My husband does the grocery shopping in our small twosome family. I get to make a list of things I want or need. The rule is, they have to be things he can find without asking the store clerks too many questions because he’s one of those “fast shoppers." Stuffed dates and Holland rusks are out of the question.
On top of that, he usually starts the conversation before I have had my morning coffee and haven’t begun to think coherently.
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“What would you like for dinner?” he asks kindly.
My brain says, “Good grief, is it 5 o'clock already? Where did the day go?”
He says, “Be sure and put anything on my list that you need. I’m off to the store.”
“Doughnuts,” I mumble through my scrambled eggs. "I need doughnuts. No sprinkles."
Need. One honest look in the mirror points out the fact that I do not "need" doughnuts, but I’m a sucker for baked goods. Always have been. I can smell a good cinnamon bun all the way across town.
When we lived in Germany, a stop at the bakery always came right after the nurse weighed my pregnant body at the obstetrician’s office. I reasoned that by the next appointment, I surely would have shed the results of the two cream horns I was about to consume.
And, speaking of cinnamon buns, whatever happened to the Cinnabon store at the food court in Duluth's Miller Hill Mall? I believe I heard that we were deemed “unworthy” by both the Cinnabon and the Krispy Kreme folks and effectively cut off from any sugar highs we had been looking forward to.
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As to the Krispy Kreme rise and demise in Minnesota, it sounds like the company was a victim of its over-zealousness. Its last Minnesota store, in Maplewood, closed in 2008.
So, they went from one shop to coating the entire state with sugary goo to “no doughnuts for you!” But, somebody forgot to tell that to the University of Minnesota student who several years ago made the eight-hour round trip every weekend to Clive, Iowa, to gather 100 boxes of Krispy Kremes, which he sold to his friends and neighbors. He should be known as “The Good Samaritan of Deep-Fried Heaven."
I used to have a ratty-looking index card with my mother’s recipe for molasses doughnuts in her handwriting. I would get it out and drool over it, every once in a while and moved it from place to new place as we changed houses. I never made them; I just thought about making them.
The curious thing was that I don’t think my mother ever made them, either. She thought deep-fat fryers should only exist in restaurants where staff would clean up the well-used frying oil at the end of the day. She wasn’t having any of that smelly, nasty stuff around polluting her pristine cupboards. That opinion also affected french fries, cheese curds and any other food item whose tastiness could be obliterated by being baked rather than deep fried. But, her kitchen was spotless.
So last week, I needed comfort food, or at least envisioning and reading about comfort food, and decided that, maybe this time, I would actually make the molasses doughnuts. I even had the molasses.
Gone. The recipe is gone. You know how I said in one column that you lose at least one box of stuff with every house move? Well, somewhere in a U-Haul truck, maybe headed for California, there’s a ratty, old index card, all crinkly with drool marks. In squiggly handwriting, there’s a great-sounding recipe for molasses doughnuts.
Could you please keep an eye out for it? I recently realized that I am now the oldest one of all my living relatives. I’m thinking I’m going to need more doughnuts.
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