Help! My crock pot’s making me flatulent!
The potatoes in the chicken corn chowder should have been cooked. They’d been in the crock pot for 8 hours. Instead they were crunchy. After 8 hours in the crock pot – they were still raw, crunchy potatoes. Tried to nuke the chicken corn chowder, but cooking everything together just made the creamy parts curdle. I was well on my way to pitching a fit when David took the slotted spoon – which does, in fact, catch the potato (that’s for you musical theatre geeks out there) – and gathered up all the spuds and cooked them separately. We left the crock pot on to cook the remaining chowder – another 5 hours on high until bed time… and found the potatoes crunchy. I know this because every time the chowder was tested for ‘doneness,’ I’d eaten a potato.
As I went up to bed, my stomach was already beginning to rumble. Oh dear. This was going to be bad. Very bad. Raw potatoes bad.
“Keep your distance,” I warned David.
“What do you mean?”
“I ingested raw potatoes tonight – this could get ugly.”
“I don’t under… OH MY GOD! Is that YOU?!?“
“I warned you. I warned you. Stay away, it’s for your own safety!”
“How can you still be alive? Are you sure that you’re not a rotting corpse?”
“Raw potatoes baby. It’s the crock pot’s fault, I’m telling you. Stay on your side of the room, you might be safe over there.”
As I was getting ready for bed, I tried my best not to defoul the air – I even left the bedroom at one point, leaving a raw potato bomb out on the stair landing.
“How long are you going to be out there?” asked David.
“As long as it takes for the smell not to follow me when I walk back in. You should go to sleep without me.”
The next morning, after a mere 22 hours, the remaining potatoes had finally cooked. Yes, we’d suspected that the element in the crock pot was malfunctioning in the past – but it had never really been and issue. It had never been a danger to the family. The time had come. The time had come for a new crock pot. David’s world view was forever changed.