A Teriyaki Interlude

Alright, let’s just put a pause on my list so I can confess:

Our shower smells like teriyaki sauce.  Yes, I said teriyaki sauce...

Why, you ask?  Well let me fill you in:

So last night Aaron and I are cooking a nice meal of hamburger, macaroni, and stir-fry (I know, kind of a strange combo…).  Things are going well; we’re about ready to eat—when all of a sudden, I hear a ‘CRACK!’ and then an “Oh no…”  I look behind me into the kitchen only to see a lake of teriyaki sauce creeping towards me, and Aaron standing over it muttering words of frustration to himself.  Not only was teriyaki goop surrounding us on the floor, but when Aaron had dropped and cracked the bottle, teriyaki had also exploded all over the walls, cupboards, cookbooks, fridge, and a little bit of our entry-way…I’ll tell you right now: this hadn’t been just any old bottle of teriyaki.  This was an economy-sized bottle that we had picked up at BJ’s, the whole-sale store.  Therefore, it looked like a teriyaki bomb had just gone off in our kitchen.

This is where it all went down...

 Aaron’s first reaction was to quickly scoop up the broken (plastic) teriyaki bottle and dump the remains that hadn’t touched the floor into our stir-fry. “At least we can still have a little bit…”, he said quietly, as he solemnly dripped the remains into our pan and set the broken bottle into the sink.  Coming out of a stun from watching this all unfold, the first thing I could do was...laugh.  I couldn’t help it.  “How are we going to get this up, Elise?!”, Aaron asked in desperation as he stared at the mess.  The teriyaki was slowly creeping towards the outer-skirts of our kitchen.  I snapped out of my amusement of the whole situation and quickly started brainstorming… Unfortunately, we had recently given away our mop.  When would our small kitchen get so dirty that we would need to do anything other than Swiffer-mop?  Famous last words… A sponge?, I wondered.  My mom had gotten up some pretty big spills from the floor with a sponge before.  They’re small, but mighty…Though, apparently not quite mighty enough for a spill of this magnitude.  It helped, but didn’t do the trick.

 

“You know what we need?” I finally said.  “…A towel!”.   Aaron dashed into the bathroom and came out with a nice big bath towel.  I’ll admit, I was actually thinking an old hand or dish towel, but if he was willing to sacrifice an old unraveling bath towel, this would work too.  So we went to work—and I’m proud to say, between the towel, the sponge, the Lysol wipes, and the Swiffer-mop, the mess was cleaned up. 

So why does our shower smell like teriyaki?  Well, we had to rinse the towel out somewhere, and this seemed to be the best place at the time.  Unfortunately we didn’t stop to think about the lasting repercussions…On a positive note, the stir-fry was delicious, and now our kitchen floor is the cleanest it’s been since we moved in.

Number 5: Don't give away your mop.