Tuesday, June 13, 2006

One thing you shouldn’t try when you run out of sugar, or so the culinary fates revealed to me this past weekend, is attempt to make your own using lemonade and a poor grasp of physical science. A powerful need for dessert struck around midnight on Saturday, and upon discovering an empty Domino bag I turned to the supermarket, only to find it closed. This left but a single option, the most perilous of devices in the kitchen: ingenuity.

“This can of Country Time in my fridge contains sugar. I need sugar. How do I get the sugar out of the Country Time?” I wondered. “Boil it.”

Gourmet inspiration like this would work in a vacuum, I suppose, with the lemonade magically evaporating in a wistful yellow cloud, leaving behind a bounty of sweet precipitate ready for collection. The way things shake out in the real world, mind you, basically involves a pot of lemonade refusing to boil and then, the moment you turn away, erupting into a charred mass of black despair.

The only edible goods that night were my hands, great was my shame, and the only thing that precipitated was an urgent need for steel wool, which naturally I didn’t have. What I located, much to my culinary redemption, was a box of Cascade. The stuff is intended for dishwashers, but paired with exasperation it becomes and surpasses steel wool.