No rival to the Colonel.

There are things in the kitchen – and the back yard – that I fear that I hope some day to be able to face with bold equanimity. There are things I fear that I intend to continue to fear because it is meet and right so to do.

I won't use a pressure cooker, ever. Or an electric knife. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that wouldn't want to see me using an electric knife, but I digress.

I am afraid of gas ranges and gas barbeques and deep fryers. I don’t like that I am, and it would be nice to cook at my sister’s house without almost biting through my lip every time I turn a burner on.

I was quite happy over the past summer using a briquette burning bbq, but I know from reading as well as things friends have said that having something with better control over temperature would increase the range of grilling possibilities.

I still think that all I really need is some gas bbq savvy guy. Person. I don’t know if The Girl has the the same issue I do. Namely the issue of living with the certainty that it is only a matter of time until the propane tank explodes, taking friends and family with it in a screaming fiery inferno. Maybe she doesn’t; that sort of sounds like something only I think about.

The Boy is savvy, and grills at his dad's a lot, so perhaps this year we’ll fill the propane tank up and get the show on the road. By which I mean he will fill the tank up and I will go stand in our neighbours yard, when he puts it all together and lights the thing. Pace in the neighbour’s yard, actually, twisting my hands and waiting for the explosion that means that my view of death by propane (as opposed to The Boy’s view of “really, mom?”) was the correct view.

Cooking with a pressure cooker ain’t never gonna happen. Ever. So it saves time or adds tenderness or some such nonsense. I don’t care. Things under pressure explode. Everyone knows that.

Deep frying, though…I thought perhaps I could give that a try. I have no idea why I felt I needed to get over my fear of litres of boiling fat in the kitchen. I don’t even like fried food. And fear of frying is not like fear of flying. It wasn’t changing my life at all, for better or worse. Although…a case could be made that it was making my life better.

If I mastered deep frying, I might take a liking to fried foods. Cutting sugar out of my diet was hard, but cutting fat and salt was easy, given that I don’t like fries, or potato chips, or any salty fried thing. If I got to like fried things as much as I used to like sweet things….I don’t know if I would have had the strength to give them both up.

As it turns out (and here is where we have Tuesday-cooking-post-on-a-Wednesday) that I needn’t have worried. I tried making fried chicken last night. Tried and quite decidedly failed. The first batch was raw on the inside. The Girl ended up having a bite of chicken skin and biscuit sandwiches for supper. She did grab an orange on her way out, so I suppose it wasn’t the worst meal she’s ever had. But still.

The batch I made when she was gone was not raw. Not even the littlest bit. It was, I can safely say, thoroughly done. Very thoroughly done. Filling the kitchen with smoke and making the smoke detector shriek kind of done. It tasted about like you would expect it to taste. Horrible.

Yes, I tried it. What kind of mother would I be if I let The Girl be the only one who had to face an unappealing mess of my own creation? A mean one. Smart, maybe, but mean.

So the deep fryer will be returned to the neighbours, I am confident that I will not suddenly start craving fried food and – big bonus – although there was a minor accident (hello? Remember whose blog this is?) it didn’t involve burning. It was more of a slipping in oil and bashing my head kind of deal. I had more trouble getting the puppies out of the way so I could mop than I did with said slipping. Actually, the worst bit of it all was the mopping; it’s incredibly difficult to mop up oil. Even a smallish amount of spilled cooking oil has this weird supernatural ability to remain un-mopped. Creepy. I'm going back to being afraid of deep frying.