DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

“Eww, what’s that smell?” she asked as I was cooking dinner. It’s not exactly the sort of question I like to hear when I’m cooking dinner. Just for the purposes of illustration, here is an example of the sort of question I much prefer to hear when I’m cooking dinner: “Damn, boy, where’d you learn to cook so good?” Or even “So you’re saying it takes only a pinch of sugar to neutralize the acids in fresh tomato sauce?”. Or even “please, please share with me the secret of your incredible tofu scramble, I’ll do anything, anything you say, please!”

So I responded in a way I often do when I don’t want to engage in a potential conflict. It’s a coping strategy, perhaps not ideal, but has the benefit of being really easy to execute: I didn’t say anything. I figure it’s sometimes better to ignore than get irked, irate, incendiary. I pretended that whatever she’d caught a whiff of could not possibly have come from my stovetop machinations, and even if it did, she was going to have to eat it anyway.

Later on, after dinner, we realized that the moment she’d asked about an offensive odor was probably just after I’d leaned over the stove and, apparently, scorched a big patch of the fleece I was wearing.