On Sunday, The Husband and I were to cook Thanksgiving for my brother, his lovely wife, and their adorable little girl. We rolled out of bed early and got to work. The first step is to mix up the stuffing and get it in the bird. I’ve been involved with this for at least 2 holidays per year for the past 17 years. I’ve done it countless times on my own. It includes melting butter, adding chicken broth, heating to a boil and stirring in the Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix. We are not talking rocket science. We planned to get the turkey on the grill at 8am, so I was moving right along. I melted the butter, added broth, and brought it to a boil. At this point, I removed it from the heat and tried to pour the two bags of stuffing mix in at the same time while stirring because The Husband was busy getting the neck and innards out of the raw turkey. I was having trouble mixing the stuffing well, so I grabbed a huge plastic mixing bowl and dumped everything in. I was starting to really settle into my task when I realized I couldn’t pick up the mixing bowl. I’d set it on the hot stove. I believe my next words were, “oh, shit.” followed by a scary calm, “that’s not optimal.” I flung all of the stuffing off the hot eye, dumped the bottomless skeleton of the bowl in the trash, and grabbed a fork to scrape as much melted plastic up as quickly as possible. I wiped the plastic in the trash can and went back for another load of melted bowl, not realizing I was leaving tiny cobwebs of plastic across the kitchen. The Husband was wrist deep in raw turkey, so he just let me do my thing for a minute.

He soon appeared at my elbow with a container of razor blades and stared into my eyes, “hey, do NOT cut yourself and make a bad situation worse.” before handing me my first straight edged razor blade. In that moment, I was grateful he had them handy. Later, I would wonder what the heck he was expecting that he thought we’d need one hundred razor blades? My question was soon answered as he said, “use a blade and throw it away, trying to clean one to reuse it is how you’ll get cut” Ok, I began methodically and carefully scraping what looked plastic marshmallows off our glass cooktop with a razor. I soon realized that scraping a hot eye with a metal blade heats the blade and was grateful he’d bought in bulk.

As I cleaned, The Husband and I surveyed the plastic cobwebs and decided that we should not serve this dressing. So, he left for the HEB Grocery with me thanking my stars that we were not celebrating on Thanksgiving and they were definitely open. Once I had the majority of the gooey plastic off stove, I cleaned up the dressing I’d slung. By this point the cooktop had cooled off and I was able to use my Cooktop cleaner on the glass top. Ya’ll, by the time The Husband returned, it looked almost new. I felt like I was on the set of a commercial for glass stoves. People can say what they like about how gas is better, but when it comes to cleaning melted mixing bowl, I’ll choose my electric stovetop every day and twice on this particular Sunday.

Ps. When I told my father this story, his response was a nodding, “oh yes, single blades, they are cheaper by the hundred”. I guess girls really do marry boys like their fathers.