Years ago, when a very wise Church leader was speaking about self-reliance, he emphasized that we needed to learn the basics like gardening, canning, cooking, and sewing among other things. And that we needed to practice those skills because if we didn't, our ability to do them would diminish over time. He said it wasn't enough just to know how to do something. We either move forward or slide back.
Here's a little background about my life and the BASICS.
We didn't grow a garden when I was a kid. The season wasn't long enough or favorable enough in Wyoming to make a garden very productive. So not on my radar. However, my mother did do a lot of canning every summer from fruit she purchased. Though I loved the end result of her canning endeavors, I really did not like that lengthy process to get to the finished product.
Nor did I like to cook. I was the youngest of a large family. My jobs were setting the table, watching the grandkids for family dinners, helping with the dishes. That kind of thing. Some of my sisters were in the kitchen right by my mom. That's where they learned to be good cooks. I don't know. Maybe they really enjoyed cooking, too.
My mother was a beautiful seamstress. I wasn't keen on that skill either, though she tried to teach me. Finally, she had me join a 4-H Club. I did learn to sew--very well, in fact, but it just wasn't a passion for me. My mother enjoyed sewing, even though she had done most of her sewing out of necessity to clothe herself and her eight daughters with beautifully stylish dresses and outfits. Some of my sisters had the same skill set as my mother in that arena, too.
Fast forward to me as a married adult with two little boys. My husband and I had just purchased our first house. It had a big back yard that fronted the street on two sides. Nice and open--and roomy, too. My husband asked me if I wanted a vegetable garden. No! Wasn't anything I was even remotely interested in.
...Until I went to my first meeting with the women's auxiliary in our congregation. The entire luncheon that day consisted of foods grown in the other women's gardens. You can be sure I zipped home to tell my husband I had changed my mind. Yes! I thought we should grow a garden.
Oh, it was a pitiful project! A couple of dummies, though my husband knew far more than I did about how to go about it. Obviously, it wasn't very successful, though we did dutifully also purchase the canning supplies including a huge pressure cooker like my mother had.
Okay. I had attempted to grow a garden. Not much to eat out of it. And...check off the canning know-how, too. Learned HOW to do it.
The sewing. I did a lot of that for the very same reasons my mother did, to clothe my growing family and make clothes for myself, too, as the years passed. I was still a skilled sewer, but the end result was usually not at all the vision I had in my mind. What was in my head just didn't come out through my fingers. However, I did sew drapes professionally for quite a long time. It was a job I lucked into when my husband had decided to go back to school and get his engineering degree. Any money that came our way was welcomed for tuition and books. All the sewing was plain and straight. I was an ace at that!
The cooking. I never liked to cook. The failure rate was always so high! Even the simplest items could be ruined under my spell. I went into the kitchen every day at 4:30 to fix a meal for what was eventually eight people--after another four kids joined us. I fed my family well-balanced meals and cooked EVERYTHING from scratch. There wasn't money in the budget for boxed anything, including breakfast cereal. But I disliked almost every second I spent fixing those meals.
And having company for dinner just about paralyzed me. Even inviting the missionaries to come to supper was an ordeal for me. Disasters dogged almost everything I put my hand to. What was a no-brainer for most of my friends was an exercise in futile anxiety for me.
Here is just a small sampling of some of those disasters:
Invited both sets of grandparents for Thanksgiving dinner one year when the kids were little. As we sat down to the table for our turkey feast, realized there were no mashed potatoes on the table. It wasn't that we had left the bowl of mashed potatoes in the kitchen, they hadn't even been cooked!
Fixed a Mexican dinner for the American missionaries when we were living in Sweden because they missed that kind of food. Somehow, I double-salted the pinto beans before they were steamed, and they were so laden with sodium as to be absolutely inedible.
Volunteered to take supper to my neighbors across the street when they had their second baby. How hard could it be to fix homemade potato soup (something I COULD prepare very well) and Hot Crescent Chicken Sandwiches. Another menu item I could do pretty well. I had prepared those items as "company fare" multiple times over the years. But oh, everything went wrong that night! The water burned out of the steamer and left scorched potatoes plus a dozen other details went awry, as well. The supper was embarrassingly late by over an hour when I finally took it across the street having had to start with the potatoes all over again to make the soup.
Not to mention the puff pastry that totally crumbled from black scorching because there was no baking time listed on the package, just a suggestion if the piece were smaller, a little less time. How much less? Apparently, not enough in my way of thinking!
And those are just a thimble-full of the sad food disaster stories in my life's "recipe book".
Then...I did it again because I NEVER learn! I decided to make an "easy peasy" Texas Almond sheet cake and take a generous piece--all duded up in a fancy Valentine box--to each of the half-dozen women I look after in my congregation.
