So what did you do the night before Thanksgiving?
Me? I went to the airport to pick up my older son who found a cheap last-minute flight from Orlando. The catch is it wasn’t into Cleveland. It was into Akron – one hour and 10 minutes from our house.
Anyway, we didn’t get home from the airport until after midnight.
I was beat so I went to bed but my husband, who always has much more holiday spirit than I do, went to the Giant Eagle to get an angel food cake. He wanted to make a trifle.
I had already looked for an angel food cake at two other grocery stores. All gone.
When did angel food become such a popular Thanksgiving item? What happened to pumpkin pie?
Well, the 24-hour Giant Eagle didn’t have any angel food cakes, either. He bought a mix.
I found out all of this when he got home and woke me up.
“Hey, think I can use this to bake an angel food cake?” he asked as he handed me a hard plastic pan shaped exactly like an angel food cake pan with a cylinder in the middle.
I took it from him and looked at the bottom. M-E-L-A-M-I-N-E was printed there.
“I guess so,” I said. “It looks like a cake pan. What else could it be?” (I found that out later, by the way.)
So, he took back his pan and went downstairs to bake. I went back to sleep.
The cake came out great and the pan did, too. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that probably wasn’t what that pan was meant for.
I hunted around through the pile of booklets and papers left for us by the previous homeowners. On the cover of one of them, I spotted the pan, which wasn’t a pan at all.
It was a mixing bowl that was to be used with the NuTone Food Center – the blender thing in my counter.
The instructions say, “The bowl rests on a turntable connected directly to the power unit. The motor, not the beater, turns the bowl. While the bowl revolves automatically, the beater turns in the opposite direction.”
So the cylinder in the “angel food pan” was actually the portal for the beaters. Hmm.
When my husband found out about this, he said, “Geesh. It’s a good thing I didn’t burn the house down.”
Can melamine burn? I couldn’t find the answer online.
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. Any weird stories? Or more importantly -- any good trifle recipes?
She quit her job as the managing editor of a medium-sized newspaper in Ohio to move to Florida. And, in the same way a woman has to work herself up into wanting that second child, she's working herself up into wanting that second career. But, no matter what she does to make money, she'll always be a newswoman -- as all this yada yada shows.
Past columns
Once upon a time, Patti wrote for the Chronicle. See those here.
About Me
- Patti Ewald
- I started this blog when I was working on a newspaper in Elyria, Ohio. I still work for a newspaper but I moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., in 2008.
2 comments:
Well at least you never broiled a pie. Several years ago my mom made a pie and broiled it instead of baking it. She picked the horrible, grossly burned crust off and we ate the inside of the pie. Then there was the year she used baking soda instead of sugar! We didn't eat that one.
two words: Max's Deli
They have the BEST cakes and pies!
Post a Comment