Bryan begged me last night, "Please, please don't make the pumpkin bread with that margarine--make it with oil".

Did I tell you about the experiment? Oh, well, sorry if I'm being redundant here, but, I'm offline right now and don't feel like checking all this months entries to find out if I've written about this before.

Faye and Delton had a booth to promote their business at a mall last month. While she was visiting different places in the mall, Faye came upon a place that was doing taste/use tests for margarine. She gave them my name (because I do all the cooking) and brought home four packages of two different kinds of margarine to test. The margarine is in plain white boxes and the boxes and individual sticks were simply marked: use first and use second.

A couple of days after Halloween, I used some of the mashed pumpkin I had gotten from the Halloween pumpkins to make pumpkin bread. Johnny's class had gone on a field trip to a place called the Pumpkin Patch before Halloween and he had brought home a sheet of recipes. We used the recipe for pumpkin bread and it was wonderful!

When Faye brought home the margarine, she told me to use it as I would normally use margarine. However, when the woman called to get the results from the first two boxes, she was very upset because I hadn't baked with it. So, in the end, I ended up making the pumpkin bread again. This time I used the margarine in place of the oil. The batter tasted wonderful. But the results of the cooked bread? Well, Bryan's response last night says it all.

The woman will be calling again tomorrow to ask if I've baked with the second batch of margarine. The first time she asked about the baking, she asked if I had used the recipe before. I told her yes and she told me that she'd like me to use the same recipe when I use the second sticks of margarine. So, today I will be baking the bread again. With the margarine provided. Let's all hope the results will be better the second time around.

Thanks to for the border background.