Inexperience and Anger

I love to cook although it didn’t start out that way. If you’ve been following you know I was a child bride. I had to learn many things by trial and error and cooking was a big one. The Monterey County Clerks Office mailed me the first cookbook I ever owned. It was titled “The Bride’s Cookbook” and had perhaps 50 pages of advice and recipes. I decided to try cooking a pot of pinto beans. Let me tell you, I LOVE beans! I had never made them so I used my brand new cookbook. The recipe called for 3 teaspoons of Chili Powder and I misread and added 3 heaping tablespoons. I’m not sure what else I did wrong; needless to say the beans were not edible. For some reason that cooking blunder didn’t bother me too much, the next one however is a different story.

I decided I would bake a Walnut Glory Cake. I had picked up another cookbook at the supermarket. Pillsbury Bake-Off Winning Recipes (or something like that). The recipe called for ingredients that I really couldn’t afford; on the other hand I was eager to cook some nice meals and desserts. The recipe called for 9 egg whites and to use almost a dozen eggs for one cake was living a little high-on-the-hog.

It happened like this…I turned on my old radio that I’d had since I was nine. Set out my ingredients, turned the oven on and went to work. The baby was sleeping and all was good. My old angle food cake pan was the kind that the center lifted out of, so in the back of my mind I kept reminding myself “not to pick the pan up by the middle when it was time to put it in the oven”. Mind you, I didn’t even own so much as a hand mixer and had I known more about cooking I would NEVER have tried this particular cake. Remember those 9 egg whites? Well they had to be beaten until very stiff peaks formed. Yep, that’s right, with fork in hand I whipped those non-submissive egg whites until I thought my arm would drop off. It must have taken the better part of an hour, and finally they were starting to take on some shape. Feeling oh so proud and hopeful I finished with the egg whites and completed the recipe. I poured the batter into my ungreased cake pan, licked the spatula and picked the cake up to put it in the oven.

As soon as I took hold of that pan things went down hill. After all of my self reminders…I did it…I picked that pan up by the middle and the cake batter crept all over the kitchen counter, down the sides of the cabinet and onto the floor. I was beside myself. Frantically I tried catching all I could and finally realizing the despair of it all I just exploded. I was in disbelief… Crying uncontrollably I grabbed a hammer and smashed that pan flatter than a pancake and I didn’t stop there, I beat my old plastic radio to smithereens too. I think that hurt me worse than anything. I loved that old radio. It had been a constant companion to me. I dumped the whole mess into paper bags and hauled it out to the garbage. My kitchen looked like it had just seen a Saturday night brawl.

Cleaning up the atrocious mess was bit of a lesson learned. I began to realize consequences come with unchecked anger.