Other people in the family have their own little things they get teased about. For instance, my father will never live down the cheese-filled sausages. And I? I will never live down a few things (one of which happened the other day and we will not discuss). I will never live down my first frozen pizza.
Much like in the sausage story, mom was not home for dinner. For whatever reason, Dad and my brother were out for the afternoon and were coming home late. They called home, where I was alone. I was roughly eight years old at the time, but responsible enough not to burn the house down so I was sometimes left alone.
As per usual, I let the answering machine get the call and heard who it was before I answered.
"Hi Gray," Dad said (there's that name again.)
"Hi Dad, where are ya?" I asked in my cheerful eight-year-old voice.
Dad answered, "We're on our way home but we're running late. Can you stick the pizza in the oven? Just follow the directions and use the oven mitts."
I followed the directions, I used the oven mitts and the Digiorno (not delivery!) cheese-stuffed crust pizza was going to ready by the time Dad and my brother came home. I was excited that I had done it on my own.
I should have known that nothing with cheese inside it is ever going to end well when it's just the three of us. Except for when it's Mozz Sticks...mmm...
Anyways, to continue on...Dad and my brother came home a little before the oven timer went off to announce the pizza was done. Dad took it out of the oven, got our pizza slicer out of the drawer and went at it.
"God, this is a tough crust," Dad groaned, pushing down way harder than usual on the pizza cutter.
My brother decided to take a turn at cutting. We all took turns. We sliced the pizza, except no one could get through the bottom crust. My brother decided to try to tear his piece of, because the pizza was clearly done.
There was a silence as his hand slid under his piece of pizza. "Gray, did you remember to take the cardboard of the bottom?"
"What?" I asked.
"There's cardboard on the bottom of a frozen pizza. Did you take it off?"
There was about a minute of silence as I realized what was going on. "It wasn't in the directions...." I just followed the directions. Whoops.
1 comment:
Ah yes. You just followed the directions. Just like I did when I was working in a lab once and the book said throw the capsule into the mixture. So I did. And there it floated, swirling around as the magnetic stir bar turned. My lab partner came over and said, "Silly, you have to empty the contents of the capsule."
"But, the directions did not say that." was my reply. Alas, but I was not 8 years old. I was 26 and felt pretty stupid. Stupider than you should my dear. For I was being paid to be a chemist. You were a child and not being paid to cook dinner. :)
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