Your TIMES and the Sallisaw Chamber of Commerce honor the women in our community who not only maintain homes and love and raise families, they are also mainstays of the business community, the wheels on the bus that keep the caravan rolling. Not only that, they also support other women who want to reach the same goals through scholarships.
It is right that we report on their philosophies of life. And we threw in their favorite recipes just for fun.
And then it turned into more fun than we planned. The fun began in our fingers, routed itself through our funny bones then moved on to our brains.
The problem was Linda Copeland, Your TIMES photographer and staff writer who took photos and gathered information, then she, Staff Writer Courtney Coble and I took on the task of writing up all those philosophies and food recipes on our computers.
Did I ever mention our computers have minds of their own? We got through those philosophies just fine. It was the favorite recipes that wrecked us. And if there is anything you need to type or set as (we call it in this computer age) correctly, it’s a recipe. One little mistake and somebody’s dinner is gonna’ go down the garbage disposal, literally. So Linda, Courtney and I set those recipes as carefully as possible.
And that didn‘t go well at all.
Of course the first mistake was mine, and of course it was a friend’s recipe for cake. I wrote you had to cook that cake for 60 minutes, then you had to cook that cake another 10 minutes. Then you had to take that cake out of that cake pan, and cook it another 60 minutes before you put the frosting on.
I was sort of like that cake might have been when I proofread that recipe. I cracked up.
“Oh no!” I laughed as I reported on my recipe gaffs to Linda and Courtney. “I’ve got my friend cooking this cake three times. Apparently the computer doesn’t know the difference between the two words — cook and cool!”
I blamed it all on the computer of course. It couldn’t possibly have been me or my fingers that made the mistake. But I had this vision in my mind of a really over-cooked cake, which I dutifully reported to my co-workers, and we laughed a lot.
Well, at least the cake had rum in it, which might have helped if the three-times-cooked cake had made it into our special Women in Business section.
Then I began proofreading my co-worker’s recipes. It was also a bit surprising.
Linda’s recipe also had to go into the oven. And that was all. You put this main dish in the oven, let it set there for an hour, then took it out and ate it. (The owner of this recipe is not named in order to protect the guilty.)
“Uh, Linda,” I ventured. “Shouldn’t this recipe be, uh, cooked, baked, or heated up at least?”
Linda’s reaction was, “What!?!”
“Well,” I explained. “In the recipe there are no directions to turn on the oven and no directions about what temperature is needed. Maybe it’s supposed to be eaten tartar, you know, raw?”
Linda made a frantic call, got the cooking directions and added them to her recipe.
This menu was becoming more menacing by the minute, but we three were getting quite a chuckle out of it. In fact we were laughing so hard we were drawing attention from the rest of the office crew, especially since we had tears flowing down our cheeks due to our own errors and omissions.
One of the Women in Business was kind enough to make her own cake recipe and deliver some of it to us, who really needed a good kitchen-tested sample at that point in time.
So we encourage all readers to try out our Women in Business philosophies and recipes. That cake was delicious. Make one, you’ll be happy. And these women prove they know what they are doing by their philosophies.
But if an ingredient is left out of a recipe, or the food is cooked too long, or not cooked at all in a cold oven, we didn’t do it. It’s the computer’s fault!
