Stop Judging Me

Stop judging me! Oh, you're not judging me? Well, you're about to be.

I have a confession to make: I, Christine Webb, cannot cook a frozen pizza.

Don't ask me how I messed that up, but I did. Royally. Like, really REALLY messed it up. Take-away-my-wife-license kind of horrible.

It all started because I had a really long day. Rex suggested that we just do something "easy" for dinner and get a frozen pizza so I wouldn't have to cook. Awesome! Great thought in theory.

The first sign that I had done something wrong came when smoke started billowing out of the oven. I opened the oven to see what was smoking. This was a bad idea, as more smoke just started pouring out. I grabbed the pizza out and turned the oven off, but it kept smoking. We quickly learned that the smoke detector in our kitchen is broken. The rest of our apartment started filling up with smoke, and so Rex opened the door to the hallway in order to let some of it out. That is when we learned that the smoke detector in the hallway is NOT broken. Nor is the one in our neighbor's apartment. Like any self-respecting person who had just set off two community smoke alarms, Rex slammed the door shut.

With our door shut, more and more smoke started filling the apartment. I started wondering if I should crawl around on the ground like they show in little kids fire safety videos. My thoughts about that were interrupted by the realization that the smoke alarm next to our bedroom does, in fact, work. "SCREEEEE SCREEEE SCREEEE SCREEEE!!!!!" it chastised us. I jumped up and down and waved my hands over my head to try to clear the smoke from the detector so it would stop. Finally it did. I skittered into the living room to talk to Rex. "We have to do something about all of this smoke!" I whimpered. "What can we do?!" coughed Rex. "All of the doors and windows are caulked shut for the winter!" Just then our smoke alarm started screeching again. I groaned and ran back to the hall to do my jumpy "clear the smoke" dance. In between jumps I hollered, "WELL YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO UNCAULK SOMETHING!" Rex saw that this was most definitely true, and he got to work on uncaulking our sliding glass door. He finally undid all of his hard work from the fall, and we got the door open. The smoke (and all of our heat) finally started making its way outside.

Once we got the smoke mostly cleared, we trooped the the kitchen to check out the damage on the pizza. After all, we were REALLY hungry. The pizza didn't look that bad, actually - just the bottom was a bit charred. This still confuses me, as I read the directions on the box a million times after this incident and still can't figure out what I did wrong. The temperature was right, and I was still supposed to leave it in for five minutes past when all of this smoking happened! Rex said that part of the pizza dripped onto the bottom of the oven, and that is what started smoking. I still don't know for sure what it was.

Hating to waste food, we decided to eat the pizza. We started eating, and it really didn't taste too bad! I looked up from my food to say to Rex, "It really isn't even that burned..." but I ended up laughing hysterically because what I got to say instead was, "Um, honey? You have ashes on your nose." He had ASHES on his NOSE. I am a horrible wife. He started laughing and pointed out, "Christine - I don't get it. You take the most complicated recipes and make them taste amazing, but you can't do frozen pizza?! It makes no sense!"

It really doesn't make any sense - I am still baffled. Let me assure you, though - from now on our "easy dinners" will come in the form of Hot N Ready's or other such easy, cheap food that I do NOT have any part in preparing. I'm sure our neighbors and the rest of our building will really appreciate it.