Martha Stewart Doesn't Live Here

Last week the girls went blueberry picking and ended up with 24 pounds!! One afternoon, shortly thereafter, I ended up with four girls in the kitchen with the task of baking something with the berries. I split the girls into pairs and, having confidence that Girl A & B seemed to know what they were doing, and realizing that Girl C & D were mere babes in the woods of cookery, I left A & B to fend for themselves. Of course, I did keep an eye on them and, as I said, they seemed competent. So Girls C & D made blueberry crisp - simple enough. We got it in the oven and they left the kitchen...just in time for me to realize that Girls A & B had committed a greivous error. They were making pear blueberry cobbler and instead of mixing the doughy part separately...they had NOT FOLLOWED THE DIRECTIONS and had combined ALL the ingredients in one bowl. Woe was me. I certainly learned my lesson not to take ANYTHING for granted as far as the girls' cooking skills are concerned. We did our best to salvage the disaster but it was pretty much beyond all attempts at repair.

The crowning touch came when Girl A opened up a new container of heavy cream to use as the last ingredient. After she had poured it into the hopelessly goopy mixture, she pointed out that it seemed odd...and lo, we looked at the expiration date and it was back in July! It smelled horrid and when i poured it out into the sink, there was definite CLOTTAGE involved. GROOOSS!

At this point, it was very hot and there was a construction meeting going on in the kitchen, and I had to stifle hysterical laughter. I told the girls to put it in the oven anyway - I didn't want them to have to throw it away at the moment of culmination. And the oven was already on anyway. I also wanted to see what it would look like...I set the timer only to realize later that I had set it for hours instead of minutes. ( Instead of sixty minutes, it was sixty hours.) And when I tried to cancel and change it, it wouldn't accept that command and did all sorts of things which totally confused me. It ended up refusing to be changed and so we just had to wait for sixty hours to go by before it buzzed. Oh my word. I was quite humiliated.