First, I studied the recipe because I really have done little to no baking since I retired from United. I wanted to make sure I could understand every step, had every ingredient, and give myself plenty of time to make the dessert.
First stumper was the pan. Half a sheet cake pan!? What are the dimensions of a pan that size? I have several cookie sheets so opted for one of the bigger ones. I could reasonably look at it and think half a sheet cake pan.
I began the afternnoon before Valentine's Day.
Step one. Make the cake. Check. Got that done.
Step two. Make the frosting while the cake is baking. Hold up! In TWO opened packages of powdered sugar in the kitchen cabinet, I was still short 1 and a half cups of powdered sugar. Not a problem. Go downstairs to the food storage. Only instead of ANY powdered sugar, there were two bags of brown sugar.
That means that I will have to go to the little grocery here in my small town AFTER the cake gets out of the oven. It turns out the pan I decided to use was TOO big. That made the cake layer too shallow. Even though I had shortened the baking time, the cake was already done and dry by the time I had ascertained I would have to take off for the store.
Rush to Hays to get powdered sugar AND the toffee pieces I didn't have and was going to leave out anyway. Gone 29 minutes. The cake is clearly already cooled. The cake was supposed to be frosted while it was still warm--just out of the oven. I'm imagining it was like my recipe for Hot Chocolate Sheet Cake, pourable frosting on a hot cake. Like chocolate lava spreading over the surface. This frosting was stiff and trying to frost a now cooled cake only resulted in the top layer of the cake getting skimmed off every time the spatula touched that concrete-grade frosting to the top of the cake.
I was definitely going to have to "adapt and overcome" which is the old Army motto I hear all the time. So, I do the worst thing I could do--put the cake back into the oven with the concrete frosting in lumps, hoping the heat would make it softer so I could smooth it over the cake. Unfortunately, I had already sprinkled the sliced almonds and the toffee bits onto the frosted cake and put it under the broiler! Freak! the frosting pretty much crystalized. What a shocker, huh!
I set the cake aside.
I must have been fantasizing that it would be okay if I let it set overnight covered with plastic wrap. But it was even worse the next day. Then I had a brilliant idea. Instead of trying to slice the cake into rectangular pieces, I decided why not cut the pieces into circles to fit the fancy paper doilies in the six plastic boxes that were ready and waiting. That would make the presentation look better. But taste better? It did nothing for the sad, bottom-line fact that the cake was pretty much an inedible failure.
The afternoon of Valentine's Day was quickly ticking by. The only solution I could think of was to go to the store and get some kind of valentine candy to put into those little bags I had previously prepared. But I didn't want to drive all the way up to WalMart. It was already rush hour. So, I decided on a different way to accomplish that. My daughter lives in the next small town east of me, just three miles away. I had a Valentine present for her. Why not drop that off at her house and go to the Dollar General store in her town....
Only, there was literally NOTHING on the shelves at the Dollar General store except boxes of Whitman sampler chocolates and Cella chocolate covered cherries--both more expensive than I was thinking I wanted to spend. So, I literally walked up and down the aisles of the store trying to find something--anything--that I could tuck into the goodie bag for each of my ministering sisters.
LET EVERYTHING YOU DO BE DONE WITH LOVE
And there it was! A kitschy faux wood circle with a sentiment I could twist into a Valentine theme. There were eight plaques. I grabbed six of them and put them into the basket and returned the candy to the other part of the store. I paid for my V-day treasure and ran out to the car, holding my breath and hoping the circle would fit into the goodie bag. Barely! But I was glad it did and that the bag had handles. I had already slipped into the bag the greeting/reminder about our Relief Society activity night the following week. This was going to work! Then I realized that two of the rounds had a different sentiment. Something about life....not love. WAH!!!
I ran back into the store to see if the last two I had left on the shelf were what I wanted or what I didn't want. Oh, tender mercy! The last two were the LOVE ones. I took them, along with my receipt, to the cash register so I could make an easy exchange. The clerk wasn't so sure. He wanted to see where in the store I had found them. I pointed in the right direction, and he was on his way. When he came back, he reported that the circles were NOT like the ones I had in my hand. Of course not! I HAD the ones I wanted. I just wanted to make the exchange and take them out of the store with me to finish my now pretty-much-failed ministering opportunity. FINALLY! He understood.
By the time I drove back to Johnstown, delivered my precious cargo of six delayed Valentine wishes and got home, it was past 6 pm. The aborted cake fiasco was still in a mess on the counter. No Valentine cupid had swooped in to relieve me of that crappy clean up detail. But, it was a startling reminder that we DO need to practice basic skills in life or loose our ability, not only to do them well, but just to do them at all. Cooking is my nemesis. No wonder I hate it!
But hey, all's well that ends well! I guess....
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