Cooking and the sink

I remember blogging about how we act alot like our parents a few months ago, yesterday I found myself at it again.
When I was young my mum used to give me basic cooking classes.So rest assurred The Acolyte would never starve.Being the young attention lad with the attention deficit that I was I would be too impatient to tend to what was on the cooker and instead I would run off to watch TV or play outside.Of course what would happen is that I would be alerted by an acrid smell coming from the kitchen and a cloud of smoke billowing from the pan or if I was lucky I would come back to find that half the contents have stuck to the bottom of the pan.After my mum realised that her lambasting was falling on deaf ears she resorted to giving me a hearty helping of my ashy cuisine.As a result I learned to pay attention to what I was cooking and to enable me to still watch TV as I cooked I would stay only for the fast cooking stuff like onions and tomatoes and then know how long it takes the other ingredients to get ready so that I would just pop in at various intervals to stir, add or reduce heat and serve while I continued doing what I was doing (yes we men can multi-task too!).
So yesterday evening I come into the house and walk into the kitchen and find that my room mate has decided to try his hand at cooking.First thing I had noticed is that he was cooking almost a whole pack of rice.Unless I have guests I prefer to cook a couple of glasses because when you cook too much food it ends up going to waste as you get tired of eating it and also just in case the recipe goes wrong for some reason you don't lose too much food (yes I don't like to waste food).Then he had adopted a cooking style that is said to be favoured by our compatriots from the Central Province.The young man had thrown in the vegetables with the rice (don't get me wrong, that may work for some people but I tend to be a purist; unless it is pilau the rice is cooked on it's own).
But I didn't tell the young lad all this.All I did was look at the temperature settings he had on the cooker.The heat was too low so what we would have had is ugali, so I upped the heat and told him that after 10 mins he should come and check on the rice so as to lower the heat and that it would be ready in 20 mins (the cooker was the same model as the one in my old aparment so I know the best temperatures for cooking rice on it). The young lad nodded dutifully and I told him that I was off to the library and would be back.
On my return as I walked into the house.The first thing that hit my nose was a faint burning smell reminiscent of my cooking lessons of the yester years.I went to the kitchen and looked at the rice.Not it hadn't been reduced to an ashy mass but it still had a burnt smell to it.The bad thing about that is that a burned smell translates to a slightly burned taste.
So I go to my roommates room as ask him what happened to the rice.
"It burned," he says."No sh*t sherlock! I wouldn't have guessed that!"I thought to myself.
So I then said, "Didn't I give instructions?"
He simply gave me this incredulous that insinuated that I had said the moon comes out at night instead of the day.I held back myself from uttering the words my mother had uttered to me some years back after I made some rice flambe, "The next time you burn food like that, you will eat the whole pan."
I mean after all I am not his mother!Then today morning I caught myself again.
I went to the kitchen and I looked at the sink and what do I find?Yesterday's dishes!Arrrghhhh!
(I am sure you all know about my sink issues) I have this simple rule, I you use it; you clean it.Since he had left and I was not in the mood to talk, I put a notice on the fridge.

No dishes sleeping in the sink,
If you make someting dirty,
WASH IT ASAP!

But that got me to thinking.Maybe I am not as easy to live with as I thought, or is it that some people are just slobs who can't clean after themselves when it comes to the small things?
Have a good weekend and enjoy the World Cup!