Can't Cook. Won't Cook. Don't Even Ask Me To Try.

My maternal unit left for Hong Kong for her annual shopping trip, three days ago. She took a flight to Cebu, from where she headed for Singapore where she stayed for two days, shopping and touring and doing whatever it is moms go to Singapore for. From there, she headed for Hong Kong, from where shell take a flight to Thailand, then Taiwan then its on to Malaysia from there. On the whole, my mom will be gone for seven days.

On the upside, I have the house to myself for a whole week. I hafta share it with my sisters, yes, but its a big house, and if we synchronize our schedules well, we wont have to interact with each other for more than two hours every day. We are on the process of partitioning the house for when we each bring our friends over. As the eldest and therefore the wisest, I have dibs on the sala, the TV and the DVD. I am lobbying for the playstation but it looks like I have some fierce competition in Yvonne on that one. I will have to do something about that.

On the downside, I have had to subsist on the gastronomic equivalent of polyester for three days now: canned goods and noodles. I am, more than ever, in that state of what I like to call, *fashionable emaciation.* I am one of those poor unfortunate souls who never learned to cook. Yeah, if I were ever marooned in a grocery store on an island, Id starve to death. As it is, I am in similar straits right now. Faced with the formidable prospect of a six-foot ref stocked to overflowing with all manner of food stuffs, I have thus far limited myself to the consumption of prefabricated food for the simple reason that I cant seem to find a workable system for detaching from the freezer the pieces of frozen meat which has solidified into a big block of ice. I am seriously considering the merits of purchasing a blowtorch. Today, I discovered I had lost the can opener. I tried opening a can of SPAM through a faith-based method: I hurled it against a wall and prayed it would break open. But SPAM metal containers proved to be stronger than I thought. And so I tried my hand at cooking *Instant*(!) Yakisoba (yucky what?!) *QUICK COOK,* it said so right there on the plastic wrap in big bold letters, and so thus encouraged, I ventured into the scary unkown, where no Encong has gone before. The instructions seemed easy enough, it said to 1.) cook noodles in boiling water for two minutes. Okay. . . I rummaged around for something an average reasonable person would use for boiling water in. . .of course! A tea kettle. I found one inside my moms decorative curio cabinet. It was a very pretty tea kettle, and so I spent a moment trying to recall if Ive ever seen my Mom actually use this particular kettle or if its uses were limited purely for purposes of decoration. No matter, I filled it to the brim with water, set it on the stove and promptly forgot about it. Half an hour later, I was watching TV when I was interrupted by a hissing sound. I whispered to myself: *If you ignore it, its not real.* I turned up the volume of the TV. The hissing sound wouldnt go away. I got up to investigate and there was the ceramic kettle, its bottom all blackened with soot, dancing about and spewing gray smoke out of its spout. I hurried to turn the stove off to discover there wasnt any water left in the kettle. I was vaguely aware of some short people coming out from the playroom to watch my kitchen calisthenics with wide-eyed fascination. It was my five year old brother and his playmate come out to investigate the reason for all the commotion. My stomach growled. Hm, lemme try this again. I filled the kettle with water for the second time, but I was wiser this time around: I dragged a chair in front of the stove and waited for all that boiling to begin again. My brother climbed on my lap and we sat in silence. That thing they say about watching a pot boil and time going slow? Yeah, ALL true. When the water FINALLY did its thing, I brought my fist down on the pack of Yakisoba, crushing the dehydrated noodles into the microscopic proportions of confetti, and dumped the contents into all the boiling and the hissing. Two small foil packs floated to the surface. I took a minute to wonder what they were and referred to the plastic wrap for guidance. It turned out they were *flavoring* and *oil* respectively, and it turned out further that they were not supposed to be floating around in a kettle-full of boiling water. I went and grabbed the tongs from inside the washing machine where I remember I left them and where they werent supposed to be, and fished the foil packs out. Now to 2.) Drain water. I turned the kitchen inside out hunting for the colander, but it was nowhere to be found. I checked the washing machine. Twice. It wasnt there. I looked inside the oven toaster found the small sieve that I used this morning making calamansi juice. I couldnt find the oven mitts and so I had to resort to wearing a freshly laundered sock over my hand. The rest of it was relatively easier: 3.) Mix flavor and oil on a plate and 4.) Add noodles. Mix well. This was done without a hitch. Okay, so the noodles came out al dente but presto, I had cooked myself Yakisoba. Yey me!

I surveyed the path of destruction I left at the kitchen. There was a blackened kettle, a fork, an aluminum tong, plastic wrappers, a melted plastic sieve and a sock. Now as my brother and I sit dejectedly eating chewy noodles that tastes vaguely of plastic, I have one thought in my mind: I WANT MY MOMMY!