Understanding kitchen rules

Knowing what is permitted for me to do in the kitchen cookingwise is a lesson I learned many, many years ago. It’s limited I assure you. Thank goodness for the microwave oven. Otherwise, it would be extremely difficult.

It’s not that I don’t know how to cook, because I assure you I do. I learned how to cook when I was probably about a fourth grader.

But knowing how to cook and being permitted to cook in our kitchen are entirely two different matters.

I told my wife Pat I had to learn how to cook bacon when I was a Cub Scout and that was when I was about 9 or 10 years old. In order for me to earn one of my Arrows or badges, not sure which it was, I had to cook bacon all by myself.

However, that doesn’t much matter and it really doesn’t impress Pat.

But curtailing my cooking privileges in the kitchen came during our first year of marriage if I recall correctly.

In fact, it was in November of that year.

Each year just before the opening day of quail season, which was on Nov. 20 back then, my dad and a few of us would always goes out to western Oklahoma. It was a tradition.

We would spend the opening two days of the season hunting the Black Kettle Wildlife Management Area. We’d spend a couple nights in a motel and we’d eat lunch in the field.

I always fixed fried chicken for the group. So, the day before we were to leave, I was fixing fried chicken in our kitchen early that Saturday afternoon.

Pat had to work that Saturday morning. Don’t think I bothered to mention to her about my always cooking chicken. In fact I’m sure I hadn’t. Just forgot to say anything about it cause I figured she didn’t really care.

I was finishing up frying the chicken when she got home from work. When she walked in and saw what I was doing, and the mess I’d made, I knew immediately I had figured wrong about her caring.

She took one look and I’d been better off saying nothing when she asked me what I was doing. I should have kept my mouth shut.

That was the final time I fried anything in our kitchen. She even finished frying the chicken.

Cooking outside on the grill or charcoaling is all right, just not in the kitchen.