I’m just bringing the red hot lasagne, and the equally hot dish of left-over stuffed marrow, out of the oven and putting them on the table mats. Firstly, I divide the marrow into three and pop a piece on each of the three plates. While I’m dividing the hot lasagne Chris decides to help make space on the small table by clearing away the empty dish and putting it on the worktop beside the sink.
The dish is still piping hot, and it’s not exactly empty either – a large spoon, weighted more heavily at one end, is in the hot dish. Using a tea towel, Chris picks up the hot dish and the large spoon falls out of the dish and onto the table, but as it falls it first hits the fork on Chris’s plate; now the fork is rather like the strangely weighted serving spoon in that the fork also is weighted more heavily at one end… Hence the fork flips off the plate and is in mid-air when my husband cleverly catches the fork before it hits the floor.
By this time the heat from the dish is making itself felt through the tea towel and Chris makes a mad dash across the kitchen to the work top by the sink… He makes it. The hot dish, now with the serving spoon back inside it, is safely on the work top; and, shaking his hot hands, Chris returns to the table.
I am placing the last third section of lasagne on my plate when there is a mighty crash on the ceramic floor tiles beside the sink – the serving spoon (not exactly free of the stuffed marrow) had tumbled over, out of the dish and over the work top, and deposited its cheesy load onto the tiles. Our friend and house guest Roland (AKA the “Bird-man from Brisbane”) cracks up and has a fit of the giggles, Chris cleans up the floor and I have to be told what was so funny because I have been busy dishing out the hot lasagne from the other oven dish.
After the giggles and the dinner I leave the men to do their bit by washing up. I am going into my studio when I hear Chris answering a comment Roly made about our unusual sink island:
“Oh yes, this sink is designed for three people to use at the same time. We’ve never used it that way yet but… oh well…”
I crack up and head back into the kitchen to see Chris proceed to wash up in each of the three positions. Roly has the giggles again.
