Thought you all should know

It happens but once a year, the skies grow dark, the weather grows cold, and last weekend I bought a few winter squashes. Since I seldom cook these, I dug through some recipes and found one that required boiling the squash whole. As I read the recipe, I got that feeling in the back of my head that something was missing. I wasn't sure what (not being highly squash experienced and all), but there was definitely a step missing. I proceeded with the plan, expecting that I would recall the missing step when I got to it.

About 25 minutes into the 30 minute boiling process, I was suddenly reminded of the missing step. See, it's simple physics. If you take a closed body that contains a gas, and raise its temperature, the gas tries to expand. This is why you generally poke a few holes in a potato before microwaving it (for those instances when you don't wan to bake it in a salted jacket for an hour). If you fail to put the holes in the potato, you will hear a loud pop in the microwave as the potato decides that the vegetative life is dull and decides to grow up and become a grenade.

A squash boiling in about two gallons of water turns out to have quite a bit more range than a potato.