The Other Side of the Apron

The Short Version

This was a disaster — never again. We starved, and my teenager snuck out to schnorrer food from the neighbors. My favorite fleishig pot is treif, and my husband melted my spatula so everything stinks like burnt rubber. Which, incidentally, is impossible to remove from the glass oven door. I’ll remember this Shabbos forever, and not in a good way.

The Long Version

Every Man with a Pan seems to have a wonderful wife whose freezer is stocked with challah, and serendipitously he doesn’t have to make challah that week. My husband is equally blessed, so check that off, and next up on the menu is dips.

May I point out that not one dip I make requires multiple pots. But apparently for this it’s-the-easiest-recipe-you’ll-ever-make-and-it-was-so-incredible-it-was-sitting-on-my-counter-and-the-photographer/my neighbor/my daughter-who-is-the-pickiest-eater-you’ll-ever-meet-walked-by-and-tasted-one-and-before-you-know-it-there-was-nothing-left recipe, you don’t need one pot, you need three: one to boil the olives “to remove the olive taste” (that’s a direct quote from the recipe), another to heat the tomatoes so you can peel them, and then a third to actually make the whole concoction.

The recipe has three steps (yes, each involves a pot). Once the olives are boiled and the tomatoes are peeled, the rest is pretty simple, I was assured. My husband chopped the tomatoes and carefully deseeded them. Then he gingerly placed the tomato flesh in a pot with the olives, cautiously added the spices and sauces, delicately stirred it all with a rubber spatula, vigilantly set the timer, and then left the spatula resting on the pot. Yes, the fire was on — can you see where this is heading?

According to the recipe, after 20 minutes of savory simmering, the flavors should mesh together and the whole house will smell divine. Well, the house did smell…

P.S. I don’t even like olives.

Here’s how it went down:

Erev Shabbos

We stalled at dips. Because when the one dip you make sets off the smoke detector, and your wife is tasked with waving a towel under it to stop the awful beeping, and then the can of tomato paste, which for some inexplicable reason is on the stovetop, actually explodes, so somehow even the mezuzah case boasts a smattering of red, your wife just wants to disappear to bury her head in her pillow and not emerge until she has to light. (That sounds really nice. Of course, that is not what actually happened. Said wife was still waving a towel under the smoke detector.)

For future reference: It doesn’t help to then tell your wife that there’s a hack involving ketchup cleaning dirty metals, so the silver mezuzah case, once wiped of tomato paste, will be shinier than ever. Not because ketchup and tomato paste aren’t the same. My husband learned this the hard way.