Kitchen wars

http://www.mccormickgourmet.com/Products/Spices/Black-Pepper-Cracked.aspx

Now that I've opened the "Rob & Jacoba's fights in the kitchen" box, I may as well keep on going because oh, do I have more. You know, when Rob and I are not physically in the kitchen, we don't actually fight all that often. There's the occasional "Are you seriously going to walk through the garage with bare, sweaty feet and then walk right back onto our almost white carpet?" and the "You're hogging all media devices at the moment - please hand over either my iPhone, the TV remote, or my computer" complaints (um, all from me and none from Rob...which either indicates I'm overly anal, which I suppose I've already established, and/or I'm pretty much perfect, also a plausible conclusion).

The problem with the kitchen is the combo of The Controller (played by yours truly) and The Creative Chef (played by Rob). The Creative Chef likes to add such things as caraway seeds to mashed potatoes. And carrots to the usually savory sauteed combo of eggs-potatoes-sausage-spinach. And mayonnaise to a fried egg on toast. And all kinds of weird crap to a box of mac and cheese. And a thick layer of pepper on nearly anything edible.

And The Controller likes her mac and cheese to taste like...well, mac and cheese. And when she wants mashed potatoes, she wants it to taste like...well, mashed potatoes. And she doesn't really like pepper very much. At all.

The first kitchen fight we ever had took place at my parents' house (way back when) when Rob volunteered to make mac and cheese for the kids for lunch. If you recall, I have 294019 brothers and sisters, so when you make mac and cheese, the final result is roughly vat-sized. When everything's stirred together and smelling delicious, Rob reaches over and dumps about 1/4 cup of black pepper into the mix...just because he's Rob and doesn't thoroughly think things through 100% of the time. I was insanely aggravated to put it nicely.

So when suddenly we had a vat of mac and cheese and pepper that all the kids were sniffling over and refusing to eat, in stepped The Controller. I admit, I got mean...poor Rob, just trying to make lunch. And then I was so beastly and he was so embarrassed that he silently got in his car and left - to drive around a city he didn't know to find boxes of mac and cheese to replace what he had wasted. I know. I am ashamed even typing this today. It was terrible when he left in his car, but it was even more gut-wrenching when he returned and handed two boxes of gas station brand mac and cheese over to my mom, apologizing that he drove and drove but couldn't either a grocery store or a gas station that carried Kraft. Oh the shame.

Side note: You would think that this incident would have been memorable enough to be the last and only time he added excessive pepper to communal mac and cheese. It wasn't.

So when I catch Rob adding Reddi-Whip to our mashed potatoes (with his followed protest of "Well, you never would have known it was there at all had you not seen!"), I have to take a deep breath, exhale the anger of The Controller, and growl softly, "Then why, pray tell, do we need to add it at all?" And refrain from punching the arm that then reaches out and, with flourish, adds another squirt of that sweetened whipped cream for pure dramatic effect.