I don’t know about you, but when my sister and I were little, we’d watch, glassy-eyed, as Mom or Grandma would stir up some sweet concoction, blending a wide array of raw ingredients into a mixture that, when properly baked, turned into the most wonderful treats imaginable. Our small engines always idled at half-throttle in those days, and our preferred fuel was sugar-laced confectioneries taken by the handful and shoved, barely cooled, into eager gas tanks. If we had a razor blade and a mirror, we would have snorted Betty Crocker herself.

But the thing we waited most for was after the mixing, and the pouring or shaping, because that was when the utensils, still glistening with the syrupy stickiness of the leftover recipe, were offered up as an offering to the sugar deities with a casual invocation of, “Now…who wants to lick the spoon???”

Stampeding rabid buffalo in heat couldn’t have kept us from the glory of that privilege. “ME! MEEEE!!!!”

Sometimes there was more than one spoon available and we each got one…sometimes it was winner-take-all. I did notice that many times, Mom used two spoons to mix the cookie dough. That seemed a little wasteful. Also, I suspect that she failed to remove quite all of the cake mix from the beaters before handing them to us kids to clean off. I’m sure that was just because she was distracted…baking takes a lot of mental power, ya know.

We’d fall upon them with all the gusto of a vulture on Roadkill Appreciation Day. Quick work was made of whatever concoction had been rendered and the thoroughly-cleaned apparatus were returned to the sink for some washing, although I think by the time we got done, not even microcellular organisms existed on those spoons and beaters.

Nowadays, I often use a spatula to clean out jars and cans of various substances and, if it is a particularly sweet thing, I’ll find myself saying out loud, “Now…look at that. Isn’t that a shame? I got pie filling all over the spatula, down the handle, and covering my hand. Well, we can’t put that into the pie, can we? The food surgeon general wouldn’t approve. Might poison someone. Hrm…well, only one thing to do!” And I fulfill my civic duty by putting myself in the line of danger and removing all food product from the utensil with my tongue.

Hey…it’s tough work protecting the public from such threats. Very *burp!* tough work.