Kitchen disasters

If you ever want to create an unbelievably rancid, awful smell that will spread throughout your house and give everyone a headache, leave a tangerine in a lunchbag, tuck the lunchbag away in a cupboard for three weeks, and then find it and open it up. Then run. It turns out that “try to wash out the lunchbag” will be the incorrect answer; the correct answer involves flame.

And then, having adequately aired the kitchen by this morning, I thought I would make oatmeal. Wrong! Not enough oatmeal, which is kind of a hard thing to stretch. Okay, plan B: corn sticks. I even have an egg, which is a rare surprise. But you know what? The corn meal recipe I’ve used 200 times doesn’t come out quite like normal. So we’ll see. But we may be right back to the cereal boxes in a few minutes.