We
all have our little fears and eccentricities.
I happen to be afraid of
canned biscuits.
It’s that countdown – mini-seconds before blast off --
that has me on edge.
Although I know the soft dough, when it suddenly bursts
forth from the can, is not going to hurt me, I remain ill at ease until the contents
are transferred safely to a baking sheet. This personal plight almost is enough
to lead to drastic measures, such as making biscuits from scratch.
Well,
almost.
The day I can create biscuits from the very beginning -- mixing
ingredients, kneading, rolling out, cutting out … well, that’s the day I win the
Pillsbury bake-off contest. Not gonna happen.
As the user of canned biscuits,
I’m different from most of the women in our family. My mother, mother-in-law,
grandmothers and aunts could create flaky, delicious biscuits for breakfast every
morning as though they were on automatic pilot, going through the motions without
thinking about it. They never looked at a recipe and, Heaven forbid, they never
used ready-made dough hatched from a refrigerated can.
I’m not the only
one who is fearful of close encounters of the canned kind. Many of my friends
share my anxiety and suffer, as I do, from a kind of dough-phobia.
If
we can send a man to the moon, why can’t a rocket scientist invent a canned product
from which biscuit dough will ease out ever so gently, silently.
Did
you hear about what happened to that woman in San Diego a while back? After she
returned home from grocery shopping, her husband noticed that she was sitting
in her car in the driveway with the windows rolled up and with her eyes closed.
She was holding both hands behind her head.
“Is there a problem?” the
husband wanted to know as he tapped on the window by the driver’s seat. When the
woman finally opened her eyes, she had a gosh-awful look on her face.
“Are you OK?” the husband kept asking.
No, she was not OK. She told him
that she had been shot in the back of her head and she was holding her brains
in.
The car was completely locked and the woman refused to remove her hands
from her head to open a door. She could not let go of her brains.
Finally,
the husband called the paramedics, and they broke into the car.
“Well,
what have we here? … What’s this?”
The paramedics found that the woman
had a wad of biscuit dough stuck to the back of her head. A can of biscuits in
a bag of groceries in the back seat had exploded from the heat in the car. Sounding
like a gunshot, the “biscuit bullet” struck the back of her head. When she reached
back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought the worst. Her brains
were falling out. You
may remember that commercial proclaiming, “Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’
from the oven.”
In this case, one might chirp, “Nothin’ says lovin’ like
somethin’ poppin’ in the noggin.”
© Wanda
Orton Baytown
Sun Columnist
"Wandering"
July 21, 2013 columns
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