The family kitchen is a place of mystery

Who eats the toast that’s nuked on settings above number four?

My research came to an end when Long Suffering Wife raced into our smoke filled kitchen with a fire extinguisher.

RECENTLY I found myself languishing on the lounge with an icepack on my fist wondering how I, a man who lifts heavy stuff for a living, nearly dislocated two fingers trying to open a bottle of bolognaise sauce.

Why are these lids screwed on so eye-poppingly tight? And how are weaker, older, arthritic or disabled folk getting them off?

Do they get someone else to unscrew them, or simply go without? Perhaps they use a large pair of multi-grips to remove the caps; like I’ll be doing from now on.

That night, I shovelled down two large helpings of spag bol – while I still could.

The next morning another mystery popped up along with my burnt toast: Why are there 10 settings on the toaster when anything over four, turns bread to charcoal? Seriously, who eats charred toast? I did some experimenting and discovered that each of those six settings produces an amazing variety of blackened bread, from merely scorched, to radioactive crumbs.

My research came to an end when Long Suffering Wife raced into our smoke-filled kitchen with a fire extinguisher.

When I was allowed to work unsupervised again, Mystery #3 arrived while I was making scrambled eggs; unfortunately I’d started out making fried eggs.

How are my eggs managing to weld themselves to the bottom of an alleged non-stick frying pan?

I honed the edge of our egg flip to samurai sword sharpness and it slid under the eggs without smushing them, but it also removed quite a lot of non-stick coating from the bottom of our frying pan.

Which leads us to the final mystery: When will Long Suffering Wife finally ban me from the kitchen, allowing me sit on the lounge with a cold beer in one hand while she does all the cooking?