Kitchen Nightmares, or The Curse of the Rice Pudding.

Doesn’t that sound like it could be the title of an Agatha Christie novel? Why am I never blessed with such brilliance when trying to think of headlines for news releases? I suppose we all have our gifts, and mine is a narrow one.

That seems to apply to my cooking skills, too. I am a somewhat erratic cook. I enjoy cooking, though tend to enjoy making things like millefeuille with my own painstakingly rolled pastry rather than more useful, life-sustaining things like casseroles. Sometimes my culinary efforts turn out well. Sometimes they do not.

F’r’instance (is that apostophe’d correctly? It looks weird), in the last six months, I have set fire to my oven twice while on the phone with my friend Elle. These occasions involved some kind of fruit crumble and toad in the hole. I’m pretty sure Elle doesn’t think I’m safe to be left alone in the kitchen.

What really seems to be my Waterloo, however, is rice pudding. Shouldn’t be hard, right? Milk, rice, sugar, any trimmings you feel like, stick it in the oven, bake. Now, twice I have forgotten about my rice pudding, gone out for the evening and come home to find dry, burnt rice (though I was just glad not to have burnt down the house).

I thought I’d be clever this time and make it on the stove top. Can’t forget about it bubbling away right in front of me, I thought. A few minutes after thinking that, I got distracted by a Pottery Barn catalogue until I vaguely wondered ‘what is that noise’ and looked up to find rice pudding bubbling and hissing over the stovetop and a saucepan burnt beyond recognition.

Why? Why is rice pudding beyond me? What does this mean, other than the fact that I have a complete inability to multitask (which I thought I learned when I broke my nose trying to move the washing machine in stockinged feet while talking on the phone. Yes, I know, some of you didn’t need to learn that particular lesson by experience)? (This is a very parenthetical post, I note).

Miss Marple would probably say how that reminds her of her old char-lady in St. Mary’s on the Wold (or whatever the name of her village was), who always missed a certain spot when she was dusting the piano and that turned out to be the clue to why she murdered her cousin Reginald). M. Poirot would put me at ease, saying how rice pudding is not a gentil dessert, and wouldn’t I prefer sirop, and then lure me into a room full of brilliant chefs and point at me accusingly.

One of these days I will blog about something brilliant and competent I did.