Cravings assuaged poetically

Oh where art
My butter tart
In these United States?
The sticky treat
I long to eat,
and my desire sate.
Look everywhere
the shelves are bare
people's brows are raisin'
Yes that's right
Raisin delight,
Is the tart I'm praisin'.
I've been known
to make my own
When a craving surges!
A bit of crust,
sugar's a must,
A butter tart emerges.

(Heaven is located just under this raisin)

It's Bloody Delicious.

Alan says we have a dark side.
What? Just cause we were merrily juicing up some veggies for a potent, power packed supremely healthful drink he thinks we have a dark side?
Is it my fault that raw beets ooze red, blood like juice all over heck and back when you chop them up?
Nooooo.
Is it my fault that juicing a beet yields a delicious, nutritious albeit damn bloody looking drink?
Heccccckkkk No.
Is it my fault that for the 3.2 seconds he had his back turned I paused mid-juicing so that I could carve the core of the beet into a rat like body that would do any horror movie gross-out scene proud?
Ummmm.........maybe?
I'll admit to that being my own idea but it's not my fault the beet had such a long rat like tail, and that when I chopped it up to fit in our juicer that fate handed me a deliciously disgusting opportunity.
It's fate's fault! A ha!!!
Usually if I babble on long enough I can find some one else to blame for anything and everything, I am much relieved this time is no different.
Fate stepped in and provided this afternoon's grotesque entertainment. My muse screeched in my ear that I should pull out my carving knife and..NOT not cut off it's tail but be a good wife and smooth out the core of the beet into a rat like form...I supposed a skinned and de-legged rat like form to be accurate.
How does one go about plating a bloody rat for their husband? A virginal white dish to show off the wet, darkly oozing rodent/vegetable is best. Flick your fingers a la Emeril in a deliciously dark home version of "BAM" to splatter excess beet juice/blood all over the plate. Be mindful of your flicking as you'll have to clean up the splatters that will....er...COULD make it on to you, the floor, the cupboards, the counters...the ceilings...if you get too enthusiastic. And unfortunately I've never suffered from a lack of enthusiasm.
Present the plate to your loved one with all the pride you can muster and rejoice in their chuckle, their appreciation of a terribly good joke.
If you think carving a bloody rat was fun you should try juicing one, held by it's tail as you lower it in to the grinding mechanism of your juicer, you'll never look at your veggie juice the same way again!
Usually when we drink beet juice we just pretend we're vampires and cackle over every sip and bare our teeth at each other and sigh over the many months away that Halloween is.
But this time we giggled like mad scientists, twitching our whiskers and slurping our ridiculously red rodent juice with mephistophelian glee.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm beets make a bloody good drink.
p.s. I don't really have to state the obvious do I? That beet juice is as close as I wanna come to eating or drinking any rat or related product..right????

The Beauty of the Big Biscuit...

How delightful are biscuits?
Very, is the answer in case you had a momentary brain lapse and were fumbling through your mind desperately looking for a response that won't enrage this blogger. The answer is very.
A hearty, buttery, flakey bread type product that you can whip up at a moment's notice and be enjoying a bite of, albeit a steaming bite in about 11 minutes.
That's 10 minutes baking time and 1 minute preparation time, I will admit that if you're not a fan of dust clouds of flour, smacking your shins in to cats that get in the way as you dash at reckless speeds across the kitchen gathering ingredients, splattering globs of biscuit dough all over the kitchen, your self and your husband then perhaps a more reasonable (which I'm not, reasonable that is) estimation of total time for everyone else would be around 13 or 14 minutes. Any more than that and I gotta wonder what it is you're doing with your flour that I'm not doing with mine. *insert raised eyebrow look here, the sort Laura Holt is always giving Remington Steele, also guess who has discovered Remington Steele and has been watching back-to-back episodes on Hulu? The answer is meeeee.*
I have very fond memories of biscuits.
They were always the dainty, little, round, perfectly cut sort that made me think of baby showers and women's something or other meetings......sorry the name of that community group escapes me, all I can remember was the table laden with pot luck food, luck indeed, as there were always biscuits, pre buttered with a wee little square of cheddar cheese already adorning the golden beauties like a wee jewel in the crown of...oh God I'm hungry. How many minutes has it been? I've a biscuit in the oven you know.
A biscuit, as in singular.
Because that is my brilliance, my time saving, get a bit of biscuit to my gullet faster than you can say "Beam me up Scotty".
The....BIG...biscuit.
What's with all this rolling the dough out and cutting it in to wee circles anyways? That's like saying you're only going to eat one biscuit and nobody eats just one biscuit. My Grandmother when she lived at home was always in to weight watchers and health and calorie counting and scales and losing weight and this that and the next thing and even she did not sit down to eat ONE biscuit, she ate a whole bunch of biscuits in one go. The tub of Country Crock margarine spread between us, the molasses already loaded into a squeezable tipped bottle so we could ooze out the perfect amount on each beautiful bite of baked biscuit. Perhaps this was why she seemed so aware of her calorie intake every where else I am just now realizing, because when it came to biscuits and molasses we were *good biscuit eaters*. As if consuming a small truck load of biscuits in one sitting was a skill to be proud of.
The Big Biscuit is brilliant.
A batch of biscuit dough pressed out lightly onto a greased cookie sheet (maybe yours doesn't have to be greased but mine does or else there's a kitchen full of broken biscuit dreams, tears and curses when the big biscuit sticks to the sheet and refuses to give you the all important big biscuit bottom layer that's slightly crispy and golden and MINE! NOT the cookie sheet's but MINE. Not that I hold grudges against inanimate objects or anything...for long...it's just I don't like non-sentient things to defy me and my will, is that so wrong?)
Then you pop your big doughy biscuit in the oven for it's allotted time and within 10 or 11 minutes....ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....a biscuit, warm and steaming and just ready to be plopped on your plate..er.....I mean divided up for you and your husband who is now the one giving you the raised eyebrow look but instead of Laura Holt's eyebrow routine it's Remington Steele's cause he's on to me and my Big Biscuit and wants in on the action.
Sometimes we just have buttered biscuit, some times the all important biscuit and molasses routine, though I warn you this is a routine that is impossible to stop. Butter a bit of big biscuit, drip a drop of molasses, munch away, repeat..and repeat..and repeat..and repeat.
You will hear a distant groan of protest that is your stomach but you will also find your molasses addled brain will ignore it and keep eating bite after perfect bite of BIG biscuit and molasses. It's just the unfortunate reality of something so dang simple and delicious.
Sometimes we dig out our cheeses and sit trading hunks of gruyere and cheddar and fontina back and forth over our plates.
Other times we plop a chunk of Big Biscuit on a salad, like a mega crouton.
Sometimes we have it with marmalade or cinnamon sugar or.....like today....fresh strawberries.
A little trick I do, if you like your biscuits extra golden on top, pop em under the broiler in the oven for a few seconds after they are baked. Another little trick I do, forget it's under the broiler, walk away, distracted by shiny objects and bits of fluff and then wonder why the kitchen smells like smoke.
I can only in good conscience recommend the first trick unless you're into charred biscuit.
A ha, which reminds me. A third trick, take your big biscuit while it's still in it's soft, warm dough form and.....pop it on your Bar-B-Q grill. Holy mama, that's a gooooood biscuit and it can get a wee bit of char but the good kind, not the stomach turning, we can use it as a piece of charcoal to draw a picture of our deceased Big Biscuit, kind. I usually dust my big biscuit with lots of flour so it wont stick to the grill when ever I've done this trick.
By the way for those of you with husbands who look at your biscuits with a dark gleam of greed in their eye I want to set the record straight that biscuits, big or otherwise..do..NOT EVAPORATE. Even a little, so should any biscuit disappear while it's cooling and the BIG Biscuit Baker is outside watering the plants then we'll all know it wasn't a natural phenomenon..... I do give him points for originality, and cuteness....so he can have as much of the dang biscuit as he wants if he continues to be my hand model.

