I Wonder If This Ever Happens To Martha Stewart...

August 4, 2014

Last night I gathered some beautiful tomatoes out of our garden, in anticipation of making and canning spaghetti sauce today.  I washed, cored, and chopped the tomatoes and cooked them up so I could get a head start on my canning this morning.  Everything went according to plan.

This morning I got up at 6:30 a.m.  I fixed Charming’s breakfast, packed his lunch (he’s still helping my brother finish up a construction project), kissed him off to work (this closely resembled a Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead episode as I hustled him out the door while simultaneously giving him instructions and handing him his lunchbox, a towel for drying off in the mid-day heat, and two fresh t-shirts in case he feels the need to get out of his sweaty shirt).  I then fed Max the Wonder Dog, made the bed, washed the dishes, and took a quick walk with my sister who has just moved in down the street. 

Upon coming home, I began to prepare my spaghetti sauce.  I took the previously cooked tomatoes out of the fridge, ran them in batches through the blender, then through the Foley food mill, and finally dumped the pulp-thickened juice into the biggest pot I own.  This went along fairly quickly and I moved effortlessly around the kitchen, singing a happy song in my way-way-off-key I Love Lucy voice.  Cooking and canning are two things that make me happy, so I sing when I work.  My sister calls me “Martha Stewart, Jr.”

With the big pot of tomato sauce on the stove, I turned the heat to up to get the ball rolling.  Figuring I had a few spare minutes, I zipped to the bedroom for a big armload of laundry and headed for the laundry area in the basement.  Our black cat, Walker, was hot on my heels meow-ing all the way.  (He has been clingy and more needy than usual since our other kitty, Powder, ran away on June 1^st.)  After throwing the laundry into the washer, I glanced at Walker’s bowl and figured I had enough time to top it off since I was down there anyway.  Meow! Meow! Meow!  Ok, so it wasn’t fresh food that he wanted.  A brief thought about the sauce on the stove flitted through my mind, but I figured it would only take a few minutes to clean the litter box as well…Walker is pretty finicky about his litter box.  After I got that done and he seemed much happier.

I sprint back up the stairs; thinking that my sauce is happily bubbling away…which it was…away, away, away over the top of the pan and all over the stove!  YIKES!  I rushed to the sink and quickly wash my hands then raced to the stove and turned off the heat.  Tomato sauce was EVERYWHERE, so for the next 30 seconds, I said almost every swear word I could think of.  Then, because the heat and tomato sauce eruption was somewhat subsiding, I composed myself and simply started groaning…oh, no, No, NOOOOO…ohhhhh, no.  What’s a Martha to do? 

After several minutes of just standing in front of the stove and staring at the mess, I slowly walked to the sink, grabbed my Handi-wipe dishcloth and a mixing bowl of water with a squirt of dish detergent, then I mustered all the Queenly grace I could find.  I walked back to the stove and mopped, and mopped, and mopped.  In my mind, this is all that any Martha can do.

This is what happens when you try to do too many things at once.

The stove as it looked 2/3's of the way through clean up...yes,
it was much worse than this before I started cleaning it up.

Starting over...which proves you can sometimes screw up in life,
but start over with a clean slate.