Microwave Disaster-AKA My Husband

Growing up, the microwave was the main kitchen appliance in our household. It was great for making most of our meals-take out Chinese, heating up soup, etc. I think we would have starved without it. It’s not to say that my mom was not a good cook, it is just that it was not really her thing. She has many fine qualities, but kitchen creativity was not at the top of the list. As a result, I became quite proficient over the years at using the microwave to make everything from sweet potatoes to vegetable dishes. I bathed in the extra radiation that pulsed through my body as I stared into the magic heating box willing my foods to be cooked faster. I could not imagine life without the microwave. Then I met the man who would be my husband.
I had found the only person of my generation who did not grow up with a microwave. Correction, the only person of my generation that grew up in a developed country and was college educated. Furthermore, he grew up in a major metropolitan city, Chicago, for instance, and not in the rural foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Now, I did not find this out immediately, but a series of events led me to this remarkable discovery. Just a few weeks into our relationship, my husband-to-be, came to my apartment to hang out and eat dinner. I had made lasagna earlier in the week and put individual pieces in the freezer to eat for leftovers. It was my first chance to show my new boyfriend that I could cook. He took out a piece of the lasagna and asked me how long it should be put in the microwave. I told him about two minutes and went back to the cookies that I was baking. Everything was fine, for now.
Later, as we were watching TV he took a frozen brownie out of the freezer and this time put it in the microwave without first requesting a duration for the defrost. I realized this about a minute into its reheating. In the middle of our conversation, I suddenly darted out of my chair and asked him for how long he had turned the microwave on. It was just as I had feared; he put the brownie in for two minutes as well. “Turn it off! “I shouted at him.” It was too late. When he opened the door to the microwave, the brownie was ablaze. So what was my husband-to be’s fight or flight response? He slammed the door on the smoldering brownie and ran away. Great. I’ve got me a real superhero here, I thought.
Well, the damage had been done. Smoke billowed out of the microwave door and left a gray, acrid haze hanging over my 750 square foot apartment. We did what any logical people would do; we stopped and dropped, just as we’d been taught in kindergarten when the firemen visited the school. As we lay on the floor below the smoky air, we contemplated our next move. Obviously, we couldn’t sit in the apartment any longer as our lungs were already beginning to burn. “What were you thinking, putting the brownies in for that long!?” I asked him. His response made everything clearer, “ I didn’t have a microwave growing up.” I’m not sure if it was the bitter aroma permeating the air or sheer shock that made me almost faint. I thought he was kidding. Who didn’t grow up with a microwave? Any self -respecting child of the ‘80s was all too familiar with microwave popcorn and heating up a bowl of Campbell’s condensed soup. Who was this guy, I thought? What kind of Podunk town did he come from? I didn’t know if this was going to work.
Well, a few weeks later, after the cloud of gray smoke had evaporated from my apartment and most of the ash had been removed from the major surfaces, I invited my husband-to-be back over, although now I retained an air of caution whenever he was alone in the kitchen. We stood in my claustrophobic cooking space baking those fantastic peanut butter cookies with the Hershey’s kiss in them. I put him in charge of melting the butter. I had already learned my lesson about giving him strict parameters on microwave usage from the aforementioned experience. I handed him the butter and the cup to melt it in. I thought I had my bases covered this time. Wrong again.
He put the butter in the microwave and turned it on to the assigned time; however, about 5 seconds in, I heard something pop and explode. “Are you kidding me?” The voice in my head yelled. “What is it this time?” I nervously opened the microwave door to find that he had not taken the metal wrapper off of the butter sticks and, no surprise to those microwave savvy individuals out there, but the metal had exploded. “Why did you leave the metal on?” “I didn’t know you couldn’t put it in the microwave,” he explained. The look on his face was so pitiful and frustrated with himself that I couldn’t be angry. Amazingly, my top of the line Target microwave managed to withstand this torture, how is beyond me. We quickly removed the exploded butter and its casing and I sent my htb out of the kitchen for several weeks.
As I thought that these kitchen catastrophes were limited to my apartment, I soon learned that I was not alone. By now, all of our friends had heard of my htb’s miniscule microwave knowledge and were on high alert whenever he was around. However, one day at work, he escaped surveillance and put a paper Christmas plate with a helping of a tasty holiday treat inside the microwave. All of this sounds fine except that the plate had the shiny trim around the outside that indicates some sort of metal was involved in its creation. Sure enough, about 15 seconds into the heating, that plate and its contents detonated as well. As smoke wafted out of that microwave in a déjà vu moment for my husband and all those around him, I can only imagine the defeat in his eyes as he realized that he was never safe in the presence of a microwave. It took some explaining about the seemingly harmless paper plate and its fancy metal edging, but eventually my husband-to-be came to the understanding that while he excelled in many aspects of his life, appliance aptitude was not one of them.
I learned two very valuable lessons about men or at least my man from these experiences. 1. The old saying, if you want something done right, ask a woman still applies. While this appalled me as a member of the generation that saw more women entering the workforce and leaving the kitchen behind than ever before, somethings might just be genetic. 2. Most important, some men are either incredibly inept when it comes to the kitchen or mind-blowingly maniacal. Maybe this whole, I don’t know how to use a microwave shenanigan was really not my boyfriend actually lacking that much common sense, but it was actually a clever ploy so that he could retain the services of someone else to cook him food while he played video games in his underwear. While I haven’t yet figured out to which category my husband belongs, I am sure that with numerous household appliances to be tackled, I’ll figure it out.