Dear Dangerous Kitchen,
We had a lot of laughs, didn’t we? Who would have thought that a song would describe my childhood kitchen? Sure, maybe a heartbreak, a rekindled romance, or a perfect summer’s day, but a kitchen?
At this point in my life, I’ve seen a fair share of kitchens, messy, minimalist, modern, but there’s nothing like your mom’s kitchen. It was your first kitchen, after all. To be fair, mom was the minority in a household of true-blue Americans, so her food was pungent, foreign, and frightening to us.
If it ain’t one thing it’s another
Whenever she fried dried chili peppers, we all had to run out of the house to breathe. I don’t know if you’ve ever inhaled pepper spray, but it does a good job of choking you.
Sometimes
The milk can hurt you
In 2015, I was visiting her and was poking around the kitchen for something to snack on. I found yogurt and started to peel back the foil lid when I noticed the expiration date – 2009. I gasped, then laughed, and began digging through all the yogurt in the back of the fridge to discover a treasure trove of old Yoplait yogurt of various flavors.
You must walk very CAREFUL
You must not lean against it
It can get on you clothing
Our kitchen was sticky. Mom would deep fry many things from homemade spring rolls for Larry’s 5th grade class to a whole fish (that could feed a family) for the cat. Grease pops, jumps, splatters, and that matters when you’re trying to wipe that up. It’s very hard to do? Isn’t it, dangerous kitchen?
Life, the Universe, and Lani 
The dried chili caught my attention, now I know the feeling of my house mates when I process chili garlic🤣🤣.
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Ha! I always enjoyed the smell of garlic frying until I started catching whiffs of my neighbors’ cooking, and then I was like, that’s really strong! And chili…that’s just cruel 😛
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Haha! Just for the love of chili.
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Some types of cooking make kitchens really greasy. When I first arrived to Suzhou and was apartment hunting, I was wondering why it seemed that all the previous tenants had never cleaned the kitchen. Now that my MIL has been living here for over a year I know that the way Chinese food is cooked makes the kitchen become the Sticky Festival (and she cleans and wipes everything every day…)
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Those yellow grease stains are super stubborn. I remember trying to get rid of them the last time I visited my mom’s place, and they would not budge!
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