Another General Conference Feast

To: Abbottsville Fourth Ward
From: Donna Banta
Subject: General Conference was super yummy!

Last October, I took a trip to Utah to visit friends and family, take in the beauty of Sundance Canyon, attend another awesome Ex-Mormon Conference, and visit the prestigious food storage mecca, Shelf Reliance, where I purchased a freeze dried entree for a future potluck at my house. Since the #10 size can had a 5 year shelf life, there was no rush to set a date. So we waited for the obvious occasion to roll around: The 182nd Semi-Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, held (appropriately) on April 1.

It was the perfect pairing! Think of it this way:

Movie -- Coke and popcorn.

Ball game -- Beer and hot dogs.

General Conference -- Jell-O and dehydrated chicken flakes.

Just add water -- or snack on it dry!

Ali and Eric brought the Jell-O!

Now the world would have you believe that preparing a chicken dinner means going all the way to the store for hoity toity ingredients with virtually no shelf life:

Only available at high end supermarkets

Then roasting it for over an hour in a hot oven:

Tastes okay tonight, but what about 5 years from now?

But thanks to the staff in my Post-Mormon Test Kitchen, we've learned that it's much easier to grab a can from your food storage, add water, and, in no time flat have this:

Delicious for a decade.

But wait there's more! After dinner, we went on to dessert. Our pastry chef, Sarah, prepared two batches of brownies: one using hot water and a freeze-dried brownie mix; the other using a "from scratch" recipe she found in that venerable academic review, BYU Magazine. 

She conducted a blind taste test:

Sarah was way scientific.

Guess what?! The freeze dried batch won.

(More proof that girls don't need to go to college.)

For good measure, we did have conference on in the background. But everyone agreed that the 182nd was a major snore-fest. We concluded that the Brethren were doing their best to avoid interfering with the Romney Campaign. (If that's the case, does it mean they actually know how obnoxious their opinions are?)

In addition to crazy GA's, we also discussed crazy Mormon exes, crazy Mormon parents, crazy Mormon siblings, crazy Mormon friends, and crazy Mormon ex-friends. Also the long suffering nice Mormons who put up with us, and the sneaky and ingenious Mormons we admire. For example, the girl whose mom and dad would only pay for BYU. Instead of caving, she took a year off, holed up in her room in her parents' house, and earned $ for "gentile college" by doing Playboy webcam videos. -- Talk about self-reliance!

We also reflected on how happy we are to have Sundays free in the great city of San Francisco. And we enjoyed an array of worldly beverages and damned good food -- along with light-mindedness, loud laughter, and evil speaking of the self appointed.

In closing, it was indeed a spiritual feast.