“Salad Cake”

A Suburban Adventure
revised:January 30,2009


The sign said, “”Salad Cake””. The outside pair of quotes distinguish the quote within the narrative, the inside pair being part of the sign and quite unnecessary, unless they referred to something that was neither cake nor salad. It was taped to a table at the fitness center. The placard behind the table said, “Try a whole new way of cooking. Healthy and delicious!” And although the placard shared the same neat and precise elementary school teacher handwriting as the ”Salad Cake” sign, there were no extraneous quotation marks to call into question the true meaning of ‘cooking’ or ‘delicious’.

A tray of “Salad Cake” samples sat on the table between a construction paper covered box with a slot neatly cut in the top and a pad of blank entry forms. “Win a Trip!” was printed neatly and enthusiastically on the box. There was no doubt of the authenticity of the sweepstakes offer.

An energetic, athletic boy-man bounced lightly on his toes waiting for passers-by to stop. Our fitness center was no ordinary gym but a home for all physical and spiritual aspirations and transformations. There were the requisite weights, stationary bikes and treadmills, but there was also a rock wall, three basketball courts, saunas, massage studios, an organic restaurant serving micro-biotic snacks and banana-kelp smoothies and a salon with edgy, androgynous beauticians whose washed out pallor belied a certain weariness from cutting one too many patron’s hair in the same longer-in the-front-shorter-in-the-back-so-it-frames-your-pretty-face-but-does-not-weigh-you-down style. Either that or they were tired from the long commute from Chapel Hill, the regional distribution center for edgy and androgynous. There were slate walls, indoor fountains and leather sofas to lounge upon in sweaty gym attire. The fitness center had standards, no quotation marks needed, and anyone allowed inside surely met their standards for earnestness.

My boys insisted that we stop at the table to try the cake. At first I resisted, fearing they would dramatically and emphatically demonstrate their dislike for the tiny sample once they had put it in their mouths. They would refuse to swallow it. They would stick out their tongues, full of half chewed cake and insist that I, or any passer by, scrape it off. I harbored my own fears of ”Salad Cake”. My mind had already topped “Salad Cake” with balsamic vinaigrette frosting.

I relented, realizing I had nothing planned for dinner that night. “This is SO good! Can I have some more?” My oldest took a second sample before I could stop him. He even offered seconds to his little brother who gladly accepted and wolfed it down. The boy-man explained that the cake had carrots, cabbage and zucchini in it. As the kids were devouring their third pieces I quickly grabbed the pad and started filling out the sweepstakes form which, conveniently for me, doubled as a contact information form. If I had the recipe for “Salad Cake” I would no longer have to claim that flavoring the hot dog water with a couple of leftover spinach leaves counted a serving of vegetables. I stuffed my entry form into the box.


A few weeks later the man on the phone began, “Hello, Mrs Cobanna? Are you sitting down?” I tell him that I had been but then I had to get up to answer the phone.

“Oh, well, grab a chair and sit down. You’re going to want to be sitting down for this. Did you find a chair?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’re sitting down?”

“No I have to clean the stuff off the chair first.”
.
“Well, I’ll wait,” his words bounced lightly through the phone lines. He was proud of the news he had to share and I couldn't wait to hear it.

Perched on a bar stool, I told him, “Okay, I’m ready.”

“You’re sitting down?”

“Yeah.”

“Your feet are on the floor, right? Cuz’ I don’t want to be responsible for you falling down.”

“Yeah. Sure.” I lied, weary of the game.

“Well, okay! I’m so glad to tell you—you’ve won a free trip!”

“A trip. To where?”

“It’s your choice, Ramona. It’s up to you. 4 nights and three days in a place of your choosing.”

“Is this one of those deals where you pay for some cheap hotel in BF Texas and all I have to do is drive three days to get there and pay for all my meals and stuff? Cuz’ that’s not a free trip. That’s free accommodations. And that, my friend, is a rip off.”

“No, no, no, ma’am! Many of these places are within a day’s drive of your home. And these are national chain hotels.”

“Oh. Okay. So what’s the catch?”

“There is no catch.”

“Great, then.”

“I just need to verify your address so one of our representatives can deliver the voucher to you.”

“Can’t you just put it in the mail?”

“Oh no!” His words regained their bouncy luster. “Because while they are at your home, they’re going to cook dinner for you and your family. How’s that sound?”

