Cooking with Gas (Literally and Figuratively)

Ah the holiday season. Not enough money and too many pot luck lunches. For tomorrow's fete, I was asked to bring desert. No, not a typo on my part. I flirted with the idea of bringing some sables au citron. That is French for lemon cookies, but sable also means sand. Yep, I geek out in French sometimes.

But then I dug out the recipe box and the Better Homes and Gardens and made some choices.

From Better Homes, I chose the Blonde Brownie recipe and made it more exciting with the addition of chocolate chunks.

From Grammy's recipe box, I chose the Oh Henry recipe. The resulting square bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Oh Henry chocolate bar. Grammy said there was another candy bar called Oh Henry and this recipe tasted just like THAT Oh Henry bar. But I've never seen one. In any case, it is yummy and different, containing graham crackers, coconut, maraschino cherries, and buttercream frosting.

Here is what you are missing if you aren't attending the pot luck tomorrow:

Good thing I explained the Oh Henry bar, eh? Here's a shot of the Blondies too -- on my souvenir plate from the bistro at the Paris casino in Vegas. (If you go, order the moules et frites.)

It looks like I burnt the counter, but I didn't.

That is cooking with gas literally, where is the cooking with gas figuratively? Read on.

My baking done, the kitchen cleaned, the Boom bathed (Al fresco! 70 degrees in December!), I sat down to catch up with my blog boys. Wandering over to the site of my unrequited Blush Aeleope, I found him writing up a storm as usual. That boy is nothing if not prolific. He even entered a contest -- 250 words or less -- to be inspired by this picture:

For details and to enter (deadline is 12/14 -- hurry!) check out An Innocent A-Blog here. I like these writing challenges -- convey your thought and get out quickly. Heck -- I wouldn't be blogging here if it weren't for a similar contest. So I looked at that picture and I started cooking, figuratively speaking.

Here is my entry to the Weirdly contest:

Everyone remembers before. "You should have seen it. Why it was the pride of the county! Folks came just to walk down Main Street and take their picture in front of the falls." Why that town was nothing short of paradise, to hear them tell it. That's how it got its name anyway. Eden Falls, in case I forgot to say.

When they talk about after, they always shake their heads and lower their voices, like somebody died. Some families were just gone. Just like that. My granddaddy says if he had skipped school like he planned, he'd be deader than a doornail and missing to boot. He always says that when I miss the school bus. Sometimes if I ask him just right, he'll drive me over to see where Eden Falls used to be. There's no more Main Street, that's for sure. The government men that came after said only a fool would build that town back up. Just a matter of time before those falls did what they done before.

But you know what? Those falls never have done nothing. I've lived here my whole life and all I see is a waterfall and a field and bunch of ugly old trees. Joe's granny says that each of those trees is the soul of an innocent that got washed away when the falls broke through and came down Main Street. But I don't think that's right. Those trees would be pretty if they were.

It came out rather quickly -- like the falls.

Tell all your single friends, JamieSmitten can feed your body and mind, if you just let her.

XO, JamieSmitten