The vicious tomato can

I am not much of a cooker. That’s why A and I are so perfect together, because he loves to cook… In fact one of the first things I told my mom about A was, ‘I hit the jackpot… he cooks.’ It’s not that I can’t cook, I actually enjoy cooking very much, it’s just that you have to pay attention to so many things…

So since A works most of the day and I work in the evenings, I decided to cook a surprise dinner for A.
I glanced into the fridge and grabbed what seemed to go well together: spinach, lemons, cheese and some left over chicken. I put everything on the kitchen counter, then I picked out some potatoes and boiled them in some water. Somehow my – obvious – delicious meal was lacking something… yes, you got it, tomatoes. Unfortunately we didn’t have any fresh ones anymore, so I went for the next best thing… canned tomatoes.
I grabbed a cutting board, a fairly sharpened cook’s knife (since A wasn’t at home I actually got to use it too…), and a few other cooking items.

Having everything laid out so perfectly in front of me, I started chopping up some fresh onions and some garlic, then I seasoned it and seared it in a pan with the spinach and put it aside, so it could rest a bit. The potatoes were still boiling away, not even close to being done yet, so I decided to hold off heating up the tomatoes for a bit.

I decided to get the can opener though, just to get them out of the can. We have about 7 drawers filled with miscellaneous cooking items, from knives, to spoons, to serving tools in different colors, shapes and sizes, to hammers and so on. So you can imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find a single can opener in between all of those weird looking tools (some of them looked more like weapons than anything you’d use in a kitchen). So I went with my guts and got the single thing, that almost did look like a can opener, although it clearly was not. It had a pointy tip that I tried to drive into the can’s up-side (how do you call the top of it anyways?). To no one’s surprise it didn’t go in, like not even close. So I looked around and found a pair of scissors, which I tried to crash into the top side as well, all it did though, was leaving some pointy marks behind, not quite the effect I was looking for. Meanwhile the water in the potatoe-water-pot almost boiled over, so I had to turn the boiler down, in doing so, I somehow managed to almost drop the plate of spinach, that was standing right next to the stove. After a quick recovery, a deep breath, I decided to tackle the can again.

That moment my alarm went off, indicating that it would only be about 30 minutes until A gets home. So I had to hurry but yet, still, the tomatoes were not out of the can. I did the only logical thing here and grabbed the hammer with it’s pointy side and hammered it into the can. Here too, no surprise, it didn’t do anything to the can (but it was so much fun). I tried the pointy can opener thing again and finally got a little tiny hole into the upside, which obviously was not big enough for the tomatoes to get out, but at least, it was open… I then tried to make as many pointy openings as possible, I had to stop at about 6 though. The tomatoes were still trapped in that stupid thing called can. As I turned around, looking for another tool that could possibly help me, my eyes spotted the scissors – again – and I had the brilliant idea to cut the can open. (This would also be the appropriate time to tell your children, to never do that at home.) With enough force I managed to get the can open, I mean, obviously, not really open, I cut a tiny opening into it, big enough for chunks to come out piece by piece. After about 20 minutes of playing around with this can-toy I finally managed to empty the can and started cooking the tomatoes.

Somehow I managed to cook the most delicious meal A had in weeks – his words, not mine. I think what tasted so awesome to him, was the extra mile I went to prepare a surprise dinner for him. He doesn’t know – up to now – how many extra miles I really went just to open a can of tomatoes.