How to Enjoy a Big Biscuit:

1. Break it in to hunks, use your hands just like the caveman biscuit makers did.
2. Prepare a little love for the biscuit with some sliced strawberries, a touch of sugar and a drip of Amaretto, let the mixture combine in an almost carnal like way until it coaxes the blushing strawberries in to releasing it's juices at which point introduce the whole thing to it's betrothed...the BIG BISCUIT!
3. Clean the table like mad in a frenzy of energy because you realize that as the sun sets it's highlighting every bit of dust on the surface and making you look like a bad house keeper, which you might very well be but there's no need to photograph the evidence now is there?
4. Raw...HEAVY....cream......thick and luscious and much more adult than the whipped gelatinous-y type stuff that masquerades as whipped cream in the freezer section of the store. If you have the patience you could whip it up, if you don't..like me, just pour a dollop over the sweetened berries and bit of Big Biscuit and try not to let your hands shake cause it looks too impossibly good to have come together that fast.
5. Lure your husband out on to the patio with promises of telling him where you hid the spoons if he'll hold the plates of strawberry shortcake type cousins in the dying rays of the sun.
6. Eat.

p.s. The recipe I use for my Big Biscuit is adapted from Bob's Red Mill
However I use only 100% whole wheat flour in my recipe, omit the sugar, and replace the shortening with coconut oil. Oh and....um depending on what's closer the fridge or the sink I'll replace the milk with water.

A Slice Of Life.....

We accidently ate the whole pizza.
Some days are like that.
The sort of day where an entire pizza seems like a perfectly acceptable meal for a couple of starved people in desperate need of their television fix and some nourishment.
The sort of day where the afore mentioned couple have to gobble down not one but two brownies before they can even start cooking the pizza, just to appease the beast of hunger that growls ominously in the pit of their stomachs. Well, in all honesty, the first brownie was for the beast the second was for fun.
It was the sort of day where salads are left tucked cozily in their chilly beds in the bottom of the fridge because opening the door and bending over that far seems like a hell of a lot of work, no matter how good the salad.
The sort of day where the last dribbles of energy went into slicing the fresh basil for the pizza, chopping the pasilla peppers and giving them a quick fry so they'll be soft and melt in our mouth delicious with a light coating of garlic infused coconut oil.
Dicing the red onion is almost the straw that brings this camel's back crashing down in an un-lady like chocolate smeared heap on the kitchen floor. Licking at her own savory fingers that have flecks of oregano and a few rather alarming looking blotches of tomato sauce dotting the backs of her hands.
The distant mournful cry of her husband echoes her own..
"I'm hunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngry!"
The kitchen fills with scent of baking bread, compliments of the whole wheat crust that's even now rising and puffing under it's crown of sauce and toppings. The fresh mozzarella is finally relaxing, tense little shivering balls of cold are basking in the heat, spreading their arms and oozing in delight and what has to be near ecstasy in the warmth that's enveloping them. Some of them even begin a tan. Golden colour tinges the occasional little pool of mozzarella that now embraces the tomato sauce, hugs it to itself in a lovely little union of gastronomic delight.
From my semi-starved induced comatose state slumped against the kitchen table I think I hear bells.
Wedding bells perhaps? Signaling the completeness of what was once a handful of separate ingredients merging into a single, whole unit of pizza. The perfect marriage.
I shake myself awake, and realize it's not wedding bells but the timer, the pizza is done. We start to shovel slices of it straight into our greedy mouths but decide a little more torture is in order. Pizza ALWAYS tastes best after a little pain and suffering. So we moan and groan and drag out the camera and quickly snap a few mouth watering photos that has us dangerously close to drooling all over it. (The pizza and the camera)
With aching feet, that scream in it's foot language for me to sit the hell down before they snap themselves off from my legs and beat me with my own heels, we grab plates of pizza, bottles of hot sauce and sink into near oblivion on the sofa.
Our feet sigh, we sigh and turn on the t.v.
Maybe it's not an intellectually stimulating night of clay sculpting and philosophical discussions and writing reams of code for a website but it was damn near perfection.
Homemade pizza, plus me plus my husband plus the t.v. equals an experience you can NEVER get anywhere but in your slouchiest clothes at home.

An edible state of intoxication.......

Consolation du chocolat avec crème glacé.

