Life Lesson: Always read the label.

So a long long time ago in a far away land (Mapleton, UT) Sister Morin (Nicole's mom) taught me how to make her glorious sweet rolls. We spent the whole day making rolls and a few other flour mixes for other good treats. We made a muffin mix, a sweet quick bread mix and some red wheat flour which Sister Morin sent home with me in little plastic labelled bags. And that's where it all started...

Chuck and I have started making pizza frequently; it's one of our new favorite dinners. We recently ran out of flour and bought a new brand of whole wheat flour. It's pretty coarse and made the dough a little too hard. So, last weekend I decided to make pepperoni pizza (we usually make BBQ chicken), but wanted to use a different flour so the dough would be a little bit softer. We had some red wheat flour in a big container labelled flour for quite some time and I went scrounging for it. I found the container and there was a plastic bag of "flour" inside. Perfect. I was excited because I found a new pizza dough recipe and knew it would be awesome. At about the kneading stage (which was taking an abnormally long time, not to mention how much extra "flour" I had to add to keep it from being sticky) I started to notice the smell. For some reason our house started to smell like delicious pumpkin bread. Odd. I keep kneading (of course). Like a light bulb I remember that we did have those plastic bags of mixes somewhere...and they just happened to have gotten stored in the big container labelled red wheat flour. I yank the bag of "flour" that I'd been using (quite a lot of it) and read the label: Sweet Quick Bread Mix, Sept. 20. Great.

Most sane people would stop there and give up. But no. I had just spent 1-2 hours on the dough and I wasn't about to lose all that work. So, I went ahead and let it rise. It didn't rise...at all. Not even after 3 hours. I still didn't give up-I wanted that pizza, dang it. So, I made the pizza with the pumpkin smelling, non-rising dough.

HUGE MISTAKE.

The pizza was completely inedible. Well, Chuck managed to eat the pepperoni and cheese off the top, but the taste of pizza sauce with pumpkin bread was just miserable.

The leftover dough...entirely inedible.

When I called my mom and regaled her with my sad tale she just laughed and reminded me of the time our babysitter and us made play dough with the pancake mix instead of flour. Then I thought of the time I made cookies with my sister and used salt instead of sugar. Yikes. Apparently, I have a bad track record and a really slow learning curve.

Moral of the story: ALWAYS read the label.