Kristin Williams Balla

Last (last) Saturday I woke up to sunshine and the delight of knowing three wonderful friends were coming over for brunch. I had a stress-free morning ahead. I keep my house very neat and it was clean enough for friends who don’t look past your heart to ogle and judge your dust.

I had exactly two tasks to complete between 8am and the gathering at 11am. One task was to make my impossibly easy Cheese Danish (thank you Nancy Goss!), so that it would be warm from the oven at just the right time. The other task was to make a pot of coffee.

I am providing the Cheese Danish recipe because it is the easiest, most delicious brunch item I have ever come across.

I enjoyed the wonderful sound of thwop thwop as I banged the crescent roll package against the edge of the counter – and smiled at the extremely satisfying pop! as the dough was freed from its straight jacket.

I pulled the rolls apart and pressed them into the base of the greased dish. About that time I noticed the faint smell of garlic or onion. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it must have been because Lyryn had heated her calzones for Family Dinner in our oven on Wednesday night.

I continued on with the beating of the cream cheese, sugar, egg yolk and vanilla into a beautiful white swirl of deliciousness. I managed to refrain from licking the beaters. Okay - okay! So maybe I did happen to lick the spatula. But not the beaters! I am making progress…

I put the completed dish into the oven and proceeded to prepare the coffee, using twelve servings of water and coffee grounds. Then I went upstairs to change clothes.

When I returned to the kitchen it looked to me like the coffee maker had exploded. Sizzling water and coffee grounds covered the counter. I had no clue what had happened and assumed the coffee maker was broken.

I pulled the Danish from the oven and again caught a strong whiff of garlic, but pushed the thought aside as my friends began to arrive. Janice came first. She doesn’t drink coffee so the lack of it was no concern to her.

Margie arrived next. When I informed her that there had been a coffee calamity, her expression resembled a deer caught in the headlights. What should we do, what should we do??? MUST HAVE COFFEE!!!!

Margie decided to investigate, approaching my coffee maker with caution. She opened it, only to discover that there was no filter in sight. “Kris, did you put a filter in here?” Well… umm… obviously not.

In my defense, the coffee maker had come with a built-in filter. Unfortunately, one time the coffee grounds had been forgotten and sat so long that the filter became moldy beyond repair. So whenever I need to use the coffee maker I use a paper filter. But not this time!

We laughed and laughed about my senior moment and the ensuing mess it created. Margie took charge of the coffee maker, rinsing it out, doing a trial run through the filter (sans coffee grounds). She is serious about her morning coffee and was going to get it one way or another.

The cheese Danish was cooling on the stove by now, and Margie popped her cream-cheese-filled French toast into the already-warm oven. Kim arrived and we all sat down at the dining room table with our full plates of delicious looking food. But there was still a weird scent of garlic in the air. The others began to notice it as well.

Our first bites of cheese Danish produced a collective look of perplexity. It tasted like garlic! Margie asked if there was salt in the recipe. She suggested that I might have used garlic salt by accident. I insisted that there is no salt in the recipe! She looked doubtful.

Attila had gone out to do errands and when he arrived back he caught us mid-mystery-garlic-discussion. “Uh…. it is probably in the crescent rolls.” I ran to the trash and pulled out the cover of the package – Garlic Butter Crescent rolls! Who knew they even existed?

As most of you know, I do not cook. And I do food shopping under duress, using a very specific list that I NEVER stray from. I had come home the night before (from a twelve-hour day at work) at 9:30pm, and was too exhausted to function. I still needed the cream cheese and crescent rolls, so Attila volunteered to do a Wal-mart run. He is the night owl. He purchased the rolls without even reading the label since he was not aware they made garlic butter-flavored rolls either!

The moral to the story is this: Only let your husband do the food shopping if 1) he reads labels or 2) you want to live a life that always contains the element of surprise.

I will take the element of surprise over accuracy any day. It is so much more amusing.