Once upon a time a lonnnnnnnng time ago my father moved us from Nova Scotia to Manitoba, which, if you're not up to date on your Canadian provinces, is from one end of the North American continent to about the middle of fricking nowhere.
I mean I joke about my Mom living in the middle of nowhere but Gillam Manitoba really WAS the middle of fricking no where.
The sort of place that has -40 degree C temps during the winter, the sort of place with enough scary sharp toothed dogs tied in every yard to give any kid nightmares for years to come and the sort of place where big ass brown bears wander past your bedroom window.
As if that's normal, as if glancing outside and a giant hulking beast of an animal that would just as likely eat you for dinner as...well...what ever it is bears eat. Honey I guess...if Disney is to believed. Which is a little weird now that I think about it, a blood spurting human or a pot of honey..? Come on now it can't be both. I hate to be getting off track so soon in to a long winded run on sentences rant but now I can't help but wonder what was really going on between Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh...I think Winnie might have just been waiting for Robin to fatten up and become more of a meal....ewwww.......that's the forbidden story of the hundred acre woods that no one ever talks about, the LAST story actually.....if it were to be told I'm sure Piglet and Roo would be all "He seemed like such a nice guy, real quiet. Cuddly, always on the look out for some honey." Yep, it's always the ones we least suspect.
Well back to childhood memories that forever warped my addled brain into the shape it is today, which is vaguely walnut-y from what I've heard.
Some where between N.S. and the middle of fricking nowhere Dad stopped at a restaurant for some much needed food and we all gathered round the table and chowed down. I'm pretty sure I had a grilled cheese because after all they are the perfect diner food, simple, basic and pretty non-evil. You never have to poke about a grilled cheese when you're a child to see if some one slipped some pickled beef tongue or burnt onions or worse yet CANNED PEAS in to it. (young version of me=picky picky eater)
Anyways Dad must have finished a lot faster than us kids as he was already on to dessert and he ordered something called..BAKED ALASKA.
I in all childish innocence queried "what is baked Alaska?" and was about to have my little grey matter cells blown away.
"baked ice cream"
Huh whahhhhhhhh? Say whaaaaaahhh?
You're joshing me Dad, you're trying pull a fast one over ol' red here. I might have been only 7 but I knew that sounded insane. Ice cream plus heat equals tears from me on a hot summer day when the ice cream melts too fast to keep up. Dad's trying to tell me they deliberately melt ice cream here and he was about to pay for some????????
Dad went on to explain as he placed his order already for a Baked Alaska that I could have one too when I finished my grilled cheese and that the ice cream wouldn't be melted. It would be covered in stuff and baked, yadda yadda. I was 7, my little grilled cheese infused mind could only latch on to the words ice cream. Some sort of magical ice cream that didn't melt and would be baked and would be mine if I could just hurry the hell up and finished this now worthless, annoying stomach filling bit of fried bread and cheese. Like any child the notion of dessert filled me with a shining sparkling hope for the full glory of sticky, ooey, gooey sweet sugar anything and like any child had the immediate and clever rationale that if I eat this grilled cheese I will not have as much room for the afore mentioned dessert of my dreams to fit in my stomach. Parents burn out a little part of their brains when they have kids, it's ok. I can say this cause I don't have any kids and I can see the difference. I'm thinking it's the indignities of giving birth and raising a pooping, peeing, squalling child for the next..ohhh 20 years that deadens a tiny part of their brains, and a good thing too, cause otherwise how can they put up with a whining 7 year old at a diner restaurant with a plate of barely touched grilled cheese that will go to waste if not eaten, still has to be paid for and is now desperately wanting to change her dinner order to just a Baked Alaska.
I say thank God for what ever it is that happens in parent's brains cause if it didn't happen there'd be no worries about over population of the earth ever again if it should suddenly turn off, or on depending on your view point. People would just never have kids again if they didn't experience the mind numbing euphoria that I suppose is creating another human life. Eventually we'd just die out, all of us playing video games and drinking margaritas on Tuesdays and going to incredibly quiet movie theater premieres run by the elderly, starring the elderly and watched by the elderly.
But I was 7, and Dad was a Dad so he didn't explode and cram grilled cheese down my throat like I'd be tempted to do if I could go back in time and meet my childhood self.
I pick at my now cold, non oozing grilled cheese. As miraculous as a hot freshly grilled cheese sandwich is it loses a bit of something as it cools. It;s kind of like the reverse of ice cream. There is a definite window of good eating opportunity for both things. With ice cream it's before it melts, with a grilled cheese it's before the fat it was fried in starts solidifying, the melting processed cheese starts siezing up and the inside of your moth becomes coated with cold nasty grease that clings to gums like a second skin.
Dad has his baked Alaska by now, as I'm now going through the agonies of trying to finish the damn endless grilled cheese sandwich from hell. A grilled cheese sandwich that is clearly out to get me and kep me from getting any dessert. I'm pretty sure the cook at the diner just took a full loaf of bread, sliced it in half and jammed a block of velveeta cheese in the middle and deep fried the whole thing before slapping it on a plate and giving it to me. I'm pretty sure that sandwich was like the world's biggest fricking grilled cheese sandwich ever.
I can't recall what my Dad's Baked Alaska looked like, as I was so distracted by the G.C.S.F.H. (grilled cheese sandwich from hell). I remember it was brown, and unbelievably like it had actually been in an oven just as Dad had said. Turned out a parent wasn't lying in this instance, sure there's no Santa, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy but that ball of ice cream had CLEARLY BEEN IN AN OVEN!!!!!!!!
Hallelujah
Suddenly a wave of greyness washes over me.....time slowed down in the horrifying about to have a train wreck kind of way it does and Dad's face is anything but blissfully happy as he sets down his spoon.
I feel like I'm speaking in slow motion, under water as I ask "Whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaattttttttt'sssss wwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrooonnnnnnnggg?"
Dad raises his hand and in a surprisingly authoritative and enviable way snaps his fingers that has a waiter rushing over at break neck speeds. Perhaps he felt the wave of grey awash over him too and knew that hell was pushing against the doors and about to break loose.
I can't remember all that was said, I remember my Dad's dark scowl, the waiter's slightly appalled frightened face, the finger pointing down at his dessert and then......I remember something small and black in the pool of creamy melting ice cream. Something that most definitely should NOT have been there. Some kind of bug, or worm or insect. I can't recall, it was too horrifying to even reconcile in my 7 year old brain.
The waiter apologizes all over the place, I think the manager was called out, I remember they offered to bring out a new Baked Alaska and I remember my Father's look of incredulity of "Yeah right."
I remember the slowly dawning realization that we were now leaving, meals abandoned, and that we were getting in to the van and headed back out on to the road to the middle of fricking no where.
Wait a second......I'm not getting a Baked Alaska? I mean I know that Dad's had some critter crawling around his but my 7 year old mind couldn't quite except the fact I wasn't getting a Baked Alaska. Not today....not ever.
I never saw Baked Alaska on a menu again.
I looked at photos of them in cook books as I grew older, I read about how they were made and always, surprisingly it remains on a gleaming pedestal, untainted and unspoiled in my mind. Despite it's one and only appearance in my life, as an infested dessert the Baked Alaska remains to this day a dessert of indulgence and mystery. Hot and cold at the same time, ice cream from an oven.
I kind of wonder if I have built it up to the level in my head that no actual Baked Alaska could be as good as what I imagine it to be. I almost never want to try one, not for fear of experiencing the gut twisting stomach churning reaction my father had but because worse than that...what if it's....o.k. Just....o.k., not food of the Gods, not ambrosia or sweet fairy like fluffy confections delivered by other worldly chefs in to my eagerly awaiting hands. What if it sucks?
I just don't know.
Do not fret though inner child, for we are off to console ourselves with homemade chocolate pudding, fresh strawberries, salted pecans, chocolate shavings and a dollop of vanilla ice cream. It aint a Baked Alaska but it aint bad.

Bulking up.

