Stage Left: Peppers and Onions; Stage Right: Geography and History

Sometimes when I’m cooking, everything is neatly planned out. I’m following a specific recipe, making a specific dish, hoping for close to a specific result, and making a specific huge mess regardless.

Other times, an opportunity sneaks up on me when I least expect it, and that’s what happened when I was trying out breakfast “omelet” muffins for the first time.

As I chopped all the peppers and onions and scooted them to the side, I caught a glimpse of the Mexico flag on my cutting board. Before I even realized what I was doing, I had sent one of the girls off in search of a “plastic bird” and I got to work, pulling up the wikipedia entry of the Mexico flag.

Now I didn’t think they would find a small plastic turkey to mimic the flag’s image, but then again, I wasn’t expecting to be brought a rubber duckie either (see the cute one above with a purple crown and pearls?? lol)! I couldn’t resist placing it on the onions as the girls gave me strange looks. Within minutes, I was also playing around with a rubber lizard’s tail to copy the snake the best I could, and traded out the duck with another soaring bird.

By then, I had the girls’ attention completely, and I dove into the explanation of what I was doing. As I pointed out the comparisons between my strange looking cutting board “creation” and the flag still showing on my laptop, I also took it as the perfect time to explain what some of the things on the flag meant. They had their own questions, too, so we touched on some history and I looked up the answers for a few of their questions.

For all that we covered, it seemed like a huge detour from my cooking time, but in reality, it was probably only 15 minutes out of my time. While they searched for toys and in between looking up a few of the questions I didn’t know, I kept chopping other items, preheated the oven, took a minute to get myself a drink of water, and even took a quick phone call. That actually proved to make me giggle even more as the typical question “What are you up to?” led to the not-so-typical answer “making a Mexican flag out of peppers and rubber duckies.”