Canned biscuits. (original) (raw)

We all have our little fears and eccentricities.

I happen to be afraid of canned biscuits.

It�s that countdown � mini-seconds before blast off -- that has me on edge.

Although I know the soft dough, when it suddenly bursts forth from the can, is not going to hurt me, I remain ill at ease until the contents are transferred safely to a baking sheet. This personal plight almost is enough to lead to drastic measures, such as making biscuits from scratch.

Well, almost.

The day I can create biscuits from the very beginning -- mixing ingredients, kneading, rolling out, cutting out � well, that�s the day I win the Pillsbury bake-off contest. Not gonna happen.

As the user of canned biscuits, I�m different from most of the women in our family. My mother, mother-in-law, grandmothers and aunts could create flaky, delicious biscuits for breakfast every morning as though they were on automatic pilot, going through the motions without thinking about it. They never looked at a recipe and, Heaven forbid, they never used ready-made dough hatched from a refrigerated can.

I�m not the only one who is fearful of close encounters of the canned kind. Many of my friends share my anxiety and suffer, as I do, from a kind of dough-phobia.

If we can send a man to the moon, why can�t a rocket scientist invent a canned product from which biscuit dough will ease out ever so gently, silently.

Did you hear about what happened to that woman in San Diego a while back? After she returned home from grocery shopping, her husband noticed that she was sitting in her car in the driveway with the windows rolled up and with her eyes closed. She was holding both hands behind her head.

�Is there a problem?� the husband wanted to know as he tapped on the window by the driver�s seat. When the woman finally opened her eyes, she had a gosh-awful look on her face.

�Are you OK?� the husband kept asking.

No, she was not OK. She told him that she had been shot in the back of her head and she was holding her brains in.

The car was completely locked and the woman refused to remove her hands from her head to open a door. She could not let go of her brains.

Finally, the husband called the paramedics, and they broke into the car.

�Well, what have we here? � What�s this?�

The paramedics found that the woman had a wad of biscuit dough stuck to the back of her head. A can of biscuits in a bag of groceries in the back seat had exploded from the heat in the car. Sounding like a gunshot, the �biscuit bullet� struck the back of her head. When she reached back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought the worst. Her brains were falling out.

You may remember that commercial proclaiming, �Nothin� says lovin� like somethin� from the oven.�

In this case, one might chirp, �Nothin� says lovin� like somethin� poppin� in the noggin.�

�

Wanda Orton Baytown Sun Columnist
"Wandering" July 21, 2013 columns