« There's Just No Competing with Buckminster Fuller | Main | Friday with My Pal O »
February 9, 2006
The Joy of Cooking
I have a sudden urge to make empanadas. That's the great thing about being an adult with moderate skill in the kitchen--I can find a recipe, follow it, and (at least half the time) relish the result. I can just go ahead and do it. Like when I have an urge for cranberry-walnut bread- I can just go in the kitchen and make it...sounds simple enough, I suppose, but I find a lot of joy in this. But my interest in cooking goes back a long way actually, to when I was but a wee child....[cue dreamy flashback music]
When I was seven, my best friend was a mean-spirited little girl who lived in a giant apartment complex near the highway with her mom, Fabienne, and a cat named Pinez. Because they were French, they pronounced its named pretty much like "Penis." Not that "Pinez" sounds much different than "Penis" in an English accent, but still, they were French and I'll leave it at that. This cat was obese and sported a veiny wart on its ear. Also, my friend had an ugly habit of rolling down her socks so they looked like little life preservers around her ankles. This much I remember, but it's all besides the point. The real point of this story is that when I would go to her apartment, which was often, she would coax me into her kitchen to "bake" something that we could sell downstairs to her unsuspecting neighbors. We would "bake" brownies, cookies, cakes even, whatever we fancied. Of course, we had no idea what we were doing and God knows where Fabienne was, probably chain-smoking on the patio, but I recall that we had practically no supervision. Regardless of what we were baking, the ingredients were always the same: flour, water, food coloring, baking soda, and lots and lots of salt. Recipes were useless to us. We would simply stir, dump, and bake in the oven until the smoke alarm sounded.
When we figured out how to dismantle the alarm, we would cart our rock-hard goods downstairs and set up shop. We had one of those TV tray tables and we would arrange our goodies on it just so, and then tape up a sign that said something along the lines of "Bake Sale for Charity" while we sat back, smiled our gap-toothed little smiles and raked in the cash.
I feel bad about it now...but not that bad. We were entrepreneurs, evil little entrepreneurs capitalizing on our cuteness. We were wise to do it then; we wouldn't be able to get away with something like that now...
Posted by debbie at February 9, 2006 10:56 AM