The Slice: Cooks come up with some creative half-baked excuses

Maybe they have magical powers.

Or perhaps it is expert guesswork.

But somehow cooks know.

In the course of preparing grilled cheese sandwiches or heating up apple turnovers for more than one person, sometimes misfortune befalls one of the treats. Perhaps one of them gets burned a little. Or maybe one winds up getting smushed.

These things happen.

But even though these culinary works in progress didn’t sport name tags, the cook somehow knows which one belongs on which plate. So when the noncook saunters into the kitchen, he or she gets served the sad news: “Something happened to yours.”

Darn the luck.

It’s uncanny. How do cooks know that the less desirable muffin or disfigured slice of quiche is not theirs? And just how is it that the singed, malformed or dropped-on-the-floor food item never has their name on it?

Of course, there are exceptions. Parents cooking for young children often claim for themselves the least attractive potato, the mangled burger patty, the gloppiest piece of pie or the torn tortilla.

And it should be noted that most cooks are just kidding about foisting the runt of the baking pan on others. But in the first moment of discovery that there’s a problem with one of the items on the stove or in the oven, somehow they always know.

“There’s a problem with yours.”

•Weather report : The Inland Northwest doesn’t experience hurricanes, which have names, or tornadoes, which are graded with impressive-sounding labels such as “F-4.”

For that, we can be grateful.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t improvise on the names front. So this summer, I plan to name our hot dry spells.

For instance, The Accu-Slice forecast for the week of Aug. 16 calls for high-temperature system “Bud” to settle in over our area. That will be followed by high-temperature system “Dodie.”

And during that stretch, we can expect P-3 levels of low humidity with a 30 percent chance of intermittent fudgesicle juice.

•Warm-up questions : What percentage of the stuff in your garage really ought to be tossed out? How often do Spokane-area apartment dwellers find themselves hearing conversations in which it is assumed that 100 percent of those who reside here live in houses?

•Today’s Slice question : How many people around here have names that were also the names of characters in novels, TV shows or movies?