "Case (Un)Managed" above this post. That is for a new mini-blog that I have recently started to help explain what social workers and those who work for non-profits go through on a daily basis (though regular, non-crazy people will probably find it funny too). Enjoy! 

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post!

So, I have something to admit; I love cooking. 

You Know That's Right

While I dislike most other activities that would qualify me as a domestic-diva, I can't resist the urge to wander into my kitchen, dig through the fridge and create something new. 

There is just something so stress relieving about all that chopping, boiling, beating... No, I've never been convicted for assault, why do you ask?

As much as I love cooking, cooking hasn't always loved me back. Our relationship is less of a love/hate relationship and more of a love/light-you-on-fire one.

Now don't get me wrong, I am a pretty spiffy cook. There isn't a soul on this planet who would contradict that. (This is might be due to the fact that I'm usually holding a kitchen knife when I ask people if they like my food.)

But I do have a... shall we say "energetic" presence when in the kitchen. That energy is occasionally expressed when I'm beating the side of a big pot with a wooden spoon while yelling, "Get back in there!" or when I'm furiously lecturing carrots on why they shouldn't attempt to roll off of my cutting board (they rarely listen, cheeky carrots).

Several of my friends, who have come over just to watch the fantastic spectacle that is me cooking, have mentioned that I really should just have my own show called, "I'm $#%@-ing Cooking, with Allison."

Now, the things that happen to me in the kitchen tend to border on the freak accident scale. I have turned baking brownies into a science project, cooking rice into a geyser and once even turned pancakes into a first rate fiasco. If you need proof check out "Life is a Circus Run by a Platypus."

Probably one of the most memorable of these little adventures happened my first week living in Spokane.

I had just moved into a studio apartment, which means that I was suddenly living in the tallest postage stamp on the planet. My kitchen was what my friend Kari likes to call a "one-butt" kitchen.

It had no counter space. I often found myself chopping vegetables on top of my microwave which sat precariously on top of a garage-sale nightstand, mixing ingredients on my coffee table and occasionally using my blender on my writing desk.

It was a time of imagination, perseverance and finding out new and incredible ways to get cornbread batter out of a living-room rug.

One night I decided to make some stir fried rice noodles. Simple enough: You boil noodles, you drain noodles, you heat noodles while adding sauce and veggies. Boom, meal.

Except in this case it was boil noodles, drain noodles, forget which burner you just cooked noodles on, set your colander on that burner, melt plastic colander permanently to your stove. Boom, quandary.

I quickly figured out a way to get the noodles out of the colander (namely lift up the entire burner on my gas stove and dump the noodles out). Now I was stuck with two kitchen appliances that had simulated the formation of the band the Rolling Stones (still together after 53 years!).

I tried prying it off, but the colander just started breaking off in little chunks. I tried pulling it off with pliers and nearly gave myself a black eye. I tried reasoning with the colander to leave, but it didn't believe me when I told it that the burner didn't really love it.

Finally, and possibly out of flaming vengeance, I decided that if melting it had gotten it stuck on there, maybe melting would get it off. I fired up the burner.

My Life in GIF Form

I would like to point out that I was technically not wrong, the colander did come off the burner. The other half of the story is that the colander lit up like it had Satan's seal of approval creating a momentary fireball.

Flinging all of it into the sink was probably the most sound of mind thing I did that entire evening. What lessons did I learn?

1. Plastic and fire are foes, not friends.

2. Eating the noodles that almost caused you to light your apartment on fire is a bittersweet experience.

3. When it comes to kitchens, less is not more. More kitchen means less chances of lighting something on fire.

If you want to see what's cooking in the kitchen this week, come join me on Facebook, Twitter (@AllisonHawn) and Goodreads!

Also, don't forget if you happen to be in the Boise area on June 13, you should come join me at Hyde Park Books for a book signing for "Life is a Circus Run by a Platypus!"

Totally Rad

Hello! I hope everyone had a fabulous week!

I had a week that pretty much wiped me off of my feet, which is how I ended up, with my trusty Netflix account, watching Beverly Hills Cop.

It had been forever and a day since I'd seen it, but laying there with my nutritional yeast covered popcorn (don't knock it until you try it), watching Eddie Murphy run around shooting people was exactly the therapy my soul needed. The man even makes a car break down by stuffing bananas in the tailpipe. Seriously, what more could you need?