If something is good as a few ounces than I'm going to love it on the pound scale. Seriously, a cup of grey sea salt? Pashaw, a measly ounce or 2 of smoked paprika? HA! Candied ginger.....one bag? One tiny little 16 ounce bag.....I don't think so. I'll take 8 pounds please.
Nothing makes us shudder with delight more than buying our most used goods in bulk.
I think perhaps we were mountain folk in another life. The sort who only *git* to town once a year and who have to milk goats and stuff like that. The sort who call each other Ma and Pa and sit on the veranda spittin' at bears. We don't do those things but I feel like we're kissin' cousins next door to doing them.
I just can't explain it but my heart beats a little faster when I buy 48 rolls of toilet paper. My lungs gotta work extra hard when I can get...wait for it...25 POUNDS of coarse grey sea salt...oh mama. I get smoked paprika, cinnamon, oregano and cumin by the pound also. BY THE POUND!
Coconut oil in a bucket so big it's both thrilling and oddly disturbing to imagine eating that much oil, coconut or other wise. I buy the natural zero calorie sweetener stevia by the pound too as well as concentrated soap in great big containers that would make you think we're gonna hole up in the house till the end of the world.
Who the heck are we?
I mean really, some sort of hermit people wanna-bes I suspect.
Earlier we sat at our kitchen table enjoying a lovely meal of nachos (with tortilla chips we bought in a pound size bag of course) and it was sooo quiet. The windows were wide open to let the lazy summerish heat blow hot kisses over our sweaty legs but it was sooooo quiet. No neighborly noises, hardly any traffic, no military booms, no helicopter fly bys, no dogs barking or lizard foot steps across the walls of the house. I'm not even sure I heard any birds so I looked at Alan and remarked on how silent it was, for a Saturday and all. Alan cocked his head in that way he does, as he's fully aware that cocking your head lets you hear better and finally agreed, it was VERY quiet.
"Perhaps everyone in the world is gone?" He finally ponders.
After all how would we know? We don't watch the news, we don't hardly talk to any one but each other, how long would it take before we noticed an absence of humans around us?
We share a small look of what was supposed to be horror but ended up more as lip twitching suppressed smirks...
Oh we're terrible, we know it, since our first thought was, "absence of humans...that doesn't sound so bad" and then of course the overwhelming crushing beast called guilt laid it's heavy hand upon our backs and pushed our greedy souls a little bit closer to hell as of course we don't really want every one gone...but we are hermits.....and we like it.
When we finally did hear some sound it was just a book falling off a shelf in the bathroom, so quiet it had been that the muted crash startled the bejeesies out of us and we are now completely bejeesies free. Alan wondered if perhaps it was zombies. He always wonders if it's zombies, I love the man but he is always just a little too delighted over the idea of the dead rising and attacking us.
Although I can't say I'm overly concerned about it, because at least we can arm ourselves with our 25 pounds of salt and deep fry them in our giant 5 gallon bucket of coconut oil. See, buying in bulk would be a total asset come the day every one in the world disappears and zombies take their place.
There just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day for each other so how can we make friends with the zillion and a half people out there? We barely scrape together the time to say howdy do to our families once a century.
At least I have the perfect best friend, some one named Linda23JJPharmaCeutiCALs, she writes me almost every day telling me how she's seen my profile pic and wants to chat and also how I can buy meds online real cheap and that if I let her transfer a zillion dollars to my account I can keep 25% of it and also how she's super sXXXXy hot (her words not mine). Oh Linda23JJPharmaCeutiCALs, she just cracks me up. She doesn't seem to mind that I never invite her over, never take her up on any of her offers to view her XXXtra special photos, buy some of her cheap pharmaceuticals, she's a feisty little terrier of a friend that Linda23JJPharmaCeutiCALs.
Alan made a good point about the general population of the world though, he said that eventually we'd run out of internet if there weren't people out there constantly contributing to it. So, I guess I would miss the human race if it disappeared, I mean in at least 10 years, 15 tops. (my estimate of when I'd run out of internet to browse)

A Chocolate Pardon...

Dear Mr.Bunny.
I suppose you suck ass a lot less than I had thought. Because this Easter you finally came through for me. Mind you I do not know yet if I can completely turn a blind eye to your mysterious absence all these years, after all I know it wasn't some horribly crippling illness that kept you away. Too bad. Didn't all the youngins in my family strut their never ending parade of eggs, toys, chocolate and Easter Bunny related goodies past my face time and time again, year after fricking year? Further rubbing salt into the deep and festering wound that was your absence in my life? I can answer that, yes, they DID!
But this year, something changed. What was that?
Seriously, was it the pink sneakers cause I'll wear them every day if that's what made the difference. Was it my constant whining for the entire month of March about the lack of YOU shaped chocolate in my life any more? Wait, it wasn't the fact that I'm finally learning how to drive is it...did that scare you Mr.Bunny? Did you see how challenging it is to apply the brakes at night time when one of your fluffy little kin crosses the road....was it the fear of me possibly having my driver's license by this time next year that finally broke your silence? A little road rage goes a long way huh?
Well what ever it was I suppose I should thank-you, grudgingly of course. Upon waking on Easter morning......o.k. it was Easter afternoon, I pried open my sleep crusted eyes and looked blearily into my husband's and rasped with out much hope, "Did the Easter Bunny come?"
Blue eyes widened, darted wildly about for a moment like crazed blueberries trapped in a bowl of white milk until finally settling back in to place. My sweetie looked straight in to my eyes and finally, the answer I've been waiting 10 years to hear, 10 long torturously Easter chocolate deprived years...he says..."Yes."
I bolt upright in bed looking wildly around, the Rabbit wouldn't just visit and not leave a treat, not after 10 years of candy-less Easters, 10 years of accumulated anger and frustration and dark mysterious plans to exact my revenge upon him.....
"Where's the chocolate?" I demand.
Alan haltingly, strangely stutteringly explains "Well you see, um, I heard the Easter Bunny calling for me to come outside to get the chocolate from him but I was sooo tired. I told him I couldn't come down and he could leave it. But the Easter Bunny didn't want to leave chocolate out in the hot sun so he said he'd leave it inside the coolness of a local store. We just had to go pick it up and pay a small handling fee to the employees for holding it for us."
I stare deep in to my husband's eyes, completely awake now.
He seems to be holding his breath.
I tilt my head absorbing this...this strange twist of events. This non standard Easter Bunny practice....
For 10 years I've been harboring ill will and confused emotions towards this rabbit, for 10 years I've waited and wondered how I'd react if I ever saw or heard tell from him again.
I smile.
Alan expels an oddly long breath of what almost sounds like relief. I suppose he was as worried about the Easter Bunny as I was.
Turns out, a little chocolate goes a long way towards repairing a damaged relationship. Come to think of it I know a few people who could use a pound or two to sweeten their complicated interactions.
And what lovely little goodie did the Easter Bunny leave for me at the local store? Imagine my surprise when my sweetie tells me it's Godiva chocolates!
SCORE!
Looks like some one is trying to suck up, looks like you-know-who has quite the brown nose this year. Sorry to all you kiddies who got .99 cent chocolate that feels, tastes and smells like wax. SURE maybe the Easter Bunny ignored some of us to the point of risking some of us having a small mental break down but when he made a come back he did it with style. And with fancy pants chocolates that some of us had only read about in Nora Robert's novels and seen on trashy female sitcoms.
Ya know, revenge is pretty sweet....but I gotta admit a box of high falutin Godiva chocolates is a hell of a lot sweeter. (and legal)
Love from me
p.s. I only sign off with love in a completely normal amount of affection a woman should have for a giant rabbit, plus I'm married so don't go getting any ideas, my husband has seen enough karate movies to lay a good whooping down on your furry behind should you ever bring me anything more than chocolate.

