Survival tips for the solo-parenting dad, part 1 of N.

Being a solo-parenting dad can be daunting at times, especially when your cooking experience is limited and you need to prepare a meal for your 6-year-old son.  Yesterday, I took the challenge.  I decided to prepare a nice, healthy meal for my kiddo, who was forced to stay at home from school because of the flu.  Sad but true, he didn't enjoy staying at home, he missed his friends.  That's what kiddos do: they miss their friends.

Luckily, his dad is an optimist and decided to cook hamburgers with potatoes and some carrots... a typical Belgian dish that is.  I peeled and cut the potatoes while Jenne, my son, cut the carrots in thousand pieces (actually, according to him, there were a million pieces, but that was just him eggagerating...)  Once that was finished, I decided it was time to put both items on the stove, make the potatoes boil like hell and stew the carrots like i never stewed before.  Somewhere in between, I also fried my hamburgers: one with and without cheese for me, one without cheese for Jenne (the 6-year-old kiddo having the flu and missing his friends).

It was plain fun.  Jenne even forgot about the flu and his friends.  He looked happier than ever before, having cut and peeled his own carrots in more than a million pieces... the carrots he was going to eat within a few minutes.  His own, very own carrots!

But then... the unexpected happened...  While I started to pound on my potatoes to turn them into a nice and cosy purée, I somehow noticed the smell of burnt food.  A quick glance at my stove revealed that my carrots were almost on fire!  All the water I've put in the cooking pot was completely evaporated... gone... farewell!  I ended up with nice carrots, but the bottom of my cooking pot had suffered quite a bit, as can be seen in the following picture:

Luckily, I'm an optimist.  I never give up.  This stupid cooking pot wasn't going to ruin my day, oh no it wasn't!  Having just lost the plot, I ended up Googling for "How to clean burnt cooking pot" (djee, how did I make that up?), and the Google search resulted in quite some grandma's tips and tricks with soda, coca-cola, vinegar and other kitchen-chemicals... quite overwhelming when you read that for the first time, I must admit.

I stayed focused.  As I didn't have soda nor coca-cola in the house, the chemist in me (seriously, I am joking am i?) decided to go for the vinegar solution:

Having a PhD-level scientist background, I had quite some difficulties believing that this fluid, of which I only knew some culinary properties, was going to solve all my burnt-cooking-pot problems.  But hey,... the optimist in me wanted to give it a try anyway!  I never give up, remember!?  So I started the procedure:

1. Take the bottle with vinegar from your fridge.
2. Open bottle.
3. Pour vinegar into the burnt-like-hell cooking pot.
4. Put cooking pot aside and pray for the best.

This procedure looked almost too simple to be effective.  How on earth could this clean my cooking pot?  Even the pope has more chance of getting laid than me effectively cleaning out my cooking pot!

But hey, I'm an optimist, so the next day I checked my cooking pot.  While I was affectionately holding it in my hands, carefully checking its burns, I noticed that the layer at the bottom started to move!  I got excited!  It looked as if there was a burnt pancake wandering around in my cooking pot!

Having noticed that, and being in an adventurous mood, I decided to checkout the pancake for myself with my bare hands.  What I noticed then was above all my expectations: I was able to take out the one-hell-of-a-burnt-pancake-of-dirt from my cooking pot, and I was left with an almost clean cooking pot!  Look mom, no scrubbing nor scraping involved!

For the sake of science, this was unbelievable!  Do you notice the pancake in the above picture?  Do you notice how clean the bottom of my cooking pot is?  There is no trickery involved here!  I am not using Photoshop, The Gimp or any other image manipulation software to turn my cooking pot into one hell of a clean cooking pot!  What you see is what I experienced, no more, no less.  Needless to say I was very happy about the way things turned out.  I almost didn't have to rince my cooking pot, I lost some vinegar and above all: I had my cooking pot back with an almost-zero effort!

What I conclude from this is the following:

1. Being a solo-parenting dad can be challenging at times.
2. Chemistry in the kitchen is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it (© R. Feynman).
3. Even when things look bad, really really bad... Never give up!

Yours truly,
Bart