Creative Cooking

When we could-meaning when there were no adults around-my cousin and I conducted experiments in my mother's kitchen. We'd take out my mother's big, yellow bowl and "make recipes." Sometimes we'd add the ingredients-just water and an egg as I remember-to a Jiffy cake mix and then devour the goo like soup. No need to bake it when you're experimenting. After all, it was a small cake mix; like drinking a milk shake!

Before we'd make-up r
ecipes we'd look out all the windows to make sure no one was coming; then we'd rush back into the kitchen and the fun would really begin! We'd start with one of those little cake mixes-most always white or yellow. Then we'd add whatever we could find; mushed-up bananas, cut-up cherries, peanut butter, jam of all sorts, pepper (Yes-Pepper-we were experimenting remember!), coconut, chocolate chips, more sugar-even brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, garlic (Yup-garlic),allspice, plus a dash or two or three of whatever else we could find in the refrigerator or my mother's baking drawer. This may have included mayonnaise, thyme, ketchup, mustard-a cut up pickle-whatever caught our fancy for after all, we were creating and creating means using your imagination and ingredients otherwise foreign to baking a cake.

After we felt the concoction was complete, just like two mad scientists, we'd stir the savory hodge podge and actually bake it, or at least try to. Once in awhile the end result was so good we'd devour any evidence it ever existed but that was once in a great while. Usually what was in the cake pan was impossible to swallow; even worse, impossible to bake. The birds, however, had a great time with their suprise meal discretly discarded behind my mother's rock wall where she grew her snapdragons.

After the kitchen was cleaned up, we'd go back outside to play-certain my mother would never miss the cake mix, eggs, bananas, cherries, peanut butter, jams, pepper, coconut, chocolate chips, more sugar-even brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, garlic, allspice, and whatever else we threw in. Surely she'd never wonder what the strange aromas were coming out of that kitchen or why her big, yellow bowl wasn't where she always kept it!

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