For the four years that we lived together in Flint, Mike, Keith and myself had a dinner arrangement that was a very effective way to reduce the cooking workload on all of us. For the five days of the school week, we each took the cooking duties one day per week. On the 4th day we went out to eat, and on the 5th day we each made our own meals. Normally the practice was to prepare low cost casserole-type meals. Like most college students we were looking to save money, and didn't have much experience with cooking.

One week Mike was feeling ambitious, so he brought a portable barbecue from his parent's house and planned to grill up some nice, juicy steaks on his night to cook. When his appointed night came, Mike took the mini barbecue outside and set it on the ground to light it. No happy with having to cook steak on the ground, he looked around for something to set the grill on. Sitting next to the back door was a plastic trash can - Perfect! He turned the trash can upside down and put the grill on top, creating a handy workstation for preparing his gourmet meal.

Mike proceeded to light the grill and put the steaks on it. Amazingly, he managed to do this without blowing anything up or catching himself on fire. He stayed out there for a while, but soon got bored with staring at the barbecue and decided to come back inside. For 20 minutes everything was fine. Mike stayed inside the house and kept warn, the barbecue stayed outside the house and cooked the steaks.

Upon going back outside to check on dinner, Mike discovered that the barbecue didn't seem to be sitting quite as high as it was before. The very hot bottom of the barbecue had melted into the very soft bottom of the trash can, effectively plastic-coating the bottom of the barbecue and making the back yard smell like, well, like a burnt trash can, if you can imagine that.

We were left with a 12 by 18 inch hole in the bottom of our best trash can, three overdone steaks, and one embarrassed chef. The best part was that Keith, Chris and I got 3 days of laughter out of the whole experience. That was the last time Mike tried to make steak for us.