TOFFEE SUPRISE!!!

For the last 6 years I have been talking about Nestle' Condensed Milk.

Someone told me that if you boil it for about 3 hours it turns into this amazing toffee.

So I decided to try it this Saturday afternoon while I was doing some computer work.

While working away, I steadily boiled the can in a pot of water. I topped the pan up with water after a few minutes of boiling, and then got side tracked by EJ, who called up on the phone with a really bad fever just wanting to talk to me.

So I talked to him and then had to make an urgent phone call to one of the girls in the office.

As I was talking on the phone I hear this tremendous BANG, as if a bomb had gone off in the building! I seriously though someone had blown up the building! Quickly I slammed down the phone and ran out to the hallway.

I wondered what had happened for about two seconds until I noticed that my kitchen was covered in thick brown liquid from top to bottom and my entrance way floor was covered in black goo. Unsteadily, I walked into the kitchen.

Horror!

I have never seen anything like it. The walls, ceiling, floor,windows, blinds, cooker - in fact everywhere - COVERED in burnt Nestle' "toffee". The saucepan was just . . . I mean it was no longer a saucepan really! Completeley black and warped.

I ran over to the stove and turned the flame off, and I noticed a small circular piece of metal on the fridge. What the...? I realised to my horror it was the top of the Nestle' can!

I looked again at the destruction. Black goo all over the kitchen! Oh my!

I realised later that it was a good thing the can blew up in the direction of the wall and the refigerator. The other direction was a big kitchen window! One small goo covered trajectory falling sixteen floors with a trail of large chunks of glass. . . I dare not think. . .

I couldn't cry because I had to call EJ back and talk to him. He was about to be interviewed live on a for a radio station, and was feeling terrible from food poisoning. So I called him up and told him about it while the smoke cleared from the remains of the kitchen. I laughed at myself, and hearing the hilarity in my voice, he didn't panic. Besides, I got him laughing and feeling a little better.

I then turn back to the kitchen. From where I was in the living room I could see a trail of black shrapnel leading out into the hallway.

I get to work. Cooker first. Rags out, boil a kettle for hot water (because there is not hot water in the kitchen), put the water in the only other saucepan we had, force the mop into the pan and away I went to scrub.

Just then the phone rings. It was potential client who is coming over to see a presentation today. He says, "I'll be with you in twenty minutes."

AAAGGHHHH!!!

I only have the cooker cleaned and I'm now VERY hot and very dirty and the kitchen is STILL a mess. I hand up and head back to the kitchen.

On the way back to the kitchen I notice a nicely formed set of sticky black footprints heading out of the kitchen to where I am standing. GRRRRRR!!!

I laugh and track another set back to the kitchen to keep on cleaning.

I leave myself 5 minutes till I know he is due, and quickly change. I head to the bedroom and look at myself in the mirror. My face is red. My feet are sticky. I look over at the floor . . . Oh NO!!!

I have now put toffee footprints across the entrance hall and into the bedroom.

I go back to the kitchen, retracing my steps with the mop, wipe down the bit of the kitchen which my prospect can see through the glass in the kitchen door, and crawl on my hands and knees to the bathroom to wash my feet.

I light some incense to take away the lingering odor of toffee smoke!!

I begin to laugh at this point. Maybe too much.

I think of the kitchen and know that behind the closed dorr it still looks like a bomb site.

The phone rings - he's downstairs.

I quickly wipe a clean trail across the ktichen floor with the bath mat so that I can safely walk to the fridge for some iced water and bring it back without covering the lounge floor with toffee footmarks.

I feel like Mission Impossible or one of those strategic SAS operations.

It's like on of those army adverts on TV: "Kitchen has exploded, prospect calls, what do you do first??? If you think you can handle this situation call this number..."

My prospect arrives and I do the presentation as if nothing has happened. He leaves never knowing of my calmity.

Then I am left with the aftermath:

I change again, and stand up on the fridge to get as high to the ceiling as I can, but alas I am not tall enough. So now there is a clean line around the kitchen about six feet high. From there up . . .well, you can see from the photos.

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The next day I left for East Malaysia, and am writing this to you not having seen the resulting clean up effort. I called the cleaners and am hoping it will be sorted by the time we get back. I will let you know.

Oh by the way - EJ couldn't beleive the mess that I had already cleaned up when he got back from Singapore - he hadn't visualised it being as bad as it was.

TRUST me it was a terrrible waste of Nestle' condensed milk. I had a KitKat and a cup of tea to recover.

A saturday afternoon story from Kuala Lumpur.

~Tila (Lisa) Clark