The rabbit shaped hole in my heart.......

(This rabbit is hollow and empty, just like me on Easter Morning)

We were heathen hillbillies. So forgive me but when I think of Easter my first and only thought is "Why the hell did the Easter bunny stop bringing me chocolate?"
Seriously?
What's up with that? Did I do something to piss the E.B. off? It's not like I was enjoying rabbit stew or pie every other day, its not like I ate his kin or something.
For many a year this freakishly large but painfully shy rabbit hopped his way through our neighborhood leaving treats for all the kids. I never saw him but I'm no idiot, I saw the evidence of his visit. Chocolate rabbits, chocolate eggs and jelly beans don't just manifest themselves you know.
I mean there's a lot of things in this world we're expected to believe based on heresay and faith but the rabbit...he left some evidence. A little "I wuz here" in an edible form, occasionally he'd even display a sense of humour and leave a few non-edible treats. Pink rubber boots one year, a stuffed bunny toy (perhaps in his own likeness???), another year he left me a Star Trek:The Next Generation Collector's plate with Data's face on the front...my God, it's like he was looking right in to my soul. Chocolate AND Star Trek??
Maybe the Easter Bunny was in kahoots with Santa. Maybe he was paying the old guy off with pastel coloured candies in return for the dirt on all us kids. But unlike Santa who's all judgey judgey about whether we've been good or bad the Easter Bunny just wants to know what kind of candy you'd like, what size boots you wear and which Star Trek: The Next Generation character was your favorite.
Until he stops coming.
Parents are pretty sadistic if you think about it. When you're a kid it's all Easter Bunny this, the Tooth Fairy that, Santa Clause every Christmas and then....they wait...until your eyes have reached the soft doe eyed expression of a true believer, your world is full of magic and make-believe and sweet candy and Star Trek: The Next Generation collector plates....they wait until they have you just where they want you. Expecting the Easter Bunny to make his yearly deposit of sugary goodness in a pretty little basket and hop away to the next place and then.......
He doesn't come.
The parents stay in their room snickering at the bewildered howls of the 20 year old in the kitchen who is sweeping her busted illusions off the linoleum floor. There's no taste of cheap rabbit shaped chocolate for her any more, just the salty bitter tears of reality.
Oh yeah.
No one ever explains AWAY the Easter Bunny.
The adults take great pride in their skill of weaving the reality of old dudes in red coats who have magic powers that let him fit down any chimney. They craft incredibly detailed accounts of what the tooth fairy shall do with the tooth she collected under your pillow, and they lure you with sweet promises of a giant rabbit who for no apparent reason at all in the dull tail end of winter, when spring is still a distant promise of green away, will sneak in to the house at night and bring you.......CANDY.
Just like that, free candy and you don't even need to slather an inch of makeup on your face and go begging at the neighbors for it all night like on Halloween. FREE candy from a GIANT Rabbit.
Until......it stops.
There's no funeral to go to, no graduation ceremony, no party wishing a giant, grizzled old hare a happy retirement. Nothing, zip, nada, zilch...no more......the end.
I never give up hope though, perhaps the Easter Bunny lost my address. Maybe he and Santa were using the same database and it crashed, these things happen you know, and would conveniently explain away old Saint Nick's lack of appearance these last few years. And of course I have a moved a few times.....that could have muddied the waters.....
I'm not quite ready to set any snares in my yard just yet. I'd give the hairy old hare a chance to explain he and his lack of chocolate away for a least a full minute before I had me one hell of a pet rabbit chained up in my garage.
So I sit, and I wait, one on eye on the clock and one eye on my growling, barely restrained craving for bunny shaped chocolate, trying to hold my stomach and emotions in check.
Sure I can buy it in a day or two for 90% less than it's price right now but it's not the same.
I don't want store bought chocolate, I want it from HIM...
Every year I wait........fingers drumming on my desk....until sleep knocks me unconscious for refusing to go to bed. And every year I awake to bright morning sunshine, a new day and a decidedly depressing lack of any rabbit deposited chocolate.
Do I cry?
Maybe a little, till I tuck those tears away in to a hard little ball of revenge that resides under my heart. Where I will harbor and nurture and grow my anger like a dark and lovely plant that's riddled with thorns and poisonous berries and one of these years....one of these years...... I won't be waiting by the door for a damn rabbit and his crappy chocolate.
I'll be out there.....he won't need to come find me cause I'll be looking for him.
And in the immortal words of our beloved Elmer Fudd..
"It's Wabbit season, and I'm hunting wabbits, so be vewy, vewy quiet!"

Why we carry 200 granola bars in the car.....

I snapped the photo of this handsome lizard when he was sunning himself out on the patio the other day. I think we had a moment, I looked in to his eyes, he in to mine and suddenly I remembered something....

Once upon a time, a few years back, my husband and I drove through the desert. And no it wasn't on a horse with no name, and anyways you don't drive a horse you steer it...ride it???
What ever.
We rolled along through seemingly endless desert. Great seas of sandy rock and scrub brush. ACTUAL tumbleweeds were seen. Blackened stone that looked like it was more than done, baked under the heat of the sun.
Why is the desert hotter than other places anyways? Is it because there are no trees? If you added up all those little scrabbly brush things shouldn't those equal a few trees? Maybe the desert is being punished, or maybe we are. Maybe there's something really ultra cool in the desert if we just had the stamina to withstand the insane heat during the day and freezing temps at night. (Damn.....I wish I had me some desert stamina right about now so I could get me hands on what ever it's hiding out there........)
Anyways driving through the desert does weird things to one's mind. You start wondering how you'd survive if the car suddenly broke down, the bottles of water in the back seat suddenly evaporated and the cell phone ran away with to make sweet cell phone love with a signal it picked up in a sleazy cell phone bar......
See, desert makes a person think strange things!!!!!!!
How would we survive?
Food and water and shelter are the obvious things to be concerned with. Being found quickly is all well and good but if you're all dried up like those tumbleweeds I mentioned, drifting across the road, a dehydrated version of yourself...that's not gonna be good.
Shelter seems the easiest. I swear I could build a decent shelter better than most. Having the woods as your playground when you're a kid means a) you can curse a lot and not get in trouble cause no one's gonna hear and b) you build a lot of *cabins*.
Maybe some kids were swimming in pools, riding horses and coloring in useless coloring books (probably even staying inside the lines), but my brothers and I built cabins. Sure they were made from fallen branches and twigs but show me an adult who knows his way around a twig cabin the way we did and I'll show you the copyright paperwork on twig cabins...oh ha ha, o.k. we didn't invent making cabins out of twigs. Every one we knew did the same thing. Kids in the boonies make cabins, kids in town make gangs.
Sure I might be bragging it up now how I could survive in the desert in my lovely 3 bedroom tumbleweed cabin I could probably construct in half an hour but I'd probably be disastrous at starting a gang. Like first off I'd ask my mom to join and I'm pretty damn sure that's a gang *no no*.
Alan said we'd have to worry about food and water as well.
And that I could decorate the hell out of my multi level 3 car garage tumbleweed home all I want but if we didn't have food and water.....well........I'm basically making a kick ass tumbleweed mausoleum right? (By the way did you notice how my tumbleweed 3 bedroom cabin turned in to a multi level, 3 car garage tumbleweed home by the next paragraph? That's how expert at twig cabins I am. By the time I get through my ramblings here I'll have built a twig city and named it Ralphie the Third.)
We considered all the possible nutrition available to us in the desert. How much protein is in a rock anyways? Is it measured in ounces or grains?
Now I don't hunt, unless it's mushrooms and then it's not really hunting it's just sneaking up on unsuspecting shrooms in the woods and popping them off their little stems. I guess that makes me a mushroom mass murderer. Does it help if I say they were chanterelles, it's been at least 8 years since I went on a spree and they were soooooooo tasty? It does? Good.
Anyways I don't hunt and neither does Alan but we both agreed that if we HAD to we could do it. We could catch some wild game and make a meal, and start a fire by rubbing sticks together (I'm sure we could do this, we've watched so many episodes of survivor I could probably rub sticks together in my sleep and create a cozy fire. I've also watched politicians so I can be both president of the united states as well as Prime Minister of Canada and once I saw this dude on a motorcycle jump over a canyon so I can probably do that too. I have a PHD in watching TV.)
After miles of desert scenery whizzing by in a dully coloured blur as we both pondered what sort of wildlife lay in wait for us should we need to partake of them Alan announces "A HA!"
"NOT SNAKES!" I say.
"Oh.....oh...o.k." He says.
Silence.
Alan announces again "A HA!"
"what? You found something?"
"Lizards!"
I was impressed, I hadn't thought of them, surely the desert was ripe for picking, bursting at the seams full of ripe juicy lizards. Hey I don't wanna eat a lizard but if you're stuck in the middle of Godforsaken no where in your sprawling 2.3 acre twig mansion with built in twig movie theater and twig bowling alley you'll eat what you can get.
Alan has other plans.
"We wouldn't actually eat the lizard."
"Ummm......so we....name it and raise it as our desert dwelling child?"
"No." he says.
"Oh." I say. "Well what do we do with it then?"
You know those silences that descend like a heavy cloud of expectation? The kind that are so thick you can practically see the silence, the shape and colour. If you were to open your mouth (which you wouldn't cause you're in the desert and you can't be evaporating moisture for no reason) you could even taste the silence? Well one of those silences happened then and I hushed in anticipation.
"We'd suck on it."
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
But I listened as he was obviously serious and we still had some zillion and a half miles left to go before we passed through the desert back into the populated land of sanity and could get a Starbucks with a side of reality.
So I said "ewwwwwww, but please, elaborate."
"Well if we caught a lizard and popped it in our mouth we could leave the head poking out so it could breathe etc and we could just sort of suck on it. I'm sure we would gain nutrition or at least a little flavor from the skin which would slowly start dissolving a tiny bit from our digestive enzymes in our saliva and instead of consuming our most likely hard to get food supply all at once, it could last for days before we'd need to get a new one. DAYS! Kids suck their thumbs all the time and you never see them with dead thumbs. Think of it, we could survive and so could the lizards!"

• Please note we don't suck on lizards. we don't even eat them. We don't get lost in the desert and we dont build mansions out of twigs....though I could build one so fast your head would spin. Also this is an idea from a former vegan so you know how unlikely lizard sucking really is even if we were stuck in the desert. By the way lizard sucking is copyrighted by me....yeah......uh huh, I keep them papers right next to my imaginary twig cabin copyright papers.

"Alan you're.................." What could I say.........?
"BRILLIANT!"
That's my sweetie, always thinking to the next level. Lizard lolly pops for us as we kick back in our new hometown "Ralphie the Third" waiting for help to arrive as I weave us an espresso machine out of twigs.

(please note that I note that some people might find the fact that I had a mini breakdown....er..rant about gross bacon ice cream sort of conflicting with my whole sucking on a lizard plan should we get stuck in the desert. Some might say, gross is gross right? Well all I have to say is I wouldn't put the lizard in ice cream, cause that would be wrong. It makes sense in my head....Also the circumstances are different, if I was in the desert with nothing to eat I might eat bacon ice cream if it was the only thing available, it might even be preferred over lizard.....depending on the lizard.)

How to Get Fried!

French fries have such a bad rep, poor little oily buggers. Is it their fault they've been turned into fast food dietary demons? Is it their fault that suggesting French fries for a meal is akin to asking if you wanna snort a little whiskey and jump off a bridge into a vat of lard and live there for a week? Becoming little lard fish people that will triple their size in an hour and eventually become one with the lard, where you and the lard will bubble and burp and belch in blubbery bliss forever after.
French fries aint all bad. It's like anything, moderation.
Mod-a-what?
I know, that never sounds fun but trust me I do know about moderation. Just because I don't apply it to coffee, ice cream and chili gravy doesn't mean I don't KNOW about it.
I like to reserve my moderation for the really important things, like bacon, flour and exercise. I'll have a little of each but not too much, I don't want my life to become all about bacon, flour and exercise. Borrrring.
I think French Fries if made with good potatoes and good oil aren't so bad. Not to mention the way I make them uses barely any oil at all. It's pretty dang cool. I start with a half a cup of oil and I end with just barely under a half of a cup of oil, I measured!
I get crispy, yummy French Fries made in healthy coconut oil and I don't have to swallow a load of guilt at the same time with them.
Plus if you're clever (like some people I won't name, ok ...it's ME) you have a big ol' green salad on the side and you end up with a filling meal that's actually pretty good for you!
Some days though we just have a plate of fries. Just so that we can thrill in the complete tastiness of a darn good fry. Saturating our taste buds in salty, crispy, moisty potato delight. And also because we were lazy and too hunnnnngry to wait for anything else and too tirrrrrrrrrrred to whip up a 3 course meal that would fill the belly hole as completely and happily as a plate of fries.
I have my fry making down to a science, I could probably make them blindfolded but I don't want to blog about my experience chopping my finger off and going to a hospital and finding out if cayenne pepper jammed into a bleeding wound really stops it fast. (We read about that and have been curious ever since. It works on wee little cuts but thank goodness we haven't had to try it on any big cuts.)
Anyways I shall share with you my oh so awesome method of preparing perfect fries if you'll promise not to get all up in my face if you use a different oil, different potato or different temperature than I and end up with horrible little carbonized fries instead of golden delicious ones.
Also my disclaimer is that not all ovens are created equal, not all their temperatures the same, use common sense. It's free after all, so use as much as you want.

Perfect French Fries:

• preheat oven to 475 F

• Get a 1/2 cup of coconut oil and put on a big baking pan that has sides so the oil doesn't run off the edge or your potatoes run away.

• melt oil if needed (coconut oil gets solid at cool temps so you might need to pop the pan with oil on it in the oven to de-solidify it. Don't let it get too hot, you're gonna be handling it soon)

• Get 4 or 5 potatoes

• Cut them, ignoring all little potato screams as you gouge their eyes out. I like slightly thick French fries, I haven't tried this method with thinner fries, I imagine the baking time would be shorter.

• Dump the cut fries in to the pan, roll them in the oil, till well coated, spread them out in an even single layer.
  
• sprinkle with sea salt and black pepper
• put on middle rack of oven for 17 minutes (I use a timer that beeps annoyingly and gives me a near heart attack when it suddenly starts beeping cause I forgot I set it)

• The fries will be pale after 17 minutes but will be cooked
• Now to brown them up like a California beach bunny.
• Turn oven to broil and with the fries left in there on the middle rack leave them for exactly 5 minutes or until brown enough to your liking. (yes I realize that sounds funny, exactly 5 or longer...that makes the 5 un-exactly, so what?)
  

• Then remove them from the oven and carefully tip the pan so that the oil pours off into a heat resistant bowl or what ever.

If you want your fries even browner you can put them on a rack closer to the broiler at this point now that the splish splashy oil is gone and give them another minute. Keep a careful eye, some people have been known to start small fires in their oven from forgetting they have something under the broiler, hence the reason SOME people have a timer that beeps when things should be removed.
And voila, perfect French fries with barely any oil left on them!
This recipe makes a nice plateful for 2 people so if you divide the oil that was used between two people it's a ridiculously small amount. See, I start with a half a cup of oil and end up with....
Woohoooooooo, remember the missing oil is divided between two people as well. Alan and I are now jonesing for a measuring device that is heat resistant and more accurate so we can get our geek on in the kitchen and measure stuff more precisely. You don't want to know the amount of time we spent discussing measuring oil.......lets just say it was a revealing amount.....as in it revealed how odd we are. Entire conversations have been had for hours about measuring the oil.......We figured out at the end of it all as conversation dwindled down, silence crept back into the household that it looks like we used approximately 6 or 7 teaspoons of oil. We theorized there was about a teaspoon of oil left in the baking pan, covering the whole thing...we moaned and groaned at our inability to measure that. We sobbed great heaving sobs as we held each other tightly and realized we know the math, we have the oil but just not the means to say 100% for sure how much was used, we decided it was probably 6 teaspoons, that gets divided by 2, so 3 teaspoons per person per giant ol plate of fries......
Psssssst......Sometimes we sneak up on the pretty little French Fries and smother them with chili and cheese and red onions. YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMY!

A sweet bone to pick.....

(saigon cinnamon)

I have the loveliest memories of crunching on chicken bones.
Gawwwd, I would munch, and suck and crunch to my lil heart's delight. I would smash them bones with my teeth until all but little pink shards remained in my mouth, slurping on the dark innards, letting the whole mass melt away to sweet nothingness on my tongue. Then pop, crunch..... Start all over again.
My tongue would become incredibly sore but I ignored it's plaintive wail.
“Shaddup tongue, it's chicken bone season.”
And it was, I never lied to my tongue. I might lie to my brothers about who had the last chicken bone...but never to my tongue.
Ahhhh chicken bones.
The last time I had the intense cinnamony, chocolate filled delight was when some kind benevolent soul from the Canadian side of the family sent us a bag for Christmas.
I don't see chicken bones very often (if ever?) in California. In fact I am not even sure the American side of the family would know what I was talking about if I said I had me a hankerin for chicken bones. I might end up with a dismantled piece of poultry if I wasn't careful with my words!
In Nova Scotia, chicken bones (the candy not the skeleton of the bird) were readily available during Christmas. Light pink little round tube-ish bits that were was almost a danger to eat, between the *hot sizzling cinnamon shell that splintered like real bones and revealed the dark chocolate within* AND the addictive *can not possibly just eat 9 and leave them be* nature of them.
So I associate chicken bones with the holidays and a sore tongue. Because I seriously did eat a whole bag at a time, the texture and flavours were that addictive. My goodness I was a chicken bone addict...when Christmas passed I'd shake and shiver for a full hour, licking the pink dust from the bottom of the bag and cursing the fool who only bought enough of the good stuff to last us a few days.
Our supplier was some chicken bone pusher in Truro, Nova Scotia.
We used to sell crafts at the Zonta craft fair every November and some how...coincidentally (yeah frickin right) the chicken bone lady was always set up across from us. It was a pretty dang big fair for the area, over 70 booths, and she some how manages to almost always be across from us? I don't believe in coincidences, I believe in the fine art of stalking your customer and knowing their weakness. I mean she probably tailed me, noticed my nefarious and lustful glances at her goodies and then bribed the candle lady to mover over so she'd be in my direct line of sight!
And there I sat, as innocent as the day is long, surrounded by all our crafty goodness, looking directly across at a lady with nothing but a table piled high with candy.
Chicken bone candy.
Sometimes we'd buy a few bags, all friendly like, to keep the peace in the snooty atmosphere of sly looks and whispered words about each others booths. Better a friend then an enemy in the hot and frantic world of a Christmas craft sale put on by a charitable organization. Hoo boy it could get intense, what with the lil old men tottering up and demanding in suspicious tones if we'd actually MADE all this stuff.
“Yes sir we did!”
“You actually MADE it?? (asked suspiciously with enough derision in his voice to have me thinking I can take an old guy down right quick between chomps of my chicken bones.)
“YES!....ahem..yes sir, we made everything ourselves.”
“Hmmm, some people they buy stuff and then pass it off as their own. This here's a lot of stuff.....Yep, lot -o-stuffff.......... What sort of saw blades you use?”
Quick as a snake this old fool would try to trip me up, as if I might suddenly crack under the pressure of his intense questioning and admit that I own and run a small but tasteful sweat shop.
Luckily I was saved from saying something foul and very un-Christmas like by quickly popping a couple of chicken bones in my mouth and crunching like mad, smiling fiercely, teeth exposed in a pink speckled grin of unwavering intensity as I stared the man down and forced him with nothing but the heat of my gaze back to his own booth to whisper to his wife and glare back at me with vindictive eyes.
Good times, good times.
The closest thing to a chicken bone flavour I could replicate till recently was to eat a handful of red hot cinnamon hearts followed quickly by a chunk of chocolate. But I must admit, though that got me like ¾ of the way there, I haven't done that very often because of my deep and abiding fear of food dyes.
Seriously, the more I think about yellow number 47 and Red number 42 the more I shudder. EVEN if I didn't know they make some red dyes from insects, I'd be bothered by it.....it's just so...wrong.....so damn wrong...
But those chicken bones, those succulent, mind numbing, gots to have as many as I can get chicken bones......I have to face facts....I know cinnamon isn't pink so I'm even beginning to think my memories of chicken bones are sweeter then the actual thing....
But cinnamon...cinnamon hasn't let me down...(yet)
In fact if anything cinnamon has only gotten better or have I?
For I have discovered REAL cinnamon. I mean cinnamon that makes the stuff you buy at the grocery store taste like bitter brown nothingness. BLECCCCK! REAL cinnamon actually tastes so good you can dip your finger in and mmmmmm, straight from the jar. NOT that I do that.
Heck no, even though this saigon cinnamon we get is sooo flavorful that it has a sweetness all it's own and can make cinnamon toast with little to no sugar. EVEN though it's as spicy hot as those dastardly little red hearts...I don't stick my finger in the jar. AND if I did.....by accident several times then y'all can just bugger off it's my cinnamon and I'll slug it from a shot glass if I choose....which I did.
Oh dear, If I can pass along one bit of advice from my wise and doddering age of 30 to all the youngins out there...don't slug cinnamon from a shot glass. Even if you've just stuck a chunk of chocolate in your mouth and a wee tip of a teaspoon of cinnamon to follow so that your mouth can become the scene of a chicken bone flavour factory...even when your senses start reeling from the exquisite combination of reallllly good chocolate and reallllly good cinnamon do not, I repeat...DO NOT SLUG CINNAMON FROM A SHOT GLASS.
It may seem like a brilliant idea to just admit you're going to eat more cinnamon and more chocolate in a slightly manic, one bite after another, after another...after another moment that stretches into at least a half a dozen moments so you might think that being mature and admitting this you ought to just sit down and fully commit to your snack of chocolate chunks and cinnamon.....
But let me tell you, sitting down with a plate of chocolate chunks and a little shot glass of cinnamon you can tip back (hypothetically) and have a little taste of doesn't work. What does work is you ending up breathing cinnamon in a choking out puffs of cinnamon, coughing extravaganza, none of which resembles the desired chicken bone flavour experience you were going for.
Waving wildly at your husband in the universal “I'm ok, Im ok, I'm only breathing cinnamon powder and trying to recover from my lungs violent, albeit correct, response to said attempt at breathing something other than air” hand gestures.
I expect in the future I shall whip up some sort of melted chocolate and cinnamon type delight, something a little safer that doesn't have me coughing up a red hot spicy dust storm and causing my husband to think that any normal person knows what a shot glass is for and it's not for a snoot of cinnamon.
Can I get a “DUH” from the crowd?
But do not worry, I don't blame the cinnamon, it's not to fault. No, I blame the Truro, Nova Scotia craft sale chicken bone candy lady for instilling in me a deep and abiding affection for a treat I can't readily get my hands on.
If both my saigon cinnamon and a bag of chicken bone candies were dangling, precariously of course, over the lip of a volcano and I could only save one I think my decision has already been made. As much as I loved the chicken bones, my brain argues with my tastebuds that we don't care for dyes that much any more and hardly ever buy candy, so why not save the cinnamon? The potential in a handful of REALLY kick your ass good cinnamon is much greater than a bag of cinnamon candies.
Hmmmmmm I just had a thought....*runs to the kitchen to check something out*

