Donuts

Tonight at Thanksgiving dinner, Dave brought up the subject of the new wave in "deep-fried" turkey - a practice that is astounding considering how dangerous it is to submerge a 20 lb cold, raw object into a vat of boiling oil. In one's kitchen, mind you.

This reminded me of Dicky and his brainstorms - which almost always occurred when our parents were out - and were usually somewhere in the stupid to dangerous spectrum. This particular time he decided to make homemade donuts for us. He took a full-sized crisco can and set it on the gas burner on the stove until the crisco was liquified, and we tossed in blobs of dough, spooned them out when crisped and shook them in a bag of sugar and cinnamon. Fresh, hot donuts covered in a sweet cinnamon mix - an absolutely awesome taste sensation. But think about the fact that there were three kids standing around a crisco can of boiling hot oil on gas stove! I recall the near disasters - spewing oil as a doughball plunged into the hot liquid to name just one. Thankfully, nothing happened!

Dicky was like that, he had great ideas that captured a kid's imagination. But even his dumb ones did too. It seems that he could convince us to do nearly anything, his self-assurance transcended logic - for me, anyway. They were funny and sweet, and make for great stories now. But his best ideas stuck with me. For instance, I still to this day go outside in a snowstorm and gather a bowl full of fresh snow to make ice cream, like he taught me to do years ago. We'd add cream, or evaporated milk (which was surprisingly good!), vanilla extract, sugar and viola! A concoction that tasted just like homemade vanilla ice cream. Unbelievable.