Hi, This is Jared. I've been invited to blog here for the first time (maybe only time). I have to tell you a story that almost ended in tragedy (house nearly burned down), but luckily ended up in a tasty and beautiful breakfast food instead (shown in the picture).2 cups whole wheat flour freshly ground...twice :)
2 cups milk...reconstituted skim from food storage :)
12 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 stick butter
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add butter to 9X13 glass baking dish and place in oven. Remove butter from oven after it is apparent that it's about to burn and let cool on stove top .
Mix flour, milk, eggs, and baking powder well. Add mixture to melted butter from oven.
Cook for 30 minutes.
Serve hot with lemon curd, powdered sugar, and fresh strawberry puree
Serves 4-6.
I began my day with a prayer that all would go well and my family would grow even closer together and feel the Spirit of the Sabbath today.
For 19 1/2 years now, yes, ever since Jeanette and I have been married, I've come home from church on Sundays and proceeded to cook a breakfast meal for the whole family. Usually, I pose the question as we pull up into the driveway after church. It goes something like, "So, what do you guys want to eat for lunch today? Your choices are: waffles, pancakes, crepes, french toast, hootenanny, omelets or breakfast sandwiches." Sometimes I'll offer 'the whole American breakfast,' which consists of bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, orange juice and pancakes. But most of the time, I only want to make one thing, not multiple. And if I don't offer something as option, it usually means that I know we don't have the right ingredients or more likely I'm just not willing to put as much effort into the meal as a certain choice would require--as in 'the whole American breakfast.' The most common options are pancakes, french toast and hootenanny. Today, hootenanny was the winner (as suggested by our sweet Emily who rarely suggests anything else) mostly because Tanner just left for BYU four days ago and he won't eat hootenanny, so it seemed a fitting option for those of us left behind.
This is where the disaster started.
I went to the kitchen on autopilot thinking this was going to be easy, then I would be off for my characteristically long nap...but not today...I was off my game. You see, today at church I was sustained as a Nursery Worker, not a Primary worker who happens to work in the nursery and would have some chance of parole, but a bonafide Nursery worker. By they way, did I mention that our ward nursery has 27 children...all between the ages of slobber and sticky?
Last week, I had told the Bishop I was willing to serve where I was needed. Well, I thought I was. I made an incorrect assumption, though. For the past 15 years I've always served in leadership callings of some sort or other and it never even crossed my mind that prison was an option for a calling.
So there I was...after sacrament meeting I slinked through the hallways enroute to the dungeon of stinky and messy, quietly hoping I'd begin writhing in pain in my right side and be graciously pulled off Nursery duty to the ER for a quick and less painful appendectomy. 'Twas not to be.
Somehow I made it to the front door, just standing there in my full suit of armor. I had my scriptures in my left hand (rendering it useless to children), priesthood manual in my right hand (rendering it equally useless), watching the brothers and sisters of the ward unapologetically dropping off their homemade little goo factories through the one-way portal. I was just thinking to myself, "I know this Church is true, I know this Church is true" when like a bolt out of the blue, the Nursery Leader warmly greeted me and invited me to step through the portal where I could already see what seemed like acres of small people crawling and messing up a very well designed classroom.
Clumsily, I introduced myself saying, "Hi, my name is Jared. I can't stay both hours today because I have was asked to teach the Priesthood lesson two weeks ago." As I think back, I'm not so sure this was just the introduction she was waiting for. But there it was. She quickly countered, "My name is Lori, I've been the Nursery leader for over 9 years." WHAT?, I thought. It must be true then. No parole for me. I quickly counted in my head...but still looking her in the eyes so I wouldn't look obvious about going into shock...how long I'd be working at the Pentagon...let's see, there's one year at school, then two or three years of follow-on assignments in the DC area. That's a minimum of three years and maybe four in the Nursery. Yikes.
