Dinner en fuego

I didn't actually see him but I know Wile E. Coyote was in my kitchen today. There's no other explanation for what happened to dinner.

It started off normal-ish. I grabbed a roast from the freezer and dropped it in the slow cooker. That's what we do every Sunday. But when I went to turn it on, something looked amiss. That's when I realized that the bottom of the crock had fallen completely out, totally in intact, in a perfect oval.

You know, like when Wile E. Coyote is standing on something and then falls through it to the canyon far, far below, all the while on his perfectly circular piece of earth that helps him not at all.

My crock pot has been crosshatched with a fine network of cracks for well over a year but it's never showed any signs of giving up. Today all of a sudden, it did. Maybe it was the weight of the frozen roast. I don't know. But then I got a migraine and went to nap it off, figuring inspiration for dinner would strike when I woke up.

When I came back downstairs, the house smelled of . . . roast. My intrepid husband had decided to try the roast in the oven. Smart man. "I wonder why the crock pot got all those cracks in the first place?" I said. "Maybe I rinsed it in cold water while it was still too hot." He theorized that it had to do more with maybe having it on when nothing was in it.

A few minutes later, I was playing with the boys when I heard the most fantastic crash/explosion/yell from my husband/loud hissing steam/I don't know what-all kind of cacophony from the kitchen. I rushed in to find my husband staring at the open oven in disgust. "I'm an idiot," he said. "We just talked about this." Apparently, he had decided to add a little water to the casserole dish while the roast cooked. It was cold water.

Everything blowed up.

In an effort to still save the roast, Kenny decided to grill it. It was a beautiful tri-rip and would have been a terrible waste. That went well until, unbelievably, he ran out of propane.

Still not to be defeated, he decided he would cut up the roast and give the pieces a quick pan fry. It looked promising.

But I had already opted out of roast for dinner, declaring it cursed. As he cleaned the tiny shards of glass out of the oven from the casserole dish, he decided that he wouldn't risk it either just in case there was glass in the meat that he couldn't see. So it went in the garbage after all.

But I know Wile E. had something to do with it.