My Little Kitchen Helpers...

My boys love to help me with all manner of kitchen chores.

This is the somewhat precarious "helping with dishes arrangement." I prefer one helper at a time but that's really only possible when Jake is asleep, so we take turns the best we can.

This is "Operation: Clean out the ENTIRE refrigerator." They got a big kick out of taking everything out and putting it on the table.






And, this is the incredible duo emptying the utensils in the dishwasher. Jake loves for whoever he hands the utensils to to say "Thank You!" for every single one. You can hear him say it as he hands each one.



This is their reward for the help: They get to drive cars in the empty utensil bin.



Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. Another year or two and my kids will be doing all the housework, right? Ha ha.


But really, it's good that I have so much help in the kitchen because lately I need all the help I can get.
We'll call this little story "Burnt smell overlaod."

A few days ago for dinner, we were having taco salad, which the boys don't always love, so I decided to throw in some chicken nuggets to supplement their olives and cheese. We ate dinner, cleaned it up, and then I remembered about the sweet potatoes that I had kept forgetting to steam. So I peeled them, cut them up, and put them on the stove, thinking the boys could eat them for lunch the next day. And then, since we had already cleaned up dinner, I turned off my kitchen brain and went and played outside with the boys. Ooops. I came back inside to a horrible burning smell and found THIS:

No water left in it at all, and the pan and steamer completely scorched. So much for feeding the boys sweet potatoes for lunch. Nothing sweet about them. Just burnt. Shoot.

So, I got the boys all ready for bed, and was amazed at how the whole house was still just filled with the aroma of burnt pan. I opened a few windows, turned on the air freshener, and sat down at the piano to get engrossed in songwriting.

At about 10:00, Kyle came home and wrinkled his nose: "what's burning?" I explained the whole thing about the potatoes and apologized for the smell.

He shook his head, walked into the kitchen, opened the oven,and found....

Those CHICKEN NUGGETS!!!

Burnt to an absoulte crisp. 4 stinkin' hours at 400 degrees. No smoke, no flame, just a really really strong burnt smell.

Can you believe I was sitting in the next room the whole time?

We weighed one from the freezer and found that the burnt ones were over two thirds lighter. They felt sort of like pumice stones and looked like charcoal briquets.

Cool science experiment, right?

Well, what can I say? Maybe my kids should be doing more than just dishes around my kitchen...