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The Kitchen Wars

I was a DS6. My mom had stayed up too late and it was 9 am and I was very hungry.

I was already making sandwiches and chocolate milk by myself. And I had observed my mom cooking...soo..

I decided to cook for myself and my sister. I pushed the chair over to the gas range and cooked bacon, eggs, and french toast. The bacon and eggs were fine, but the french toast was probably not that good. No big deal because as kids most anything tastes good when you are hungry. My mom got up and smelled the food. Her first reaction was to ask who cooked breakfast. My sister said I did and because she never lied, mom believed her. And that was that.

Despite the addition of coffee for my mom to the AM menu, the morning forays into cooking had an end point.

One morning I attempted to make chocolate pudding. This was the old style pudding requiring some serious simmering to get the pudding to set. On top of this I decided to make a triple batch. If I had left the pot on the range to cool, or had it been just a single batch, it all would have been fine. But I had seen mom put the hot pudding in the fridge and I was convinced that was the way. But standing on the chair with a very heavy bowl of hot bubbling pudding undid me and I fell, the pot landing on my arm, and the pudding going everywhere. Some of the pudding scorched on the range and the smell hung in the air when I woke mom up complaining of being burned. One look at the pudding monster convinced her to get up whereupon she found my sister in the kitchen eating pudding off the floor.

The 3rd degree burns on my arm and the realization that I had almost caught the house on fire put an end to the kitchen free-for-all. I was no longer an amusement for her friends, but a Safety Hazard!

The kitchen got a set of doors with a lock.

That kept me out for a few days until I unlocked the kitchen window one morning then got back in that night with a screwdriver. Bread crumbs do not lie. And a week later mom was making sure the other windows and doors were locked.

I then studied the new doors carefully. The lock was a combination lock secured through a bail and loop whose plates were secured with shallow wood screws.

I simply unscrewed the screws and got back into the kitchen, then reseated the screws. Bread crumbs don't lie and mom had the screws replaced with bolts.

Next to fall was the combination lock. I systematically tried combinations until I figured it out. I was better with the bread crumbs, but one morning sisterly prodding and hubris got me and I made her breakfast again.

A key lock went on the door. At the library I looked up locks in the card catalog and then found out about lock picking. I got a book on lockpicking and my mom and friends laughed over me reading it.

Problem was I did not have the dexterity or strength to do it properly. But I did find another book on doors and learned how hinges worked.

It took two chairs, but I did take the pins out of the hinges and took the doors down.

At that point mom was furious. But she made a deal with me - no cooking while she was not home and I had to get help with heavy pots - and she would leave the doors off. If I broke the rules, she would put a steel door up. I kept my end of the deal and she kept hers.

Three years later I went to live with my dad and his new wife. The next morning I was cooking breakfast when they got up. My dad was not amused and I got spanked pretty bad and he really enforced the no-kids-cooking-in-the-kitchen rule.