Twinkie memories

With all of the hand-wringing, hoarding and e-bay selling of Twinkies and other Hostess-related products thanks to the employees' union leaders telling them not to worry, that their strike would result in more cash, not the threatened closure of the whole business as was promised by the owners (Good job, union leaders. But at least you guys still have your jobs.), I figured I could write about one of my earlier Twinkie memories.

It was a long time ago, in a suburb far, far away. My mother used to go to the Hostess store and buy Twinkies and other cakes by the box and put them in our basement freezer. All one had to do to thaw one out was take it upstairs and put it in the oven for five minutes and it's be as perfect as a Twinkie could be.

Then one day, we got our first new-fangled microwave oven. Me being a teen, I could not see much use for it, until I was told that I could warm the Twinkies up in that instead of the oven. OK. That seemed like a handy thing, then. So the next time I wanted a Twinkie, I took one out of the freezer and put it in the new microwave. Not really being familiar with the concept or aware of it's capabilities, I set the power to "high" and turned the dial to "5 minutes" and turned it on. Then I went back downstairs to wait on my anticipated gently-warmed snack.

I was brought back upstairs in a hurry approximately four minutes, thirty-five seconds later by the screaming of the smoke detector, only to find the entire upstairs of the house filled with smoke. Bad micro-wave..BAD!

Once my sister and I and a neighbor or two managed to silence the smoke detector and air the house out by opening all of the doors and windows (It was wintertime if I recall.), I examined the microwave to see what went wrong and found the remains of the Twinkie: blackened and shrunk down to a rock-hard little thing about the size of a Tootsie Roll, sitting in the remains of the melted plastic bag that the Twinkie had been wrapped in.

That was the day that I learned that micro-waves cook things faster than regular ovens. Now I know and appreciate them for this, but my mother...well let's just say that she didn't appreciate that Twinkie Viking Funeral in her kitchen while she'd been away. Nope. Not one bit.

So that's what I'll remember as Hostess goes out of business forever. Thanks for the memory, Hostess...and micro-wave people.