Well, I just had a doozy of one. As it was occurring, it made me flustered and frustrated. But now that I think about it, it is pretty funny. I promise I'm not normally this dysfunctional.
On a side note, I am trying to correct my posture. I slouch terribly and my shoulders are always drawn up with tension. I figure that if I'm always tense, I might as well be tense in the right way.So I am trying to hold my back straight and keep my shoulders relaxed. It takes a ton of conscious thought to do this. Basically, I am trying to stand and move like a ballroom dancer.
So here's the back story: JayJay is in Kindergarten. His school has some sort of healthy snack program. An outside company donates healthy snack foods to all the kids in school everyday. They get peaches, apples, grapes, cucumbers, peppers, etc. Some of the items are things that make me scratch my head, like the small container of raw, chopped up zucchini. I've never eaten zucchini raw, but I guess maybe some people do. Anyway, sometimes the snacks they give are things that JayJay won't eat raw. Instead of letting the food go to waste, I cook it into something he will eat. One time they gave him slices of carrot and I used them to make carrot cake, supplemented with my own carrots, of course. He loved it. So when they gave him carrots again on Friday, he wanted me to cook with them again. But this time he wanted a pie instead of a cake.
I figured I could whip one together before I made dinner and we could eat it for dessert. Things started out going fine. Standing straight and tall, I put the carrots in a dish with a couple tablespoons of water, covered them, and steamed them in the microwave. While they were cooking, I put together the pie crust. Pie crusts are not my friends. I can make them taste good, but making them pretty is another matter entirely. No big deal. I figure if it's yummy, then the appearance doesn't matter. Don't tell a professional chef I said that though. I rolled out the dough, lifted it into the pie pan, and attempted to shape the edges. I had to tear off a bit here and smash it on there, but the end result would function. I set the crust aside. My shoulders were slightly high. I relaxed them so they dropped down to a more graceful position.
By then, the carrots were finished cooking. I took them out of the microwave and dumped them into the blender. Some of the carrots missed and spilled onto the counter. It didn't phase me. I picked them up and put them in the blender with their brothers. I put the lid on. Now, I know that if you try to blend hot things, the steam pressure will blow the lid off and splatter food all over the kitchen. I was really careful because I didn't want that to happen. I shouldn't have bothered, because even though that didn't happen, carrots still ended up all over the kitchen.
I knew that initially pureeing the carrots would be difficult just because the puree would be so thick. I deliberately added the couple tablespoons of water that was left in the bottom of the dish I steamed them in, hoping it would solve that problem. Nope. After blending for a few seconds, I could tell it wasn't working. The bottom carrots pureed fine, but the top carrots didn't drop down onto the blades. I grabbed a stirring utensil from my smoothie maker, put it through the small hole in the blender lid and tried to push the carrots down against the blades. No luck. That utensil wasn't designed for my blender so it wasn't long enough with the lid on.
I took the lid off.
I know that you should never stick utensils in a blender while it is running. But I figured if I just pushed a little deeper, I could loosen things up, get the carrots moving, and they would puree nicely on their own. I tapped on the top carrots. Nothing moved, but the motor made noise like it was working harder. So I pressed on the carrots harder. Still nothing moved. So I pressed harder.
Boom!
I don't even know what happened. Somehow the utensil struck the blades. My hand was knocked out of the blender jar by the ricochet and carrot puree and whole carrots splattered all over my kitchen. Yikes! I turned the blender off and counted my fingers. They were all still attached. I wasn't injured. I should have given up then, but I didn't. I wanted JayJay to have his carrot pie.
I cleaned up the carrot mess, putting the whole carrots back in the blender and wiping up whatever splatters I couldn't salvage. I checked the utensil. It was split in three places on its end, but I couldn't see any obvious chunks of plastic missing, so I figured there wouldn't be any in the pie. I realized my shoulders were high and my back was hunched. I corrected my posture and then turned the blender on again, taking care to turn it off to stir the contents. I made a little progress, but half of the mixture was still made up of whole carrots. I decided to add the remaining ingredients of the pie--which included honey, eggs, spices, and butter--hoping the extra fluids would loosen things up.
It worked. The remaining carrots pureed and the spices mixed in. All I had to do was add the sugar. I turned the blender off, dumped in the sugar, and turned the blender on. Moments later, I noticed the base of the blender was loose and the jar moved slightly when I touched it. Uh-oh. I shut the blender off and turned the jar to the right, trying to tighten it. It just got looser and carrot pie filling started oozing out of the base. I turned the jar to the left and it still got looser! No matter which direction I turned the jar, it loosened.
"No, please." I said helplessly as more and more filling oozed from the base of the blender.
My last resort was to tip the jar sideways fast enough that the pie filling would fall toward the lid and the spill would be minimal. No such luck. As I tipped the jar, all the pie filling spilled over the blender and the counter. All I could do was stand there and stare. What a nightmare.
My posture was terrible. I corrected it then carried the blender jar to the pie pan and let the remaining dregs of filling spill into the crust. Then I carried over the blender motor contraption and scraped as much filling off it into the crust that I could. Then I scooped handfuls of filling off the counter and dropped them into the pie pan over and over until most of the filling was in the crust.
The end result: a very messy looking pie. Counters, me, blender, floor, me, cabinets, stove, and me coated in carrot pie filling. All with the grace and poise of a dancer, right?
But finally the pie was baking in the over. Despite the disaster, it should still taste good. JayJay would have his pie.
Then JayJay came upstairs after eating leftover pizza for dinner.
"Can I have dessert?" he asked.
"No," I said. "It's not ready. I'm baking a carrot pie for you."
"I want candy for dessert," he said. "Can I have candy?"
Heck no, my son. Heck no.
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