After School Special

If any of you have read Charlie's blog, you'll know that Friday after school he had some kids over to video preparing and eating a three course meal for their speech class. One boy, Jake, was to make the appetizer, nachos. A sweet girl, Ashley, was to make a chicken dish with pasta and Charlie was making desert, a white cake.
When they arrived, around 4:30 ish, they didn't have a clue what was going on so they talked and laughed for about 1/2 an hour to get comfortable and set things up. Ashley asked me if there was somewhere she could thaw the chicken. WHAT? I filled the sink up with some cool water and told her to put it in and if it wasn't thawed when she was ready for it that we'd thaw it in the microwave, which for the record, I don't feel comfortable with. Granted, I don't cook...and I wasn't going to be eating it. But isn't chicken suppose to be one of those things that you have to make sure is thawed and cooked correctly?
Anyway, three teens in the kitchen and none of them have any cooking experience. Well, Charlie cooks a little and I knew he could make a cake by himself, so I hadn't really worried. However, the other two apparently hadn't had any experience.
When we make nachos, we always make them in the microwave. Jake wanted to broil them and I heard him say to set the timer for 5 minutes. I told him he may not want to broil them that long, and got a look from him and Charlie (plus, they were video taping it on giving instructions as they cooked) so I excused myself to the back of the house and asked them to just please keep an eye on things.
Mark comes home and finds me, we talk for awhile and decide to order out since our kitchen is being used. By this time it is 6 ish, so we walk toward the front of the house and in the hall leading to the kitchen we are confronted by smoke. I'm not exaggerating, you could barely see beyond your nose. While the nachos had been broiling, they put the chicken (I didn't even bother to ask if it had thawed, I no longer cared) in a pan and tried cooking it...on high heat. When the pan began smoking they kind of forgot about the nachos. Of course, the kid cooking the nachos was filming the pan burning and probably was too distracted by the smoke to remember the nachos under the broiler, or to be able to tell that the smoke wasn't only coming from the burning pan...but the oven as well. The only thing that had been edible was Charlie's cake. It was really good. The last kid left our house around 8 ish, and I've got to say that I was pretty surprised. The kitchen was spotless, the oven had been cleaned, the trash taken out (all the charred, and yet raw on the inside, chicken and flame broiled nachos had been trashed) and we still had cake to eat. Now, who could complain about that?
After it was all said and done, Charlie said he had had fun. That's all I cared about. Well, that and that we hadn't ended up having to find out what our insurance deductible for fire was. Always a plus.
I may try to put some of the video up from it.
I couldn't help but notice that Charlie had failed to mention this on his blog this morning. He'd told me he'd written two new posts, and I thought he'd mentioned something about the cooking video. But nope, he'd went with a new song he'd wrote, something about "Die, Die, Die"...
Oh, my Charlie...he sure knows how to make his mom proud. I'd not go back to being 15 again for anything in the world!