I love films from the 1980's. Despite the crisp, clean, shiny feeling that all new movies seem to have, I still love hearing that synthesizer theme song and terrible dialogue. So, in case you need to be convinced as to why 1980's films are the bomb, here is why I adore them:

1. 1980's film plots didn't have to make sense.

No, seriously, as long as there was dialogue, some form of a climactic story-arc and inspirational sounding synthesizer music you could have written any plot and put it on the screen. And people did.

You want a story about a kid who fakes being sick for a day then runs amok; avoiding his parents and the principal, destroying an expensive car  and somehow managing to hijack a parade float? Sure! We'll give you Ferris Bueller's Day Off!

You want a movie about a teenager trying to win back his girlfriend from a skiing bully? You also desire that this movie include an entire montage of dancing fast food hallucinations that serve no purpose to the plot? Oh, and you also want the movie to be almost entirely comprised of dialogue like this:

Just go watch Better Off Dead!

There is something fantastic about watching a film that had a basic premise that someone just said, "You know what? Maybe we just need to throw a random scene where someone attempts to get high by snorting fully set Jell-o! Oooh! I know! Let's throw in a fanatical, and possibly psychotic, paperboy who will travel to the ends of the earth for two dollars!"

And that is how 1980's film plots pretty much go.

2. Bad guys in the 1980's were completely ineffective at life.

It always amazed me that villains in 1980's action flicks hired the most incompetent henchmen ever. With all the money they were shelling out to employ these losers, you'd think that requirement number one on the job description would be, "Can hold, load and fire a gun and be able to hit the broad side of Texas."

Your generic 1980's bad-guy underling might as well be given a Supersoaker full of bubbles for all the good they did defending their evil overlords. It constantly confounded me while growing up that the bad guys would face off against the hero, empty countless clips and do nothing more than modify the scenery and possibly trim a topiary. Then the hero would step out and basically blindly fire, like the picture to the right, and every human being in a ten mile radius would hit the dirt.

The only time a hero is actually shot is if it makes him or her look more tough, and half the time I think she or he had to jump in front of a bullet to get it to hit them!

3. People were extremely philanthropic in 1980's movies.

Coolest High School Janitor Ever!

Apparently it was normal in the 1980's for some kindly old janitor  at your high school to take you in, train you in some random martial art and then give you a classic car. At least the kid in Karate Kid didn't seem overly surprised about this.

It is also fairly common for a random old scientist to befriend local teenagers and allow them to play with their extremely expensive technical equipment, even when they blow the living crud out of it. After all, that's basically where the plot to Back to the Future came from.

4. The future was so much cooler in the 1980's than it actually turned out to be.

Speaking of Back to the Future where are my flying cars and hoverboards? Also, I think my lightsaber is long overdue and I haven't even heard hints of magical food packets that we can stick in a machine and magically hot and delicious food will pop out. Come on science, get with it!

5. Heroes didn't have to be complex.

While I enjoy my modern renditions of Batman and Spiderman as much as the next person, I also sometimes enjoy just watching mindless destruction at the sake of saving the world. Why does the world need saving? Umm... reasons?

Let's face it they all had reasons to cause wonton destruction (90% of the time it was revenge), but normally those plot devices were kind of lame.

A drug dealer attacks your buddy? You turn in your license to kill and go wipe out the equivalent of the population of a South American country to get your revenge. You also must make at least one building explode and kill a maniacal mastermind. That's it, that's all you need to be a 1980's action hero. No deep, dark secret, no inner-turmoil or conflict. You just need to know you're the good guy, and they are all bad guys.

6. If someone ever needed to train for something, there was always a band nearby to play awesome workout montage music.

Remember this little gem?

How would Sylvester Stallone have ever survived Mr. T without his theme music?

7. Evil masterminds almost always defeated themselves with monologue.

20 Minutes Later...

"Alright Johnny Goodguy, I have you tied to a chair and completely at the mercy of my amazing array of weaponry. Before I kill you however, I am going to explain every last detail of my nefarious plot, taunt you, read you my college dissertation and then show you a slideshow of evil kittens..."

I wonder how many times the world would have been destroyed or taken over if the evil mastermind had just cut out his ten-minute monologue and just shot the hero without further explanation?


 So, what were all of your favorite things about films in the 1980's?

In other news, thank you everyone who put a bid in at the Washington Chapter of the Modified Dolls' auction for the signed copy of "Life is a Circus Run by a Platypus!" The auction raised quite a bit of money for the Not For Sale Campaign!

As always, I can be found on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads!