A little bit of backstory is necessary here: I live in a dumpy apartment with a pathetic kitchen and insufficient cooking implements. How bad, you ask? Let me see: I don’t have a wooden spoon, I have this thing that looks like a paint stirrer, and my stove has two temperatures: “boiling over” and “is that on?” You get the picture. This set-up leads to a lot of improvisation on the occasions when I do attempt to cook there and, more often than not, culinary disasters of an amusing, if inedible nature.

Last week I decided to win points with my daughter by making her rice crispy treats. My son, the same child who won’t eat any cereal that does not have the word “cocoa” in the name and who argues for the existence of “breakfast dessert,” doesn’t like rice crispy treats. Go figure. So I opened up the cupboard and pulled out the package of pink and white marshmallows (be sure to read the description) I had recently bought at Los Lagos, which is the Mexican grocery at Fairfield and Creighton, and got busy. Unfortunately, my one and only pot had dinner in it, so I cast about for a way to melt the butter and marshmallows. Of course, my 200 year old microwave should be just the thing!

Okay, if you’ve ever put a marshmallow in the microwave, you know that they puff up to ten times their normal size. I knew that; everyone knows that. But I figured that if I just kept a close eye on them and beat them down with the paint stirrer every 30 seconds or so, we’d be in business. How wrong I was. After cheerfully watching the marshmallows balloon up – it was really cool – and squashing them down for a couple of minutes, my enthusiasm began fade and I started to realize that this just wasn’t going to work. Plus they were sticky, really sticky; they were threatening to suck the paint stirrer in and never give it up. I quickly switched tacks. Since I didn’t have another pot, I decided to give a metal mixing bowl a try. Seemed reasonable. No, no it was not reasonable. Those things are not meant for stovetop use. As the pinkish lump of marshmallow began to brown on the bottom, I knew I had to cut my losses and compost the entire mess. (The dog couldn’t believe that I wasn’t slopping the whole sticky lump into his bowl.) I bought my daughter off with candy and ended the evening a wiser, if sadder person.

Related posts:

1. When Good Foods Go Bad – Part 2