See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Carmine Santa Maria
Brooklyn Daily
I’m madder than Sir Isaac Newton when that apple landed on his head, forcing him to discover gravity — and then get blamed by some geezer every time I drop something on the floor — over the fact that I’m pretty much an immovable object that is constantly slammed into by irresistible forces, and that can sometimes make things gets messy.
Look, I don’t need to tell you that Cole Porter was right when he wrote “Something’s Gotta Give” because gravity, and, frankly, all of Mr. Newton’s theories, just so happen to be the bane of the existence of the elderly, who suffer from a limited mobility, balance, and strength, resulting in Newton making lots of things fall to the floor.
In fact, I’m getting to hate Sir Isaac Newton more than I hate Alan Trebeck.
Case in point was the other day when my lovely wife Sharon went to Coney Island to enjoy her Saturday at the beach. As soon as she left, I decided to cook up my favorite macaroni dish — “pasta con lentils” (that’s pasta with lentils, for those of you who don’t speak the mother tongue) — something my dearest doesn’t particularly care for.
Making this delicious dish usually takes a couple of hours because of the big pot I use — boiling five quarts of water is not quick, especially when you’re watching it. Now, you ladies out there (and I know you are out there) know the drill: you cover the pot and when the water boils over because you didn’t lower the flame in time, you put in the pot’s colander and the pound of pasta inside.
The water stops boiling, and as the pasta starts cooking, you add salt and you wait again until the starchy water erupts over the pot because you were too busy cooking the lentils and spinach in a Pyrex pot on another flame. That’s when you know it’s done.
Now, bear in mind, because I cannot stand, I do all of this cooking on a stool that sits in one spot. To put it bluntly, it’s a messy situation, even though I don’t use dried lentils, but instead use the avant-guard technique my sainted mother patented back in the day — put a can of Progresso lentil soup on the pasta, add salt and pepper, and serve to the hungry boy sitting at the table!
Remember, folks! Do not throw away the boiling starchy water after you remove the colander with the cooked pasta, because if you do, you are missing out.
I prepare a dish for myself to see if the pasta is cooked enough, add lentils and spinach and salt and pepper until I like how it tastes. I eat my bowl, then put the rest of the pasta, with the delicious spinach and lentils, in a container in the Fridigaire (that’s Italian for refrigerator!).
Meanwhile, put another kind of pasta in the colander and into the pot that had the boiling, starchy water, to cook on the flame. The macaroni will cook quicker and you’ll have another pound to store in the fridge.
Then, while the two pastas are cooling off, start washing the pots and pans, the stove, the floor, and the rest of the mess you’ve made before your wife comes home and kills you. That’s what I was doing when I pushed my stool by the counter next to the Fridigaire, where I just put the pastas and was about to enjoy the fruits of my labor, when I spotted a lentil on the bread box behind the dish. Knowing full well that Sharon would spot the mess (yes, a single, solitary lentil is a mess) and start screaming about it — because, as I stated before, she don’t like lentils — I reached over to remove the lentil with my fingernail, when to my horror, Newton Laws again came into play.
The dish of pasta fell on the just-cleaned floor.
“AAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I screamed.
What to do? I quickly reached for the knife to slash my wrists. But then Sharon would find my blood, body, plastic dirty dish, lentils, pasta, spinach, and spoon on the kitchen floor, which would be worst then death.
So I cleaned up the whole thing, and never got a bite of pasta in edgewise! Damn that Newton!
Screech at you next week!