Start with a question

I have a simple question for all my friends. Now, I’m not a Bible scholar or anything like that, but I know the ten commandments. I must admit, I’m not real experienced in any of the religions or cultures around the world. All this being said, I need to know if there’s any reason, I can’t kill my daughter. I mean I don’t want to end up in an eternal fire, or have to live thirty more lives or anything like that.

I know there’s a commandment about honoring your father and mother, but that doesn’t apply here. Also, if I killed her, I feel I would actually come closer to Nirvana. Then again, there’s that whole ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ thing, but seriously; How strict can that be? I kill insects, and mice all the time, and daughters can be classified as vermin. Can’t they? I guess it is against the law, and if I were caught, I could be convicted. However, that’s only for this life. I could handle the next twenty years in jail, if I knew for sure my eternity was taken care of. Well not really, I’m actually a wimp when it comes to stuff like that, but there are always extenuating circumstances. I could get a hotshot lawyer, or a lenient judge. Remember too, as Mr. Ohh! I’m a celebrity, and celebrities are above the law. Right? So, I guess we’re back at trying to interpret the Bible and other ancient documents. Which is something scholars have disagreed on for centuries. Therefore, if there are any biblical, or any other type of scholar, for that matter, out there, please contact me as soon as you can. Heck I’ll take phone psychics at this point. Until then, I guess I’ll have to let her live. For Now!

Don’t necessarily answer it

Now, you may be wondering just why I want to assonate my darling little princess. Unless of course you have daughters of your own. If that’s the case, you know exactly about my desire to dispose of my female offspring. You’re probably just wondering about the exact circumstances leading to the inevitable conclusion. For those of you who don’t have daughters, ignore everything you just read. Have several daughters, they are glorious little princesses, who will never cause you a little bit of trouble. Anxiety filled years of trouble, but certainly not a little bit. Okay, maybe I said too much.

The most recent, episode in the ongoing struggle with my princess, came in the form of a father/ daughter baking contest. Now, I like to cook once in a while, but I’m not a baker. My daughter can bake a few things, but is mostly allergic to anything which might come close to being called domestic. Why the heck did we enter a baking contest? I’ll tell you, because Alexandria, and Paul did. Now there’s a reason if ever I heard one.

Maybe a little competition isn’t good

Have you ever met someone, that for some reason you have to compete against? For me that’s Paul. We’re reasonably friendly but for some reason we’re also adversarial. We also have seventeen-year-old daughters who are best friends, who similarly keep us at war. Both of them are superb bakers so they entered the city-wide contest. Alexandria told my princess, and the rest is history.

I know how to make to make a pretty good lemon bar, so we decided to play to my strengths. My daughter, on the other hand, decided to confuse a simple issue. She agreed to make lemon bars, but looked for the most hyper active, uber max lemon bar recipe ever made. After a week of searching, she found it. The really senseless thing is I agreed to make it before I saw the actual recipe. Bad Plan!!

I don’t know what that is

I looked on the ingredients list and saw I needed cardamon and lemon zest, so I went to the store. I walked down the spice aisle and found the cardamon. I’m not kidding. It cost seventeen dollars for two ounces. I was about to scratch it off the list, but princess got those wide eyes and said, “Daaaaddeeeeee”. I dropped it in the cart, and cursed the day she was born. Then I looked for lemon zest. It wasn’t anywhere. I asked the lady, and was informed you don’t buy zest, you have to zest a lemon. You’re not going to believe this, folks, zesting means you file down a lemon, not a lemon tree mind you, an actual lemon. The thing is, you have to buy an actual lemon file to do it, and that costs nine dollars. Of course, once I paid for cardamon, the file, or zester as it is called, seemed pretty cheap.

I don’t understand the instructions

The very first thing the instructions told me to do was to set up my stand-mixer. What the heck is a stand-mixer? I looked it up and learned, not only didn’t I have one, they cost a hundred-fifty-dollars. I should have stopped right there, but my male ego wouldn’t let go once it agreed to something, besides I already had cardamon, so I pressed on. I was supposed to mix the brown sugar and butter until fluffy. Will someone please tell me what fluffy sugar-butter is supposed to look like? Even if I had a stand-mixer I still wouldn’t know what I was looking at.

The next instruction was even better, or butter. Ha Ha, that’s a baking joke. What? It wasn’t funny? Well, neither are those freaking instructions. They read, and I quote, “Mix flour-oat mixture into sugar-butter blend slowly until combination is a dry moist but crumbly. About 2 cups or more. Make sure it’s not too wet.” End Quote. What the, heck is dry moist? Also, how wet is too wet? That’s like asking for an extra dry wine. Wine is wet, it’s never dry. If it were dry, you couldn’t drink it.

Crumbly I do understand, so I went with that. Sadly, the next instruction was to press the dough into a pan firmly, making sure it doesn’t crumble. Does this make sense to anyone? If I didn’t want the dough to crumble, why the heck did I make it crumbly? And another thing, there are two tablespoons of zest in that crust. Have you any idea how much lemon filing that takes? Besides, you have to keep changing zesting spots. If you file too deep, you get a gusher of lemon juice in the eye. Yes, I’m sure it happens. I confirmed it three times, and I only have two eyes.

Or even the cheese

Next, I had to make the curd. The curd I know about is cheese. In the bars you mix lemon juice with milk. The milk spoils, and you get the cheese, but you don’t want that cheese. In fact, I wasn’t supposed to use milk at all. I was supposed to use condensed milk, and add egg-yolks first. Luckily, I got it on only my second try. By my thoughts, the stuff should’ve been called curse instead of curd. Maybe it’s a misspelling.

By the way, does anyone want an almost full bottle of cardamon? For all that cash, the recipe only took a quarter teaspoon.