Rice or Wrong

“Mate!” I exclaimed, frustrated at having to repeat myself for the third time in as many minutes. “Clean up as you go.”

Master14 was panicking about his upcoming Home Economics test where he was to cook up fried rice and had asked to have a practice run at home. I agreed incorrectly thinking a stress free night of someone else cooking for the family sounded great.

“Stop yelling at me,” he snapped back. “I’m anxious already.”

He was anxious!?

I’d spent the last fifteen minutes trying to keep my tone friendly and encouraging but it was getting increasingly difficult.

That’s not how the teacher said to cut an onion. Then why did you ask me to show you? Do I cut up the trunks of the broccoli and put them in too? Yes, I mean do you even look at what I feed you as you’re shovelling it into your mouth? I wanted a proper thing of corn not a can of corn, Dad. Well you should have said. I did – I told you I needed corn!

Nothing either of us was doing was right in the eyes of the other but he wouldn’t let me leave the kitchen and after one particular point in the proceedings I decided I wasn’t risking leaving.

Only a couple of minutes ago I’d walked past the saucepan bubbling away on the stove and asked him what had happened to all the water in with the rice.

“That doesn’t look like eight cups,” I told him.

Eight cups?!” he exclaimed, racing over. “I thought you said a cup.”

Half an hour later the family was enjoying Master14’s dish and giving him all the congratulations he seemed to think was warranted.

He was lapping it up. But of course he wanted more.

“What would you rate it out of ten, Dad?” he wanted to know.

“Oh, a ten,” I grinned through another mouthful of slightly overpowering burnt onion flavour.

I expected him to giggle and ask what I really thought of it and then we could discuss a couple of little places he could focus on during his test.

Nup.

“Good,” he nodded as if I was just confirming what he already knew. “I want to do really well.”

“You’ll do fine,” I assured him. “Just put the rice on and then prep everything else before you start cooking the onion and all the rest. Have it lined up in little bowls or something. And clean up as you go so you don’t end up in a mess where you can’t find anything. Trust me, it’s just easier.”

Turns out I mustn’t have stressed that last bit enough.

He slumped into the car seat after school and I knew before asking it mustn’t have gone as well as he’d hoped. I mean it had no chance of going that well, but it must have been even worse than I’d hoped.

“I think I got a C minus,” he grumbled.

“That bad?” I said, surprised. And I was. I mean the thing we ate was at least edible. The little kids even had seconds. “What happened? Did you burn the onions?”

Burn the onions? Forget to add water to the rice? Leave out the soy sauce? Snap at the teacher for emptying the fire extinguisher all over his frypan? Once I started to mentally list off the many ways it could have gone wrong I realised there might have been any number of things.

“No, the rice tasted fantastic,” he said, perking up for a moment. “It was even better than last night.”

So an eleven out of ten then.

“Well, what was the problem?” I prompted.

He sighed, a bit miserable again.

“We weren’t marked on our cooking,” he said, before saying something which made me think the teacher must have been in a cracker of a mood that day and as such extremely generous with her marking. “We were marked on our cleaning up.”

Poor bugger. He didn’t stand a chance.

In other food news: Came home from town to find THIS. Fridge open, leftover sausages & Kewpie in Mister14’s hands, sitting on a FRIGGIN STOOL. Because ya gotta be comfortable. This is why we’re poor.

“Who brought the cutlery out?” I asked, giving our seven year old a knowing sort of look. “Me,” said Master14, with a huge dollop of you’re welcome. Amongst the more common implements can I draw your attention to the two cheese knives, one steak knife and a couple of…I don’t know. Barbie forks? Also, for the seven of us he’d grabbed eight forks and six knives. Because he’s all about attention to detail. Can you guess which silverware I made him eat his snags with?

Raising a family on little more than laughs

not even a spoonful of sponsorship in this post

1 Comment

  • I still remember in home ec we were making vanilla slice. Clearly being the only one in the whole class who could actually cook i peeled the plastic off the puff pastry before cooking it to which my group all yelled at me and told me not to take it off until they asked if you were meant too…My teacher looked like she might cry as the whole class descended on her to ask if you took the plastic off before cooking hahaha Blogging about my own grocery haul this week, without puff pastry!

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.