Brotherly Advice

The other night I had signed up to feed the missionaries and decided to feed them hamburgers and hot dogs. (It's that time of year, you know.) I decided to go with my blue cheese burgers because they're really yummy and after patting out a bunch, began cooking them. I'm still a little sensitive to cooking smells, so once the burgers were cooking, I began to notice an unpleasant aroma. Something smelled just like vomit. I began trying to sniff out the smell and finally decided it was the smell of the meat cooking. I was a little concerned by the smell, but had decided to chalk it up to one of of those weird pregnancy things when Elise (without my having said a word) goes, "What smells like throw up in here?" That is when I started to freak out just a little bit. Here I've put all this time and money into dinner, only to have it smell like vomit? I certainly don't claim to be Wolfgang Puck or anything, but I'm a decent cook. I don't cook things that smell like vomit. The raw burgers didn't smell that way, only the ones that were cooking. I was desperately debating how to solve this problem. So I called my family to see what their opinion was. I got a hold of two of my brothers and my mom, who offered some advice on what I could do. Ethan suggested adding some hot sauce or chili powder to the pan they were cooking in. His thinking was to mask or overpower the other smell with the "hot" smell. Adam thought setting something on fire might do the trick. Nothing like the smell of smoke to "throw" the smell. After talking to them, I just had to laugh. Their advice was so practical on one hand and so typically male on the other. :) They were so sweet to take time to help me solve my dinner dilemma. In the end, I realized the stainless steel pan I was cooking in had gotten too hot and the blue cheese had burned on the bottom of the pan, causing the "vomit smell". Thankfully, once we got that problem cleared up, dinner went off without a hitch. The burgers and hot dogs were delicious and no one is worse for wear for eating them. :) And I had fumigated the house in time, so no one knew about the earlier cooking woes. Why do things like that happen only when you're preparing for company?