SusieJ's Advent Calendar December 13, 2008

The recipe: Vanillebrezeln

Vanilla has much more depth of flavor than the pejorative use of the word would suggest. Vanilla pretzels are a delicious and easy to bake way to showcase that flavor. These are a good cookie to make with children that enjoy rolling playdough and shaping it.

The surprise: Origins of a bittersweet song

The song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", first sung by Judy Garland and made famous by Frank Sinatra, is a bittersweet little song that ends on a note of hope.

My first conflagration

I was living in West Virginia the first time I set anything in the kitchen on fire. I forget what I was cooking, but I needed to saute it in some olive oil in a frying pan.

It was only a few years since I'd started cooking, and each meal seemed to take an hour longer than expected to prepare. Consequently, I'd try all sorts of short cuts, like heating the pan before pouring the oil into it. Which I did. But because all my prep work took so long, the pan was much hotter than the flaming point of olive oil, and the oil promptly burst into flame when I poured it in.

I calmly tried to remember how to put out a kitchen grease fire. Water was out; it could splash the oil everywhere. When I was very small, my father had dashed through the house wielding a fire extinguisher when a burner caught fire, but I had no extinguisher. Was it baking powder or baking soda that was recommended to be thrown on grease fires? If the wrong one was used, would it ignite too?

That is when I started to panic.

Then I remembered — the lid. Cover the fire, starve it of oxygen, and it would go out, with no harm done, except a large scorch mark on the bottom of the pan.

What disasters are burned into your memory?