I looked around at the men and women in the room who were all busily caring for between one to three children. I quickly sat down at the PlayDough table next to a cute little blonde boy, who, I thought, probably looked a lot like me when I was that age. He was trying to fit some PlayDough into a spaghetti maker and couldn't get it to work. I knelt down next to him and showed him that it was easy and we pressed the two plastic pieces together to make blue spaghetti come out the other end. He was delighted. Then, two seconds later, he rewarded my help by crushing the newly pressed spaghetti into a ball and tried to put in back into the machine. I helplessly wondered to myself how many times he would repeat this. Infinitely! was the answer I supposed so I tossed the makeshift pasta maker to the side and showed him how to roll it into a ball instead..something I thought he could learn the first time. Using the same gusto he had used to ruin the spaghetti, this young boy managed to wreck my beautifully crafted, nearly symmetric ball of blue PlayDough and then asked me through many gestures and overt body language that he wanted me to create again what he had just destroyed. Fool me once, shame on you, I thought, but fool me twice?......
The clock on the wall indicated my Priesthood lesson was to begin in 10 minutes. When the time finally came, I apologetically excused myself and exited the Pasta Vault to rejoin the true church again, just down the hall.
I was assigned to teach a lesson on the Temple and Family History to a group of about 15 High Priests. I had been preparing my lesson for two weeks, looking up scripture references, thinking of stories I could share, making sure to include all the attributes of a good lesson like staying within the time limit, bearing testimony, scriptural references, logic and reasoning, and a host of relevant examples to discuss. I was excited to have a captive audience where we could all learn together and find ways to become better fathers, husbands, priesthood holders and employees. My new audience were men who are steeped in the gospel, who understand the scriptures, who hold regular family and personal prayer and set the example for Home Teaching.
This was my bread and butter.
I'm not convinced that's what actually happened, though. I only got one comment the entire lesson, from a brother in the audience who I've noticed always has something to say (and it's always uplifting and on track), two others read assigned scriptures I gave to them and then the closing prayer happened. Other than that I'm sure anyone got anything out of the lesson other than me.
And I went home in kind of a funk.
As we pulled up into the driveway, I offered to make a breakfast lunch and Emily recommended hootenanny. I accepted.
We had run out of milk during breakfast, so I made some from our food storage dry milk. (Always a family favorite )
But our family is on an organic kick so I substituted freshly ground whole wheat flour for the normal white--but this savvy baker knew whole wheat flour wouldn't rise as well so I added just a little baking powder. I had preheated the oven, placed the butter in it, but by the time I got the grinder down, ground the flour twice because I had it on the wrong setting the first time, the butter in the oven had nearly burned because it had been in too long. I removed the pan.
So, the butter pan cooled off on top of the stove waiting for the batter. When I finished the batter, I just poured it in...not caring that the glass cooking dish was no longer even warm. I turned the 350 degree oven timer to 20 minutes and was about to walk out, but decided to stay in the kitchen and talk with Madeline who had been helping me. We decided to make the orange juice from the freezer. About 2 minutes into the cooking cycle, the oven began to billow smoke. I quickly looked around the top see if perchance a unit had been inadvertently turned on. It hadn't. So I opened the stove to find that I had accidentally dropped an extra oven mit inside and it was on fire and sitting on the electric burner. Madeline yelled, "get some water." But something inside put electrical and fire in the "not good" category, so I simply reached in and whisked it away with my 'bare 'ands'. NOT a good idea. Part of the melted polyester oven mit stuck to my finger tip and burned me pretty bad.
I got all that under control and the 20-minute timer went off. Good. Well. I thought it was now done..
Turns out the batter was still mostly liquid and wasn't rising like I knew hootenanny characteristically does up the sides of the pan. I just walked downstairs to Jeanette telling her that I give up and this isn't my day. She listened. And then told me everything would be okay. I went up and gave the batter 10 more minutes to finish cooking, but thinking in my heart that we we would probably need to "pull the ox out of the mire" this Sunday and order pizza or something.
We all sat down and I held my breath. Everyone loved it. We called the new recipe "Breakfast Cake" and wanted to share the recipe with you because it turned out so well.
I guess my prayers have been answered after all this Sunday. And maybe I do have a bright future making blue pasta.
Love,
Jared
Jared
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