“What. The. Hell. Is. That?”
“I call that ‘dinner’.
“Oh, you can’t fool me, I’ve had dinner once and it didn’t look anything like this.” There before her was a bowl of….something. Mostly grey with a hint of orange color and mottled patches of crispy crust as if the concoction had rolled down the highway for about 10 miles. Then someone had flattened it with a 2 by 4 and dropped it into this soup bowl. She looked up at him with a WFT look on her face.
“You’re better off not knowing all the details, and I implore you not to go into the kitchen until I give you the green light. I might have to call in a contractor or two and I suspect we’ll be eating carry out for the rest of the week.” The look on her face changed from whimsy to downright exasperation. More details were called for.
“Well, it’s like this. I was watching TV and flipping through channels when fluffy jumped up on the coffee table and knocked over the encyclopedia and it landed on my foot. That’s when I threw the remote at Fluffy, missed and it sailed out the open window. Since we live on the eleventh floor I simply wrote off the remote. So there I was watching some cooking show. “The waffle hour.” It’s amazing! This guy spends an hour a week cooking nothing but waffles! Who knew!? Anyway after that, was some boring cook with an English accent talking about cheese soufflés and how delicious they were. I thought the guy was an A-hole, but after an hour of waffles, I was hungry so I thought I’d give the cheese soufflés a try. We didn’t have enough real cheese so I tossed in some cottage cheese to round out the recipe. Tossed it in the oven, set a timer on my phone and waited.
“Well, Fluffy was giving me that evil eye of hers so I wasn’t going to let any damn cat get the better of me so I went down to the courtyard to find the remote – which I did, but the battery cover and batteries were missing. That’s when I realized I left my keys in the apartment so I climbed up the fire escape. Or half way before someone called the cops on me and I spent 45 minutes explaining to them who I was, where I lived and why I was on the fire escape. Mrs. Roper had to identify me in person as living in the building before they’d let me continue my climb.
“Long story short, I continued up the fire escape cause the only way in the apartment was the open window, so that took another 20 minutes and as I was climbing through the window I must have startled Fluffy cause she bit my hand. SEE! By this time the god awful smell was waifing outa the kitchen and when I went in, there was this black smoke billowing outa the stove. Let me tell you, Fabeeze can cover ANY smell. I think that sheen on the soufflé is part Fabreeze.
“So, here’s dinner. A nice Cheese Soufflé I made for you.”
“We’re probably gonna need a new stove.
“And a new cat, but that’s a story for another time.”