Aussie Pie - Anatomy of a Kitchen Disaster

When I signed off yesterday, I fully intended to give you the ingredients and details of preparation of Aussie Pie.  However, after cleaning up yesterday the mess in my kitchen I'd made the day before, I've had a change of heart.  I made a really huge mess, you see, and I think it's incumbent on me to discourage any attempts at emulation.  At any rate, we'll take up Aussie Pie again in due time.

Now, I know you're not really curious about the kitchen clean-up I was compelled to perform yesterday after submitting my post, but I'm going to talk about it, anyway.  My purpose is to tell a horror story, in hopes that it will discourage you from cooking when you're tired, and to give you a concrete example of the cost, in terms of unnecessary and entirely avoidable work, of culinary mental mistakes.

As you'll recall, I, in the throes of an exhaustion-caused stupidity attack, overfilled my blender with scalding-hot gravy-makings, and when I 'shot the juice', figuratively speaking, to the blender, the blender responded in kind by shooting the juice, literally speaking, back at me and my immediate vicinity.  The indoor cloudburst that resulted, in and of itself, wouldn't have been much of a problem if the contents of the blender had only been clear liquid, but this, sadly, was not the case.

My gravy-makings, remember, had been pressure-cooked, and thus contained little pieces of eye-of-round roast, carrot, celery, and onions.  Well, after having been neglected all night and most of yesterday morning, these food particles could not have been stuck faster - to counter-tops, floors, appliances, etc. - if someone had used epoxy cement or crazy-glue to stick them.

It was, basically, one whopping Hell of a mess.  They were many in number, these food particles.  There must have been literally thousands - I do not jest - of these, stuck individually and in little clusters, onto surfaces throughout the kitchen (and beyond its confines, as well, it turned out).

And then, there was the grease.  Although a well trimmed eye-of-round roast doesn't have much external fat, more fat comes out when you pressure-cook one than you can shake a stick at.  Now, we all know that cooking fat in liquid form doesn't dissolve in water but floats on it instead, so what do you think happened when I poured my gravy-makings into the blender?  That's right, the fat floated to the top.  Then, when I turned on the blender, what happened?  Right again.  I wound up with not only food particles all over the place, but a boat-load of grease, too.

Feeling horrified yet?  No? well, just wait.  I've not yet described my clean-up ordeal.  If that doesn't scare you, nothing will.

Immediately after posting my article yesterday, I entered my kitchen, and on close inspection, discovered the extent of the mess.  My findings dismayed me, but knowing the job had to be done, I set to work.

First off, I collected cleaning supplies - kithen-cleaning liquid with grease-cutter, general-purpose cleaning liquid, mop and bucket, floor-cleaner, kitchen towels, paper towels, etc. Then the actual cleaning started.

I started with vertical surfaces, such as cabinet fronts and the sides of appliances.  My intention was to clean from top to bottom so that I wouldn't have to clean places more than once.

The refrigerator is in close proximity to where I had the blender positioned that fateful evening, and it was the grease spattered on its side that led to my discovery of how much grease I had to deal with.  Fortunately, although there was a lot of it, the grease was mostly in the area surrounding the scene of the accident.  The grease, being localized, was comparatively easy to clean.  This was a good thing, I thought, and I made reasonably quick work of it, although there was a gracious plenty of grease.

The grease, however, turned out to be the only blessing (if I dare call it that) in this sordid affair.  Grease was, in fact, only the tip of the iceberg.  It was while cleaning up the grease that I discovered the problem of the food particles.  This turned out to be worse than my worst nightmare.  The good news was, I discovered that I could get the glued-on food particles up.  The bad news, without expending considerably more than a little elbow grease, I'd have to apply the liquid to my target and wait for the cleanser to dissolve the 'glue'.  Either way, it would take time - lots of time - and not a little effort.

Anyway, after a little experimentation, I determined that less time, but more material, was consumed by spraying cleaner on a surface and letting the glue dissolve before wiping, and more time, but slightly less material, using the elbow-grease method.  For horizontal surfaces, I opted for the spray-wait-wipe method.

Vertical surfaces were another matter entirely. I didn't even bother trying the spray-wait-wipe method on vertical surfaces.  I'd be working against gravity using the spray-wait-wipe method, the problem coming in during the 'wait' stage, so the elbow-grease method was obviously the only effective way to clean these.

By the time I'd cleaned all the vertical surfaces and raised horizontal surfaces, I had been working for almost five hours.  I was pretty much beat by now, but I still had the floor to tackle.  This was not going to be easy, despite my having done a half-assed job of cleaning it the night before.  I had gotten up the liquid, you see, but I hadn't gotten up all of the food particles.  These food particles now were glued securely to the floor.  Trying to scrub the particles up, by using a mop, liquid floor cleaner, and brute force, would be a useless gesture, and besides, my reserves of brute force were low just now.  No, time and dissolving the glue were the only solutions, but Lordy! Lordy! was I tired (as well as sore, stiff, and fed up to here), and about half-past ready for this job to end.

Anyway, I persevered.  It took me some time to clean that floor, but clean it I did.  I laid down a generous amount of liquid floor cleaner, and then waited.  Every fifteen minutes or so, I did a little test mopping.  Finally, no food particles remained.

This final clean-up task wound up taking an hour to complete, so the duration of the entire job was about six hours.  I was utterly exhausted, for the second consecutive day, and I've been kicking myself ever since for being so stupid as to have caused it in the first place.

Moral of story? It's this: Please, please, please! never ever try to cook when you're tired - you're apt to regret it.  As the proverb says, What ye sow, also shall ye reap.  In cooking, however, it can be worse than that.  For the one mistake you sow, you often reap twice - you may very easily screw up your food (I got lucky and didn't, fortunately), and there likely will be a mess to clean up afterwards.

Happy cleaning - er, cooking!