God says no to Zatarain's

I had such high hopes for dinner tonight.

Two weeks ago, my parents sent a care package containing many excellent things, including more muffin mix than I knew what to do with and a single box of Zatarain's Yellow Rice mix. This stuff is great - the perfect blend of creole seasonings and...erm...yellow rice. It's a staple at home, and since there's no way I'm making shrimp gumbo up here (the prawns are ridiculously small, for one), the rice was supposed to fix my creole seasoning deficit.

Not trusting the cleanliness of the communal pots (which are always greasy, for some reason), I decided to try the microwave directions and use my lovely Pyrex-ish dish. Twenty minutes later, the rice looked good, the slightest bit of water had come out of the top, and all it needed was five minutes to fluff. I could handle five minutes of fluff time. Using my dishtowel makeshift mitts - which have worked for the oven, mind you - I pulled the dish from the microwave and tried to move it around the door to the counter.

Unfortunately, the steam escaping from the dish caused my hand to jerk, which caused the dish to slip from my hands...which sent my lovely box of Zatarain's all over the kitchen. Floor, microwave, refrigerators, jeans...just about everything but my dry-clean-only shirt got an authentic taste of New Orelans.

I said some unladylike things at that moment. Fortunately, no one was around to hear me.

The dish landed intact and right-side-up, fortuitously enough, and so I was able to salvage a bit of the rice, though that hardly made up for the two meals I lost. The surviving rice had plenty of time to fluff on the counter as I swept wet rice off the floor, wiped down the appliances and the counter, and mopped the floor with my dishrag, as we are currently out of paper towels again. The little rice I was able to eat was good, but I had to supplement with a muffin. What the hell, for sweeping the kitchen floor, I deserved a muffin.

I miss shrimp gumbo.