Vaporize

It is a scientific fact that teenage boys vaporize food…lots of food. When my own son was a teenager, he had no problem consuming a half pound of cheddar cheese as a little after school snack. So we made a deal. If he ate all the main ingredients of the dinner I was going to make when I came home from work, he would be the one to bike to the store for replacements.

I haven’t been responsible for feeding a male adolescent for many years, so was out of practice  at a family event a while back. Three teenage boys were among the guests at our house. I split a dozen large Sheboygan hard rolls, buttered them lavishly and stuck them in the oven to toast. I put a basket with the twenty-four rolls on the kid’s table, served the other guests and was about to sit down when I noticed the rolls had vanished. So I put twenty-four more buns topped with another half pound of butter in to grill. The scenario repeated itself instantly except this time I sat down to eat, too, sans roll.

At this year’s party I was prepared. Four dozen Sheboygan hard rolls were stuffed into my freezer awaiting their apocalypse.

The younger generation of our family is awash with girls, but we do have two little boys amidst our sea of females. I will be ready when they hit their teen years. I’m going to emulate the cooking methods of Sourdough Sam, Paul Bunyan’s camp cook:

“Sam’s cookshack itself was over two miles long. One whole side was taken up by the great griddle, on which he fried the sourdough flapjacks for which he was famous. It kept a whole bunkhouse full of cookees busy hauling wood for it. The batter was mixed in a big reservoir Paul had dug on a hill back of camp. The mixing was done with an old river steamboat which was kept busy steaming back and forth all night across the lake of sourdough. When the breakfast whistle blew, the floodgates were opened and the batter poured through a flume to a sprinkler system that squirted the cakes on the griddle.

Flunkies with sides of bacon strapped to their boots skated over the smoking surface, greasing it and turning the flapjacks with scoop shovels. As fast as they were done they were stacked on wagons drawn by four horses, which galloped to the mess hall, up a ramp, and down the middle of the great table, while men with cant hooks rolled the cakes off onto the plates. Another four-horse outfit, hitched to a sprinkler wagon, followed  close behind with the syrup.”

Sounds like a plan.

Quote from  “Ol’ Paul, The Mighty Logger”, by Glen Rounds

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