Kitchens lessons learned

By By Suzanne Langcuster
When you are in the kitchen anything can happen.
We try to make our kitchens safe for ourselves but also for the younger members of our family who love to play under the cook's feet. Fire is something that can happen so quickly, and having an extinguisher nearby is a must and may save your kitchen.
There are many funny events that occur in the kitchen also. It can be the hub of activity.
I recall a summer when we were busy making jelly. It was a busy summer day. We had a piano tuner tuning our piano and we had just finished peeling and cooking our apples to make jelly.
I put the paraffin on the stove in a small pot to melt and seal the jars. For some reason I walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and went to another room in the house.
In just minutes my youngest son John came running down the hall and said, "Mother, don't get excited but your kitchen is on fire."
We had just painted the kitchen. Running was all that came to mind. Instead of grabbing the extinguisher I grabbed the pot with the hot paraffin, which was on fire and tried to get it to the sink.
It napalmed on me and burned my hand badly.
Fortunately, thanks to the Good Lord and good doctors, I was okay. I walked away from that having learned two lessons:
1. Keep those extinguishers handy.
2. Put your paraffin in the microwave to melt.
One of the more humorous events in Mother's kitchen was with my sister's cat. This cat was a jumper. It would high jump from one thing to another. Our family had been gone and when we returned we could hear the cat hollering in the most mournful sound you could imagine. We began to search and followed the noise to the kitchen.
After some brief searching, Dad walked near the refrigerator and said, "That crazy cat has jumped down in the back of the refrigerator." Laughter filled the kitchen, but Dad wasn't too happy.
He had to remove the whole back of the refrigerator to get the cat out. That cat shot out of there, uninjured, like a bullet.
Kitchens are a very important part of the learning process.
It is there we learn to cook with safely, hang around long enough to gather what is left, and to never leave a jumping cat loose in the house while you're gone.