Unbagging the Cats 1

Unbagging the Cats 1

Friday, October 14, 2011

All Stove Top With No Place to Go

The full moon Tuesday had me feeling a bit Halloweeny. That, and the Annual Ketchup Tablecloth Yard Ornament I pass every day on the way to school. But they don't hold a candle to the sight I beheld Wednesday morning, upon entering my kitchen after leaving The Pony and Hick to their own devices with a pan of Stove Top Whole Wheat Stuffing For Chicken.

Don't hate me because I'm a gourmet chef. Hate me because I serve up the food onto the plates, and abandon my eaters. This blog doesn't write itself, you know. Genius gallivants about town until all hours. Hick spends quality time with is goats and chickens. The Pony lives to game on his laptop. So we all do our own thing in the evenings. I dished up chicken and stuffing for The Pony, and told him that if he wanted some more, to wait and see what his dad left.

Sometime between The Pony's plating, and 4:50 the next morning, a near-catastrophe stuck the stove top. In the wee hours, with only an under-cabinet fluorescent bulb to shed some light on the situation, I heard in my head the stabby music from Psycho. Picture me peering at my almond Kenmore with the face of Eddie Murphy in Daddy Day Care, the scene where he opens the bathroom door to see how Jeff Garlin's son had potty-trained himself so quickly.

Crusty crumbs of stuffing lay scattered randomly across the once-smooth metal. Some chunks had lemminged themselves over the edge to splat on the linoleum before petrifying. I am fairly confident that both Hick and The Pony are acquainted with rudimentary tools such as the serving spoon. Like the one that was left in the pan. It's not as if I left them to their own devices to experiment, like chimps poking sticks into a termite mound. A bigger mess could not have resulted from inserting a mixer into the pan and turning it to HIGH. Did they put a blob of stuffing on the spoon, and flip it at each other's mouth, perhaps? Did they tip the pan over their respective faces, and revel in a shower of stuffing? Did they try to feed from it like pigs at a trough?

The site was disturbing. Not as disturbing as when Ben Stiller got his beans above his frank in Something About Mary. Or as disturbing as when Ben Stiller played pick-up basketball in Along Came Polly, and got a mouthful of sweaty, hairy, man-boob. But it was disturbing. In a non-Ben-Stiller kind of way.

There's no explaining the mysterious power of the full moon in cahoots with Stove Top Stuffing.

7 comments:

Tammy said...

And men think we have mysterious moon cycles.

Sioux Roslawski said...

Val--

ONLY from you would I expect something like this. If someone said, "Write a wicked-sharp post about Stovetop stuffing," I would say, "Wicked? Probably not," but you managed to make the ordinary extraordinarily funny. Well done.

Val said...

Tammy,
And teachers KNOW students have mysterious moon cycles.

***********************
Sioux,
Truth is wickeder than fiction. I writes 'em as I sees 'em unfold before my jaundiced eye.

knancy said...

My first “jump to” conclusion for the stuffing slaughter offender was Hick. I immediately could visualize him digging, scrabbling and clawing through that stuffing pan for the chicken MEAT just like he seines for soup MEAT. Then, I thought, it couldn’t be him if he is plugged into his crappy CPAP and dreaming some kind of heavy breathing dream. So it must have been your resident ghost. Then again, maybe Frig shot ice cubes like exploding pucks into the stuffing due to the post surgical problems. Frig was in the immediate area the entire time.
And I remembered “revenge is a dish best served cold". This is looking more intiguing by the minute. Ms. Frig in the kitchen with an icemaker!

Val said...

knancy,
I think you're onto something. All signs point to Frig. Who, by the way, is awaiting an organ transplant. The coldecystectomy was apparently unsuccessful. Her ice ducts are clogging regularly, resulting in difficulties in filling her ice bladder.

Hacking with a butter knife by Dr. Val Thevictorian does little to alleviate the symptoms.

Kathy's Klothesline said...

Sometimes I will tell he who is salivating over a tsty dish to just stick his face in the pan and snuffle .....

Val said...

Kathy,
Hick is so like a dog when supper is almost ready. He roams through the kitchen sniffing and salivating, then sits down to "chat" and distract me from the task at hand. I think he's waiting for me to drop something. So he can snarf it up in a heartbeat.