I considered whether to go along or make up an unassailable excuse like that several members of my family had forgotten how to chew (true) thus at times choked on entire peanut butter jelly sandwiches they’d stuffed in their mouths (true) and were on strict diets of pre-digested carp smoothies (false). He broke through the lingering silence. “For dessert, there will be “Salad Cake”!”

“Great!” What I really meant was, “Shit! I’ll have to clean the kitchen for a stranger.”

“Okay, what night works for you?”

“I don’t know-any night, I guess.”

“Well, it looks like we have Friday night available. How’s that? You probably have plans. Let’s see…”

In the brief second it took him to survey the schedule for another open evening, I took stock of our humdrum lives in the rural suburbs of a not-so-urban town, where a round of Italian ices counted as international culture; where people were either dangerously excited when the new Chili’s restaurant opened or curiously disillusioned because they were hoping for a TGIFriday’s.

“Friday’s fine for us. But I hate to ruin someone else’s weekend by making them work on Friday night.”

“It’s fine,“ he reassured me. “I’ll send Sara.”

He explained a few details of the dinner: Sara would bring the food and cookware, prepare the food, serve us on our plates, “You do have plates and utensils, right? Just asking,” and clean up while we enjoyed the “Salad Cake”.

“What about the trip?”

“What trip?”

“The trip you said I won.”

“Oh. Yeah. She’ll bring you the voucher. Oh, and if you call to cancel please have another date in mind. Our representatives only get paid if they make you dinner.”


The rest of the week, I prepared for Sara’s invasion of our kitchen. I cleaned the crumbs from of the drawers, I scoured pans I hadn’t used in years since I totally forgot the part where he said she’d use her own cookware.I slid the Halloween decorations out of sight--it was February, after all. I swept and mopped the floor and dusted off the cafeteria lady action figure that served as my kitchen island centerpiece.

Sara was on time. As she stepped out of her car, I pushed the remaining knick knacks off the counter and into a drawer. She rang the bell holding her large box of food on one raised knee. We were struck by an overwhelming sense of Sara. She was beaten down from being on the losing end of life’s battles a few too many times. Her eyes were a washed out gray and the blue had drained to her sunken, dark sockets. She was listless, lifeless. That’s harsh and overstated. She was clinically depressed.

She and my husband made several runs to her car to retrieve all the food and cooking instruments needed for our feast.

“Did you bring “Salad Cake”?” my eight-year-old asked after she made her final run.

“No, I have to make it first. I’m fixing your dinner tonight. How does that sound?” She turned to me. “Where are your spoons?”

I pointed to the spoon drawer and my son, reluctant to ever let his words hurt anyone's feelings, darted up the stairs without answering the question.

She asked my husband and me to sit down and talk while she prepared the food. She opened the drawer and moved things back and forth looking for just the right spoon. Suddenly she gasped at something in the spoon drawer. She quickly grabbed a spoon and closed the drawer. I was pleased that she was impressed with my vast selection of wooden spoons.

She pulled out a small easel and put a preprinted tablet on it. She introduced herself and provided her history, “I’m Sara, I live in Chapel Hill.” She was a bit androgynous with her k.d. lang haircut but there was not an edge to be found. She was edgeless. “I used to work in a lab. I was a biologist but I got laid off and found this job. I’m going to ask you some questions.” She flipped back the first page of her tablet.

“Like a test.” I said helpfully.

“Yes. Like a test. But don’t be surprised if you get most of the answers wrong.”

It is not hyperbole to say that the chasm of charm separating biologist and sales rep had never seemed so vast as it did in that moment.

Sara said that her partner couldn’t believe how much better food tasted when prepared in the way she’d show us tonight. Her partner hated vegetables until her partner tasted them prepared in this new miraculous method. Her partner, she confided, was frugal, but even her partner thought the cost of the pans was money well spent.

Author’s Note: Sara referred to her partner as “her partner” exclusively throughout the night. I have no way of ascertaining her partner’s gender and for accuracy’s sake, will throughout the story refer to Sara’s partner as such, although were this not an absolutely accurate recount, I’d make up a gender neutral name for Sara’s partner, like Pat or Sid or Shawn. But in deference to Sara and her partner, for the remaining portion of this story I will refer to Sara’s partner as” Sara’s partner” or "her partner" and my husband, Danny, as “my partner.”

Sara used the biggest, shiniest, most powerful salad shooter ever seen to slice and dice carrots, cabbage and zucchini. She was a master at changing out the cutting barrels and pushing vegetables down the shoot to within millimeters of her own fingertips. I beleived her when she said that I couldn't do that and if I tried I'd cut the tips off my fingeres and bleed all over the zucchini.

