The Day The Microwave Stood Still...

by angelica

it happened on a saturday morning. I had just put a container with water for my morning cup of chai (it’s a powder, you just add hot water!) into the microwave when their was a noise, kind of a very troublesome “clunk”, and then the microwave was dead. absolutely and totally.

I decided to be brave, face the world without nuking and postponed buying a new microwave until monday, when a technical wizard friend of mine was scheduled for a visit. he would sure be able to fix the problem. and I would sure be able to survive for two days without a microwave!

boy, was I wrong!

saturday breakfast: I found a pot (in spite of not using a kitchen I still do have one and it does have equipment), filled it with water and put it on the stove. I did remember to turn the knob to make that thing that the pot was standing on hot. of course I turned the wrong knob so I had to switch out the metal cover. that had happened before, I do have plenty of covers available for just these occasions.

fortunately I also had a second pot as the first one looked pretty bad after standing on the hot oven without water for a while. while reading the paper I had of course forgotten that I was heating water in the kitchen.

I went to Denny’s and decided to try again sunday morning.

saturday lunch: I didn’t want to take any chances and just had a sandwich (pre sliced bread) with some cheese (single wrapped cheese slices) and an apple.

saturday dinner: I learned through experience that you have to take the meal out of the plastic wrap before putting it into the oven. it is not enough to just pierce the top. I ordered some take out.

sunday breakfast: I managed to boil some water (I did not leave the stove while I was doing so) and toast some bread without any incident! I took that as a good sign for the day and thought I’ll give it a try for lunch and have some spaghetti with tomato sauce (from a glass of course!).

sunday lunch: let’s just not talk about it. I will have to remember to buy heavy duty stove top cleaner monday.

sunday dinner: I always wanted to know how the food is at that new restaurant around the corner….

my new microwave looks pretty! and I got it really cheap, they had a monday morning early bird special…..

Got Diapers?

by angelica

a while ago we had a comment here on the site from the daughter of an NDS, suggesting that the syndrome might skip a generation as she apparently has great domestic skills herself. that might well be, as far as I know some research pertaining to that issue is actually underway and as soon as we hear anything we will of course post it here.

what got me thinking though was the fact that there WAS a daughter of an NDS sufferer to begin with. how did she survive???

I personally never wanted children – and for good reason as it turns out because how would I have fed them? dressed them? how could I have brought up kids without starving, maiming, displacing or who knows what doing or not doing to them …?

an incident that happened many years ago comes to mind: I was living in an apartment complex in the big city and one of my neighbors and friends had baby twins. I guess they were cute, I never really figured out what made people fawn over little screaming sausage-like things. and it seems to me that for several month you do nothing but constantly put something in at one end only for it to come out smelly at the other end. until one day the little sausage starts crawling along the floor and you have to put everything in your place at a height of at least 3 feet. but I’m digressing.

there was an emergency one day and my neighbor had to leave, without the babies and any time for explanations. my doorbell rang, she stuffed the babies in my arms “gotta go, here is the bag with their stuff (???), see you later”.

I won’t go into details but the kids did survive. no thanks to my “skills” of course but I guess babies are resilient and can live with a lot of shit. literally and up to their ears! (how am i supposed to know about diapers?)

my advice: if you are an NDS sufferer and are thinking of having kids – make sure you have the income for a full time nanny. and cook. and housekeeper.

The Kindness Of Friends

by angelica

whereas poor blanche always depended on the kindness of strangers I did so on the kindness of my friends. to cook for me, to help me mend clothes (helping means they would have to do it, of course), to explain to me various things ‘domestic’.

lately I noticed that my NDS syndrome seems to inspire certain behavioral patterns in my VS⁺ (very domestic) friends in spite – or maybe because? – of my obvious symptoms. for example: the innocent remark to a homemade soup elicits the statement “oh, this is easy to make, I’ll show you.”

NO, you don’t!

sometimes they don’t even wait for an answer and go on to tell me anyhow on how to do it by pouring a bucketful of chinese gibberish into my ears. “sauté the onions”, “scald the milk”, “heat oil in large skillet” – how am I supposed to understand that?

a month ago a friend came visiting, went into my kitchen and put a black thing on my stove. a gift , he said and it was, as I learned, called an iron pan.

I got instructions, they sounded easy enough, and I then looked at the pan for the next few weeks with a mixture of dread and temptation until I finally decided it was time to maybe fight NDS.

first try: smoke alarm went off, experiment was stopped.

second try: everything went well until I added the ready-to-go-come-out-of-bottle teriyaki sauce. as it turns out you don’t heat the sauce up in the hot pan but add it later.

third try: I didn’t realize you have to cook the rice first.

fourth try: I managed to prepare a meal consisting of tofu cubes with precooked rice (my neighbor cooked the rice for me), flavored with teriyaki sauce.

I’m eating rice with tofu and teriyaki for a month now and am considering asking my friend for another recipe because it starts to get a bit boring…..

I think I may have just taken the first step to eventually overcome NDS.

How I Found Out

by angelica

I had no idea that I suffered from NDS-syndrome (No Domestic Skills) until I reached my early thirties.

first my mother cooked and did the homework, then my various boyfriends and later my now ex-husband did the chores.

when I was single I hired a cleaning lady and ate out.

then came the day when a friend of mine was helping re-roofing my garage and I was too lazy to drive to a restaurant to get some take out for lunch.

after just having spent two weeks visiting another dear friend of mine who loves to cook and being subjected to watching her do just that for 14 whole days I decided to FIX LUNCH myself.

I had eggs in the fridge, and potatoes that weren’t too old, and frozen spinach. I always have frozen vegetables in my freezer cause they are healthy. every few month I throw the old ones out and replenish them with new ones. I do the same with the potatoes.

anyways – how hard could it be to cook some potatoes and serve them with spinach and scrambled eggs?

to make a long story short: if we’d been in an Italian restaurant this would have been on the menu:

potatoes al dente, served with spinach porridge and egg flambé.

and a look into the kitchen made the lebanon in 2006 after the israeli campaign come to mind.

this was my first hint that I might suffer from NDS-syndrome. and soon the evidence mounted!

to be continued…..