5 stalks of celery

I mentioned on the air the other day about my first attempt at a Thanksgiving dinner and when the stuffing called for 5 stalks of celery chopped up and cooked, I thought that was 5 "bunches". Needless to say it came out very "green." I've never been able to live it down from my family. But it seems I'm not the only one with embarrassing moments in the kitchen. Check out this note:

Susan,



I heard you talking about one of your first experiences in preparing Thanksgiving stuffing with a recipe that required 5 stalks of celery for which you prepared five bunches of celery and had a very green stuffing that year. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that and what candor it took to share that with your listening audience. I wanted to share a similar experience with one of my first cooking experiences that I haven’t thought about for years and never had the chance to share with anyone except my parents, the parents of a good childhood friend and the Franklin County Fire Department in Grove City, Ohio..



When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I was at a friends’ house on a weekend for a sleepover. I had spent a lot of time in my mother’s kitchen as a child and learned to prepare one of those Chef Boy-Ar-Dee boxed pizzas. I had made them several times by myself at our kitchen at home. One of these boxed pizza mixes accompanied me on the sleepover which my friend and I started to prepare on a Saturday morning while his parents were outside and running errands.



The recipe called for half a measuring cup of water. I read the recipe while my friend mixed the ingredients. After blooming the yeast and adding the flour mixture, the contents of the bowl looked more like soup than pizza dough. My remedy to that was to add more flour and being the bright 7 year old, I knew that you must also add a little baking powder to make the dough rise. With three times the volume of pizza dough than the box mix would have yielded, there was no need to let it rise, Right?



We placed the huge ball of pizza dough out on the greased pizza pan, pressed it as well as we could into the corners, added the small can of sauce, Parmesan cheese and the few slices of pepperoni on top and into the hot oven it went. We went down in his basement to watch T.V. and wait for our pizza to bake.



Imagine the surprise of two 7 year olds when we came upstairs, opened the oven door and witnessed the growth of what looked like the blob falling off of the pizza sheet in huge chunks and falling to the bottom of the oven. It was falling over the sides and running to the bottom of the oven like a lava flow from a Hawaiian volcano. What a mess! We took the pan out of the oven and quickly discovered the self cleaning feature on the oven we were baking in. I had never heard of such a thing but my friend assured me that his mother had used that feature several times and that it would work. We set the oven on “self clean”, grabbed some pop and chips and returned to the basement to watch the rest of our Saturday cartoons.



Imagine the additional surprise of two 7 year olds when the fireman interrupted our Saturday cartoons to pull us from the house because a very concerned neighbor had called the fire department, concerned of the smoke pouring out of the house by the smoke created from this self cleaning oven.



After telling this story to the fireman, I look back on the experience having learned three very important cooking tips:



All measuring cups are not “one cup” as demonstrated with the three cup measure that my friend’s mother owned.
There is something called “SELF RISING” flour in a cooks’ arsenal.
A “SELF CLEANING” feature on an oven actually cremates anything in the confines of that oven and then locks you away from the scene of the crime so that it can accomplish its’ goal which sometimes includes a new kitchen paint job.


Thank you for sharing and I hope this little cooking story brightens your day so that you don’t feel too bad!



Raymond L. Mitchell

LOYAL LISTENER