“When you prepare vegetables for your family, Ramona, you put them in a pot of water and boil them for fifteen or twenty minutes. Correct?”

“Uh, no. I put maybe the frozen veggies and maybe a tablespoon of water in a glass bowl and cook them in the microwave for a couple of minutes.”


“But they, for example, your carrots,” she held up one her perfectly sliced carrot disks,” they’re mushy right?”

“No, I cook them as little time as possible.”

“Why?”

“So they can retain their nutrients.”

“How did you know that?” She wasn’t as much interested as frustrated. I was ruining her sales pitch. The mental image of my amputated finger tips in the zuchini casserole didn't help, either.

She was there to persuade me to buy pots and pans from the same company that brought the world the Salad Master, the original salad shooter. These pots and pans are made with 7 layers of aluminum including one layer of the same kind of aluminum from which jet engines are made. They--the pans, not the jets, allow food to cook without adding water, thus allowing the food to retain all its nutrients.

“My partner used to hate Brussels sprouts. Do either of you like Brussels sprouts?” My partner used an overdramatic grimace to indicate a hearty dislike of Brussels sprouts. I figured she knew the answer before she asked the question and didn’t respond. “My partner loved Brussels sprouts after I cooked them in this cookware system. Food tastes more like it does in its raw state.” It's fair to say that it's never a good marketing strategy to make this particular point using Brussels sprouts.

“Food doesn’t stick to the pans, either. No oil is needed.” As proof, she started cooking some chicken thighs, skin down, in a large jet pan. She tried to turn a thigh over with some tongs she found in the still amazing spoon drawer. “’It’s sticking,’ you’re probably telling yourself. Why is that?”

“Because it’s not done yet. It will release when it’s ready to be turned.”

“How did you know that?” If the effort had not been so overwhelming, she would have stamped her foot.

She tried a new tact. She pulled out one of my pans and held it next to hers. “Now if I told you that you could buy this pan made from jet engine aluminum that would allow you to cook more healthful meals for your family for $300 or another pan that could potentially poison your family for $100, which would you choose?”

As distasteful as the second choice was, the first choice was out of the question. My partner and I waited for the third choice.

Our blank stares and non-answers did not discourage her from continuing the sales pitch she had clearly prepared and perfected herself.“Obviously you care about your family so you’d choose the three hundred dollar pan. Well, don’t worry. This pan costs twice that much.” She stashed the semi-precious pan in a cooler secured with a combination lock she pulled out her apron pocket.

She flipped the tablet to a page with an image of a refrigerator. “You probably wouldn’t think twice about spending three thousand on a major kitchen appliance, right?”

“Well….”

“You probably don’t consider your pots and pans a major kitchen appliance. But you should.” She wheeled on one heel toward the stove and asked where the spatulas were kept. I directed her to the spoon drawer. The spoon drawer could just as easily be called the knife drawer, the spatula drawer, the take-out menu drawer. I figured it was the vastness of its holdings that kept amazing her, although by then her expression was more of a grim sigh than a enraptured gasp.

She said she had to start the “Salad Cake”.” Notice that I’m not preheating the oven. I’m going to cook it on the stove in this pan.” She said it with a flourish of a magician pulling the Dalia Lama out of a hat.

My partner and I were spellbound. We had seen her slice the carrots cabbage and zucchini into tiny slivers. But how could she turn a pile of unappealing vegetables into the moist, chocolaty cake the kids tasted at the fitness center? She had finally stumped me. And then she revealed the secret —a box of devil’s food cake mix. She mixed half the box with one egg and one egg yolk plus two cups of the slivered vegetables. She explained that the moisture from the vegetables would give the cake enough liquid to make a moist and chewy cake. She put the cover on the pan and put it on the oven to cook. “You can’t do that with jut any pan,” she said confidently.

We sat down to unseasoned, unsalted chicken thighs, cooked but cold carrots and green peas and dinner salad dressed with bottled balsamic vinaigrette. She cleaned up the kitchen while extolling the virtues of the Salad Shooter jet pans.

“How is it? Doesn’t it taste different? Can’t you taste the real flavor of the carrot and peas?”

We dishonestly agreed but our oldest son said, “Where’s the salt? This needs salt.”

Our youngest said “I ate my ‘no thank you bite’,” forgetting the requisite ‘no thank you’. “Where’s the cake?”

