Tomorrow at our church, a women’s luncheon is being held after the service. Our women’s group is now called Ladies of Grace. I was asked to make a log roll for desert. Ladies (L) of (O) Grace (G), get it? L-O-G. Yeah, I thought linking a log dessert with our acronym was kind of a stretch, but whatever—you have to have a dessert of some kind anyway, right? And I don’t mind helping out—we’re always hauling stuff to church: a dish for a potluck dinner, candy for the Easter Celebration, boots for the Mission, Christmas gifts for the children of the incarcerated, etc. We congregants also work in the yard, paint props for Vacation Bible School, set up tables and chairs for various activities, etc. The phrase “many hands make light work” has been used so many times around our church; it should be engraved over the entrance.
Friday night I set to work. The recipe was found and the ingredients were assembled—except—where was the flour? I’d made a quiche a couple of days before and had used some for the crust. I didn’t remember using it up. I discovered a five pound bag of whole wheat flour in the cupboard that could have been used, but nobody wants a “hardy“ chocolate roll. I looked in the pantry closet (several times), the cupboard, the refrigerator, another cupboard, but there was no flour to be found. Rats—I had to go to the store. No matter that I had spent all day running from one store to another and was in at least two different stores where flour could have been bought. The fact was I had no flour to use for that chocolate roll.
“Well,” I thought, “I did need to get some salsa ingredients anyway….” (Salsa is an essential condiment in our house. The Man grew up with it--“it” meaning fresh and homemade, not one of the jars in the snack isle next to the chips-- and he feels its absence acutely when we run out.) So being the bright bulb that I am, I figured I’d go to Walmart because they always have cilantro and my regular grocery store is almost always out of it. (I think the Chinese restaurant next door to the grocery swoops in and buys it all up before I get there.)
After arriving at Walmart, I started consulting a list in my purse of other things that I hadn’t been able to pick up earlier in the day. I don’t know how many times that list was pulled out and consulted—I didn’t want to miss anything! But guess what they didn’t have at Walmart? No, they had the cilantro—what they didn’t have were the all- important jalapeno peppers for the salsa. How irritating!
After getting what I needed, I pushed my cart to one of the registers and proceeded to stand there for what seemed like 10 minutes while an affable, but completely inefficient cashier dealt with a man who appeared to have an extremely low IQ. He stood in front of me with a cart of empty banana boxes, and he appeared to be buying only one item. “Why are we just standing here?” I’m thinking. “I’ve got a chocolate roll to make, you know! Buy the stinkin’ thing and drag these boxes out of here!” Now there’s a good Christian attitude for you!
After deserting that sad duo for a line that was actually moving, the stuff was bought, shoved into the car and I headed for home. But wait—oh no—it hit me (close to halfway home, of course)—I had forgotten to buy the darn flour! It hadn't been on that list I was so careful to consult. OK, so it was like 10:00pm by now and Miss Early Riser was getting tired. So where did I have to go? That’s right—the grocery store I usually go to but had avoided because I was sure they wouldn’t have cilantro and I didn’t want to make more than one stop because it was getting late and I wanted to snag the flour, get home and bake. (Take a breath!) Well, at least they would probably have the jalapenos for the salsa—that made having to stop for the flour a little more palatable.
I arrived at the store, and once inside, grabbed a couple of unnaturally large peppers (were these genetically engineered?) in the produce department and found myself glancing over to the herbs to see if, by some miracle, they had cilantro then decided, “Why torture myself?” and walked on to the baking isle to get the precious flour.
By the time I got home, it was waaaaay too late to do that baking. So today, I popped out of bed at 5:00am this morning to do the baking before the rest of the day's activities started to unfold, went out to the little refrigerator in the garage to grab a protein shake for breakfast, and lo and behold, there’s the flour I’d been looking for sitting on the refrigerator shelf as innocent as can be. Oh yeah, it all came back to me. I’d had the brilliant idea that it would “keep” better in there. Yeah, it’ll keep real well, if nobody knows where it is!
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