ATTENTION MUST BE PAID TO THE TEMPERATURE ONE IS READING WHEN COOKING

 I make lunch – peanut butter sandwich for me, ½ can of soup or a cold cut sandwich for husband.  I wash the dishes after lunch.  

But then I forget to do most important thing – figure out what we are eating for dinner.  I forget to ask my husband what he wants or “feels like” for dinner.  This is all a “since Covid” thing – before that we ate lunch out at Wendys (under US$4 for both of us) and we would discuss what to have for dinner as we went to the supermarket and shopped for that day's dinner.  So I forget even though this has been going for over a year.  

Some days this does matter as we will have something for dinner which does not need to defrost– on Mondays, for instance, he usually has hot dogs (which are generally not frozen) on bread and beans – while the beans are frozen they can be quickly defrosted as they cook on the stove and I have a chicken patty which can be cooked directly from frozen with leftover Chinese takeout rice and left over gravy of some sort – which can also be cooked directly from frozen.  Most days at least one item needs to be defrosted.  

Today I remembered and asked what husband wanted for dinner – sausages and spaghetti with tomato “gravy” (sauce).  Plenty of time to defrost the sausages and I took them out and left them in their plastic bags on a plate to defrost.  I had cooked tomato gravy last week, so I had plenty of extra frozen in the freezer in containers and I took one out also, even though it can be cooked from frozen.  I thought I was doing great.  

We went out for a walk in a local park as the weather was pleasant (last week we tried to do and it was much too windy).  When we came home I took in today's mail and sealed it in a quart plastic zip bag and put it in the plastic box that due to the pandemic our mail sits in for 4 days before I open i and took the Saturday bag of mail out of the box and took it upstairs to our office.  I spent the rest of the afternoon at my desk in the office.  

I came down an hour before we would eat dinner.  I made three phone calls to computers – checked that we had not forgotten that we had used any of 3 credit cards we normally don't use, which if we did I would need to pay and mail out on this Sunday's run to a USPS collection box with outgoing mail(since our mail delivery is not doing well, I have been checking just in case we used an unusual card and forgot so that no bill payments are missed) none of them have been used.  I then telephone our bank's computer and made sure that 2 direct deposits to our bank account are there, so we can spend the money and then started on cooking dinner.

I put up a pot of water to boil the spaghetti.  I put a small amount of water in the smaller of my two cast iron pans to start cooking the sausages and put the tomato gravy in a small pot (technically a sauce pan) to heat it, knowing the mess the sauce can make I put a lid on the pot.  When the water in the pan for the sausages started to boil I added the sausages and covered the pan – set the timer on the stove for 8 minutes, per the package of sausages.  The spaghetti water started to boil and having weighed out the amount of spaghetti I needed, I dropped same in the boiling water and turned it down a bit.  I then set the table.  When the timer went off I took, the lid off of the sausages, removed them and dumped out the remaining water and put them back in the pan to brown. All was going well.

Tomato gravy was heated and I shut it off with the lid on.  I checked the spaghetti – it needed more time. I was keeping an eye on the sausages and turning them so they would each brown on 4 sides.  I tried the spaghetti and it was done so I put into a strainer it and set aside in the kitchen sink to finish draining.  
The sausages looked done.  I took out my trusty oven thermometer and put it into one of the sausages to check that it had been cooked to over 365F so it would safe to eat.  It was only at 85F?!  Tired another – same thing … maybe they had not be completely defrosted when I started cooking them?  I put them back in the pan and let them keep cooking.  I tried them again 10 minutes later – they were now 91F?  Put them back into the pan.  

Husband came down for dinner, I explained what was going on.  He tested them – still in the 90Fs?   We decided to cut them in half and cook them that way to speed up the cooking.  He had cut two in half and the other two were sitting on a plate as cut in half only 2 fit in the pan.  We let them cook a few minutes and then tested the temperature – just about 95F .  What the heck was going on?

Then I looked at the thermometer.  OH NO!  Somehow it had to be reset to Celsius from Fahrenheit – so the temperatures were considerable hotter than we thought they were! 

I had the two which had been cut open and they were rather overdone and hard to chew.  I let husband have the two which had not been cut open as they had been cooked slightly less.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
Always check your equipment when something does not seem right.  Had I looked closer at the thermometer when I was first getting these odd readings I would seen the problem right away.  Dinner would have been on time and not overcooked.  

(95C = 203F – much above the 165F I was looking for, so no one has to calculate this out.)