Macaroni cheese, Pit Pads and gerkins.

When I was working full-time I tended to cook up a couple of days worth of dinners on a Sunday evening, now that I work part time I usually prepare meals for the rest of the week on Tuesday afternoon or evening. Yesterday I cooked up a big dish of macaroni cheese, except I didn't have macaroni so used penne and also added brocolli, cauliflower and, of course, runner beans (I'm a big fan of one pot meals) I kept 2 portions in the fridge and froze the other couple of meals. I know its not exactly haute cuisine but I enjoyed making it and the end results should taste good, except for a couple of minor hitches.

The first hiccup was Billy's fault. Billy is a typical terrier and obsessed with cats, chasing birds, trying to climb trees after squirrels and catching flies. I live in a first floor flat with a balcony and when I'm home Billy spends most of his time out on the balcony. There is railing around the edge of it but by lying as flat as possible Billy can get his head under the railing, onto the edge of the ledge so that he can watch the cats in the garden below. He spends hours out there, whimpering occasionally as the cats taunt him by parading up and down.

Well yesterday the pasta was cooking and the cheese sauce was just getting to that crucial stage where it is starting to boil and thicken. The stage where it needs constant stirring to stop it sticking to the base of the saucepan and getting lumpy, when I suddenly realised that I hadn't heard anything from Billy in a while.

I abandoned the sauce and going outside leant over the railing. Billy had somehow managed to get under the railing and was out on the ledge that runs along the front of the building, he was balanced at the end, three flats along from where I live. The ledge gets narrower as it goes along and where he was standing it wasn't wide enough for him to turn around to come back. Cats I know have nine lives and have been reported to fall off 20 storey buildings and walk away unscathed, you don't hear the same anecdotes about westies, so I was worried about what would happen if he fell the one storey. I grabbed some shoes and dashed around to the front of the building where I was able to stand on my downstairs neighbours garden wall and reach up and grab the dog. I swear, to get under the fence, he must have had to dislocate his shoulder blades and would need to take his back legs off at the hip, throw them over the rails and then reattach them, or he wouldn't have fit.

That crisis was averted but back inside my worst fears were realised. I had lumpy and slightly burnt cheese sauce.

The next issue with my Mac cheese wasn't my fault either, I don't think. If I was to blame anyone I would probably accuse Mabelline, the cosmetic company, of producing faulty goods.

 I was grating the cheese to go into my lumpy sauce and I suspect that you can guess what happened next. Often when grating things I manage to graze my knuckles, well yesterday instead of my knuckles I somehow managed to grate my finger nails. So not only did my cheese sauce have lumps of flour and flecks of burnt sauce in, it also now contained flakes of Coral Reef coloured nail varnish.

This got me thinking about a conversation I'd had the other evening when out for a meal with some ex-colleagues. We'd been talking about business ideas,and two friends who'd been made redundant at the same time as me, both reckoned that they had brilliant, new and life changing ideas for inventions. One was for Pit Pads, absobant pads you could stick to the underarm area of your clothes to stop you from getting damp patches when hot. The other idea was to invent edible string for tieing up bales of straw and hay for livestock. Both my colleagues were passionate about their ideas and were convinced that if they were produced they would make a fortune. Unfortunately when I looked online the next day I found that both were already being produced. At that point I decided that everything needed has already been invented, although I am prepared to concede that technology is still coming up with a few new ideas. The human race has been inventing and coming up with new products for centuries, so surely by now everything new and useful has already been made.

I had an amusing hour looking at some of these inventions and was especially impressed by the:

• Heated butter knife which solves the problem of not being able to spread butter straight from the fridge
• Slippers with lights built into the toes so that you don't have to turn the main lights on during nocturnal bathroom visits. On a similar theme you can also get fluorescent toilet paper.
• Dog umbrellas which fit into the dogs lead, to try and avoid that wet dog smell on rainy days.

Yesterday after my slightly problematic cooking experience I realised that there are still some vital inventions needed and not all of them related to macaroni cheese. The first that I'd like to suggest is grater proof nail polish, think about the gallons of cheese sauce this could save. Manufacturers of cosmetics make claims that their varnish will dry in 60 seconds, will strengthen and condition your nails, but for some reason none have come up with a polish that will with stand a cheese grater. My second idea is for dog food that becomes fluorescent when it exits the dog, this will make it much easier to pick up when the light is poor. Manys the time that I take Billy dog out in the early moning or late evening and I've had to resort to feeling around, hand in poo bag for a warm deposit. Finally someone needs to come up with a jar opener that works, I know that there are dozens on the market, my Mum and I probably have most of them between us, but they just don't work. I have a jar of pickled gerkins in my cupboard, unopened since about 1978, which I just can't get into. 

So any would be inventors out there who are stuck for inspiration please give these a go, and should you end up making a fortune from them remember who gave you the idea. Now anyone for macaroni cheese anyone?