Work With What You Have: Another Culinary Adventure

My mother grew up in a family that struggled financially.  When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, hard times became even harder.  They scraped along doing without, but more importantly, doing with what they had.  Nothing was wasted.  Something worn out and broken? – well, there was some use for it.  Mom’s life was further complicated when her father became disabled and died during the Depression, while she was a teenager.  And  so, very early in her life, my mother’s motto became “When you have a lemon, make a lemonade.”  When difficulties arose, when disaster struck, when life seemed to take a wrong turn onto a dead-end road, she learned to just look at the situation from a different perspective and let God redeem it.  Over and over again, I heard her say those words. 

I thought of my mom yesterday, while visiting my daughter Kat who lives in Nashville.  As a physician, she has learned to maximize the tightest pockets of time.  She was able to come home briefly yesterday midday between the clinic and hospital.  She quickly stirred up an angel food cake mix to be served for dessert at supper.  She popped the cake pan into her little countertop oven.  Before she left, the cake had risen and was burning, stuck to the burners on the top of the oven.  She rescued the pan, scraped off the charred shell on top, and opened the windows to let out the heavy sweet smoke that had now pervaded the kitchen.  We preheated the regular oven to finish baking what remained.  She left for work, and I was left to take the cake out of the oven when it appeared to be done.

The buzzer rang, I removed the pan.  So far, so good.  Then I made the big mistake of following the instructions.  The box said to invert the bundt pan on a glass bottle to let the angel food cake cool.  But as soon as I turned the pan over, the cake fell out in big hot steamy chunks.  I quickly scooped the cake onto a plate as best as I could.  And I watched the cake deflate into what appeared to be a rather pathetic version of funnel cake – a flat sugary confection served at carnivals.

This cake was refusing to be made.  I tried to think of something else we could serve.  But when Kat heard about the dilemma, she didn’t skip a beat.  She moved into catastrophe mode.  It was like seeing my mom “making do,” as she used to say.  Kat took what we had, tore the cake into little pieces, added some sliced strawberries and Cool Whip, and mixed it together.  The result looked (and tasted) incredible, and no one was the wiser.  Needless to say, there were no leftovers.  Disaster was averted with a little creativity sprinkled on top.

“You’ve got to work with what you have sometimes,” she remarked with a smile.

God blesses and makes it enough.  He redeems even the most impossible situations.