September 13, 2016 - The mystery of the dirty blue tea kettle.

          Sunday night is my night to curl up in front of MY Television to watch TCM, or Masterpiece classics on PBS.  

However, it has only been a few years that I have had the choice of channels to myself.  For many years my husband surfed endlessly before he would settle on a movie and often times it would be 5 to 10 minutes into the movie or it would be a military movie or sci-fi which I don’t care for.  It used to drive me off to go read a book elsewhere.  If I stuck around and acquiesced to his choice of movie I would always seem to miss the first 5 or 10 minutes due to his surfing.

Now, years later, I am amazed when I see those 5 or 10 minutes of movies I have seen before.  It puts a whole new slant on the movie – especially the mystery movies.

          But, I am getting off point already. My husband is a good cook no, a great cook, and when he is hungry he wanders to where I am curled up and offers to make me a sandwich if he is making one for himself.  GOOD GUY I got there.

          He is very good at the toasted “ham and cheese” and often brings a nice cup of tea with it, or some pickles, or olives, or a cookie.  He knows how to do it the way “his Queen” likes it. [HIS secret to our 38 years of marriage – FEED HER!]

          Couple weeks ago he delivered a grilled Gouda cheese and ham sandwich and he put it down and said.  “Just didn’t seem to slice nice.”  He also knows I am the “presentation type” and I like my sandwiches cut on an angle. He left it with me and my old TCM movie.

          It sure did look ragged – half the cheese had slid out of the grilled sandwich and I opened it up to sort of repair it.  I fingered it to push it around to make it neater, but suddenly discovered the problem was one of those little squares of paper the deli packages are now putting between the cheese slices.

He hadn’t seen it and it got cooked between the ham and the cheese and it got skewed instead of cut.  I had a laugh – peeled it out. 

I strolled to the kitchen, showed him, and we both had a good laugh.

He said, “Maybe that is why the sandwich I had yesterday was so chewy I couldn’t eat it; so I tossed it out.”

He was embarrassed, but I assured him, we were not the only ones to have this crisis with the grilled cheese including the paper.  A few days before I was talking with a co-worker who had the same thing happen to her and she had served her grilled cheese to her husband.  She hadn’t cut his sandwich and his experience was not like mine.  I had some warning; he had none.

When did everyone start putting those little papers between the slices of cheese?  We lived very well without them before – why now? 

My husband said, “So they can charge more money, I guess.” 

I answered, “But wouldn’t they make more money because someone can’t get two slices of cheese apart and they use more cheese on one sandwich and use the package up quicker and have to go get another package sooner?”

We pondered that.  But this reminded me of the mystery of the dirty blue tea kettle I had at the first house we lived in here in North Carolina.

I commuted to Spartanburg, South Carolina – about 45 minutes away to work and brown bagged my lunch.  However, my lucky husband came home [less than 10 minutes commute] and made himself lunch most days.

Having long commute hours I used to do the majority of my cleaning on Saturday mornings.  So, with the sun shining in the kitchen I routinely tackled the stove top and gave it a “like new” shine. 

I had a blueberry blue enameled tea kettle at the time.  It was one of those gifts that I asked for specifically and it could not be easily found.  Eventually, we went to a big mall in Greenville, South Carolina, and we walked the entire mall before we finally found one.  “Pricey” as they say down here in the South.  So, every week I always cleaned it special and shined it up so it still looked “pricey.”

One week, I noticed it was more splattered than usual.  I scrubbed its sides.   Even the bottom was grimy so I scrubbed that too.   The next week, it seemed just as bad.  I scrubbed it again.  This went on for several weeks – how was this tea kettle getting so dirty.  I started to take the kettle off the stove and set it aside when I was cooking during the week and it still was getting greasy and grimy on the sides and bottom.

One Sunday evening my husband offered to make his famous grilled cheese and ham sandwiches while I was in the middle of one of those TCM old romance movies. 

He called, “Come get your sandwich it is ready.”

I strolled out to the kitchen and he slid the toasted sandwich onto my waiting plate and sliced it in half.  As I was about to turn to leave I noticed him put his sandwich down on the cast iron griddle and he deftly placed my blueberry blue enamel tea kettle on top of it.

“What? What are you doing?” I asked.  

A mischievous smile came over his face, “Works good, doesn’t it?”

Mystery solved.