Fig Cake, Sammy Eats the Turkey, and More

Fig Cake, Sammy Eats the Turkey, and More

Welcome to Christianity Oasis. This is Fig Cake, Sammy Eats the Turkey, and More from our Sojourn With Luz Leigh Collection. We hope you enjoy this enlightening reading and it helps you on your own be-YOU-tiful Christian walk.

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Sojourn With Luz Leigh

Fig Cake, Sammy Eats the Turkey, and More

Written by Luz Leigh - 26 November 2008

If you follow my wandering words with any regularity, you know that I tend to change moods almost without notice. Recently the administrator of this site told me to let the little child out ... the one that abides inside me and brings smiles to those who read what I write. The child will be free in a few minutes, but first I must share some thoughts with you.

Around my home, house cleaning is something akin to having a root canal done. I hate to do housework, but twice a year I am forced to tackle it whether I like it or not. The days before Thanksgiving and again before Christmas I make a clean path through the house, especially the kitchen. Today was one of those traditional days.

As I began with the annual rite of inserting the extra leaf in the dining table, I remembered that there are certain things that are much easier to do if there are two people working at it. Because I only do this once a year, the little mechanism that holds the two ends of the table together has a tendency to not cooperate, but after much tugging, I was able to pull the table apart and insert the leaf. It always amazes me the difference in the finish of the table and the leaf. The leaf looks almost like new while the tabletop has watermarks from tea glasses having been set on the uncovered table, and a few scratches. Oh and there are the black dots left from a child's project many years ago when a magic marker somehow made marks on the table. Imagine that. But in my book, all these imperfections just give character to this old table.

The table could be considered an antique, I'm sure, because from my earliest recollections it was in use, not by my family, but in my neighbor's home. When my children were small they would visit her home and were impressed with "that BIG table with matching chairs" in the formal dining room (their description). I could remember having the same feeling when I was their age. After the neighbor died and the children were still quite young, the table, chairs and the buffet came to our house. We have not taken the great care of the dining room furniture that Mof-Mof did. We ate our meals around it as long as there were children at home; then my husband and I shared meals and visitation at the table. So when I'm dusting and polishing the old table, my mind wanders to a lot of fond memories. When will she get to the fun things, you are asking.

Here's one. One Christmas Eve I was preparing for the big dinner to be enjoyed at our home by my husband's family members the next day. I knew I HAD to mop that kitchen floor; I always had a horror of my mother-in-law's feet sticking to the dirty floor causing her to be unable to leave. So, I was hurrying with the baking. I quickly put together a fig cake, stuck it in the oven, and because it had to cook about an hour or so, I decided I would mop the kitchen floor while it was cooking. Just as I was about to finish with my moping, I smelled a very familiar odor ... the odor that alerted my family that "mom's cooking" ... the odor of something burning in the oven. Oh, to my horror ... when I opened the oven door, I was met with smoke and a sight I did not want to see. What had been cooking in the oven was not exactly a fig cake, but rather a mixture of all the ingredients for the cake, EXCEPT some very important ones ... the dry ingredients, including flour and seasonings. With no flour in the mixture in the cake pan, I had created a big pan of cooking oil, lots of eggs and sugar and a quart of fig preserves. This mixture had a tendency to boil and overflow from the pan.I sat down in the floor and began to cry. Not only had I wasted all those ingredients, but the oven would have to be cleaned before I could make another cake, bake the turkey and dressing and everything else I had planned for Christmas dinner. My sweet husband, who never entered the kitchen except to get something to eat or to drink, came to my rescue. Once the oven was cool enough for him to touch it, he began the gigantic task of cleaning all that sticky, gooey mess from the oven. In order for him to get pleasure out of doing this time-consuming task, he made it a point for years to tell of how my cake "blew up in the oven," laughing all the while. I insisted it was NOT a cake at all ... just a sweet gooey mess. To his credit, I must interject this. During the last few years of his life, he learned to cook certain foods and enjoyed it. He could cook a mean pot of vegetable soup and cornbread.

If I am repeating myself on the any of the following, forgive me. But there just may be someone who hasn't heard about these things. Our first Christmas as a married couple, I put up a little pine tree in our living room, decorated it with a few ornaments and on Christmas morning we celebrated the birth of our Lord. Because we seldom went in that room, the door to the hall was kept closed, and we forgot about the tree. On Valentine's Day my husband discovered the very dead, pitiful looking tree, devoid of most of its needles.

One Thanksgiving Day after our older son had married, and blessed us with our first grandchild, he called and was laughing so hard I could hardly understand him. Seems that the people who lived across the street from him were expecting numerous relatives for dinner. The man of the house had smoked a big turkey and had set it on the picnic table on the carport to cool a bit before he carved it. Louis, the neighbor, went into the house for about two or three minutes. My grandson had a basset hound that wandered the neighborhood at will. On that day Sammy the dog had smelled the turkey being smoked, so when she spied the turkey sitting on the table, she decided that she would help herself to the freshly baked turkey. Although it was still rather warm, she dragged the bird from the table and carport to a grassy area of the yard. She enjoyed it immensely. Louis, the neighbor, had to laugh as he watched Sammy trying to pull the still hot turkey apart. Marie was not too happy about the ruined bird, but blamed her husband for leaving it unattended. Sammy died of old age just a few years ago, still loved by all who knew her. My grandson, who is now grown, never got another dog to replace Sammy.

A few years following the turkey incident a big cow dog, belonging to my other son made his way into the same neighbors' kitchen via the doggy door. By now the neighbors had resigned themselves to feeding our family's dogs. I know people say allowing a dog to eat chocolate will bring death to the dog, but this dog proved that to be false in his case. That when day old Dink went into the kitchen, he spied a chocolate cake sitting on the kitchen counter. You guessed it. He got the cake and ate a big portion of it before the lady discovered him in the house. The only way Dink almost met death was when the lady threatened to shoot him if he didn't leave her food alone. Just to set the record straight, we did spend a lot of money on dog food; just seems those dogs recognized, just as many humans did, that Marie & Louis were great cooks.

When we meet again, I will continue with more Thanksgiving or Christmas memories.

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