Watch out! Cooking can be dangerous.

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In anticipation of my return to work, I was cooking some quinoa today. The plan was to make a cold quinoa salad to take for lunch for the early part of the week.  Quinoa is good for you, tasty, combines easily with a variety of produce to come up with a lot of different dishes.  The salad I was making today had red quinoa, fresh yellow tomato, onion, cucumber, summer squash (both yellow and green) and black beans.  Then, of course, I used my trusty Hendrickson’s sweet vinegar and olive oil dressing (yes, again).  The flavors meld perfectly to produce the most delicious summer salad.  Since I’m trying to eat healthier food and avoid fast food restaurants, this works well for me…something I actually like and that has a lot of different veggies in it.

I decided to cook the quinoa in the microwave since it’s so terribly hot today.  No need to heat the house up unnecessarily…isn’t that what microwaves are for?  So I measured out the quinoa I had left in my pantry (added quinoa to my grocery list) and used one part quinoa to two parts water.  Put everything in a microwave safe bowl, tore off enough plastic wrap to loosely cover the bowl, put it in the microwave for 8 minutes.  When the dinger went off, I opened the microwave door and noticed that the plastic wrap had puffed up.  I lifted the edge of it up…children, don’t try this at home!  Steam billowed over my right hand…ouch, ouch, ouch.  I’m proud to say not even one cuss word escaped from my mouth…that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking them, but at least I managed to keep my nasty thoughts to myself.  I left the offending bowl of quinoa where it was and walked over to the sink and ran cool water over my hand for a while.  That helped, well, at least as long as I kept my hand under the running water.  Kind of difficult to get anything else done with your hand under the faucet.  So I decided to be a big girl and just deal with the pain.  I sat down at the computer while the quinoa was cooling for 15 minutes…cooling, or sitting there, or something.  Hey, the instructions say to let it sit there for 15 minutes then put it back in the microwave for another two minutes…so that’s what I did.

As I was working on a blog post, I could feel the heat emanating from my fingers.  Not the best feeling in the world, but I’ve had worse things happen.  If I had an aloe plant, now would be the time (or past time) to coax a little aloe gel from the plant…note to self, add aloe plant to shopping list…

See, I took my mother’s advice and never ran with the scissors, or stuck my hand in the garbage disposal, or took a pan out of the oven without using a pot holder (just kidding, she never told me about that, somehow I just knew that was something you didn’t want to do), but the steam…I’m sure somewhere along the line, she must have informed me about the dangers of steam, but it slipped my mind for about five seconds today…now I’ve got the burns as a not-so-gentle reminder…cooking is a very dangerous activity.  The next time I hear someone say that they’re steaming mad, I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about.

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