“It’s not ready yet.” I noticed that Sara fixed her gaze on something in the corner of the drawer as she opened the spoon drawer again. She quickly grabbed a dish towel and slammed it shut. “I tell you what," she addressed the boys,"let me talk to your parents awhile. We’ll let you know when the cake is ready.”

I cleared the kids’ plates off the table and sneaked a peek in the drawer. A plastic cockroach from my final sweep of the counter was splayed upside down on the forks. I decide to let her think the worst. At least then, she would leave with an anecdote.

The two hours we had been told that the meal and clean up would take had passed long before. It was getting close to nine o’clock on a Friday night and we hadn’t watched a moment of HGTV. We were clearly not buying the jet pans. Trying to salvage something positive about the evening, I reminded her, “Well, you made us dinner. So, now you’ll get paid.”

“Oh no. I get a commission only if I sell something.”

“That’s not what the guy on the phone said.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I get paid on commission. If you don’t buy anything, I don’t get paid.”

An extra beat of time passed.

“I’m very sorry. We’re not going to be able to help you out. I’m sorry we’ve wasted your time.”

“Well, if you could host a dinner party and invite six couples over to hear my presentation, I would get a roasting pan free. Do you think you could do that?”

My partner passed a hand over the flavorless meal, and quickly answered, “We wouldn’t want to put anyone through all this. I mean, it’s a big time commitment and everyone we know is busier than we are.” Everyone we knew was watching Brother Bear 2, sharing a bag of microwave popcorn with their kids and calling it “Family Movie Night.”

She served the boys the “Salad Cake” They gobbled it down and asked for seconds. She dissented but I shrugged and allowed them one more piece knowing it was the most vegetables they had ever eaten in one day. It was the perfect time to call it a night.

But instead of boxing up her stuff, she wanted to show us one last thing. Sara put some water in one of her pots and two of mine and turned on three burners. We all watched the pots waiting for them to boil. She took one more stab at quizzing me. “I notice you don’t have any Teflon coated pans. Why is that?”

“Because Teflon leeches toxins into foods as it cooks.”

“How did you know that?” She impatiently tapped the spoon on the counter. Not much was said after that.

Finally she added a bit of baking soda to the water. “Taste this.” She offered each of us a spoon of the baking soda water from her jet pot. It was nasty. “Now taste this.” She gave us a spoonful of water from one of my pans. It was wretched-much worse than her pot of baking soda water. “You see, everything’s the same, except the pan. So what could make it taste so different?”

“Clearly, it’s the pan,” I said, “but couldn’t you have made the same point with-I don’t know-sugar?”

“I guess. I never thought of that.”

Finally she was done. She wiped her pans dry and stashed each one in its own terry cloth cover and filled her boxes and cooler. We asked her questions about her life. She had been a biologist with a pharmaceutical company and didn’t like the way the lab was run. Her complaints, she believed, got her fired. Next she found work at a children’s portrait studio, but that didn’t work out either because, let’s face it—that never works out for anyone trying to live a drug-free life. Finally she opened a holistic physical therapy clinic. She received training and certification online. I probably don't need to draw arrows linking 'physical therapy'with 'certification' and 'online' or add '??' and '!!!' in the margin to emphasize the tenuous nature of her accreditation.

She had two devoted customers, one being her partner, the other an attorney. She was selling pots and pans in her spare time until her clinic had a few more patients. But what she really wanted to do was be a P.E. teacher. “I loved my P.E. teachers in school. They understood me. They liked me. Most people, back then, didn’t like me.” My partner looked at me to gauge my reaction. I continued to watch her fold and unfold her dish towels until they fit just so in a box.

“What about the trip?” It had gone unmentioned. I wanted my four days and three nights in hot, sunny Cozumel.

“What trip? Oh! The trip. No one ever remembers that.” She ripped a single sheet off a pad of printed forms.

The trip limitations were printed on the front of the paper while the exclusions filled the back.

To take advantage of the free trip, winners had to travel at least three hours from their home, reserve a basic hotel room at least three months in advance, put down a one hundred dollars deposit and request the return of the deposit no later than one week after the trip. It was not a trip. It was a burden. No quotation marks needed.

I walked her to her car. I felt bad that she had gotten nothing out of her efforts. Then the cockroach flashed into my mind. We had given her something--no, nothing--just a story to tell her partner that she would ruin in the retelling. I helped her load her car. The bottom of the trunk was covered with a template showing how each box and cooler fit. She lingered at her car door trying to make the evening last a little longer. I wanted it to be over before “House Hunters” started. But I had something I could give her.

“I used to be a P.E. teacher. I think you should try it. I think you’d be great.”