Set The Ray to Strudel
A Tale of Cooking in The Nuclear Age
Before I really start my story, I would like to give you a pop quiz, just to see if you won’t be offended by what I have to say. Here we go:
Toaster Strudel was meant to be cooked in the...
a. Toaster
b. Microwave
c. Oven
d. Under a magnifying glass
If you answered B,C, or D, then you might not want to continue, as the events that take place after this won’t seem that funny.
sometime during the summer. Two friends of mine were over at my house, and we were outside painting, when one of them, named Josh Stancil, asked if he could have some breakfast. Me and my other friend, Scott, assuming that he was a rational person who could read and follow simple directions, told him just to go inside and start cooking it. There was no reason to think he couldn’t do the easiest of tasks- cooking a simple pre-packaged pastry... or was there?
After about a minute or two...
(it must have took him a long time to find the freezer) he re-emerged and proclaimed that it would be done in a minute. We continued to paint and really didn’t monitor the time very well, as we were outside on the back porch. It did seem strange to us that we didn’t here anything from the toaster, so after a while, Josh went back in the house to check on it. And that is when we saw the smoke...
of the kitchen and told us that there was a problem. When we went inside we saw that the room was filled with clouds of black smoke. I saw that the microwave was the source of this and rushed top turn it off. The scary thing was that there was still about three minutes left on the timer, so it could have gotten even worse. At this time I didn’t know what he had been cooking, so I kind of assumed there was metal in it or something. When I asked him what he had done, he said, and I quote: "I just put some toaster strudel in the microwave and set it to Auto-Cook."
had really collected in the house and my parents were coming home soon, so we had to open every window, turn on all our fans, and sweep all the smoke out. While they were doing this, I decided to venture into the blazing inferno of the microwave chasm.
of a toaster strudel I found inside were like a charcoal briquette. The blackened rock that was once a delicious Pillsbury confection had been... soldered to the bottom of the microwave, so much so that I was forced to use a metal spatula to chisel of the fire-scarred microwave. It was incredibly hot, and I had to use several potholders to pick it up. The fruit filling had expanded while it was inside the outer shell, but break the shell, because it had hardened greatly, so instead it had exploded out of the small hole at the end of the strudel, and formed a kind of sweet smelling lava rock. Smoke was billowing off the strudel as if it were some bizarre part of an 80’s Techno Club, and I nearly started to dance when something hit me- Josh had said that he put it on Auto-Cook. Auto-Cook is for ten minutes. Microwaves are built to cook things very rapidly, so that strudel should have probably been taken out after thirty seconds. But the most troubling thing was that he must have thought that Auto-Cook was made specially for toaster strudel, or that it magically detected what kind of food you have, because why else would he not follow the regular directions?
A black mark, however faint, still remains on the bottom of our microwave. It is but a tool to show that no matter how dumb you are, you aren’t as dumb as Josh Stancil...