(very sad but honest to goodness extremely tiny sample of cinnamon coca powder toast made with left over bread crust bits I scrounged from the bread box thingy)

Oh man...cinnamon....cocoa powder.....this is a very very very good combination. I am now in agonies because there is no bread made or else I'd be whipping up some crunchy, buttery cinnamon, coca powder toast and sitting back dreaming of chicken bones.
Instead I'm contemplating a wee tiny shot glass of cinnamon and cocoa mixed together.............
This is also one of those moments where I am severely ticked off at the bread maker for not keeping us well stocked in bread for such cinnamon, cocoa powder testing emergencies. (Never mind that I'm the bread maker, I can be mad at myself can't I?)
But wait, I'm more then just the bread maker...I'm a gull dang biscuit maker when I want to be is what I am........and biscuits can be made in like 30 minutes...I'll be right back.....
(time passes, approximately 30 some minutes if you're picky about such things........)
One batch of biscuit dough, dived in two, one half flattened on a cookie sheet and covered with a mixture of coca powder, cinnamon and brown sugar, second half of dough spread over the top. Baked, one big cinnamon chocolate biscuit sandwich. Taste test...YUM! Second taste test...mmmmm YUM!
It's not a chicken bone.....but it is warm, cinnamony, like a cinnamon roll only flat and with chocolate. A chocolate, cinnamon flat.
Hearty enough for the grownup in me, not a speck of unnatural colour added, and best of all, satisfies the incredibly overpowering chocolate/cinnamon taste I have been craving for the better part of forever now..........

We Survived the Pancakes....

No seriously, these were Pancakes that didn't kill us. JOY!
I didn't get cutesy and make my valentine's day breakfast for my sweetums and I into heart shapes.
I could have, I made super hearty pancakes with batter so thick I could have formed it into balls if I wanted to.
Maybe I should have made pancake snowmen. 3 dimensional snowmen would have been a cool Valentine's breakfast but I'm thinking it would have been a little too big for one meal. I suppose I could have made just one, one nicely rounded, foot high pancake snowman and we could have shared....but digging into the soft belly of anything, even a pancake snowman isn't the way to start a Valentine's day (or any other for that matter)
I'm quite satisfied with the thick blobby pancakes that we had and that they didn't kill us.
My husband said if it was going to be our last meal that as far as last meals go it was a pretty good one. They were more than good they were delicious, perhaps it was the possibility of getting sick that made them ever the more sweeter...?
Did I not mention yet the questionable ingredient I added to my mix?
Not arsenic or cyanide as my husband guessed. He's funny that way, happily chowing down on his breakfast with thoughtful pauses while he savors a bite and finally announces in a weird little British accent "I do not detect any hints of arsenic."
When I was making breakfast I was on auto pilot, which is never a good thing when you're cooking. Thinking all the thoughts one usually thinks when performing a semi mindless task I've performed many times before. Crack an egg in to the bowl but think about whether aliens are real. Scoop up some flour and a couple of teaspoons of baking powder but the mind is reviewing the proper way to shift gears in a standard transmission. Stirring the whole mass of batter and wondering why on God's green earth they'd keep a show like Battle Star Galactica on the scifi channel BUT NOT the Dresden Files. You know, all the usual mind wanderings a person has.
So when it came time for the liquid portion of the pancakes my eyes spied the jar of raw (un-pasteurized) heavy cream that had been in the fridge longer than I could remember.
It didn't rot!
We'd already had a delightful scientific-esque moment one day a few weeks ago as we marveled at how the heavy cream had gotten heavier. Thicker and sort of cheesy smelling. Both of us bravely stuck a finger in and tried it, both of us remained in perfect health so we just put the jar back in the fridge to see what it would do.
See, that right there, that's the difference between me and the food network cooks. When I'm making something I don't just cook to fill the belly and make a pretty plate, I wanna see what something does. In this case did this elderly heavy cream kill my sweetums and I?
If you've been holding your breath waiting to see how this turns out go ahead and suck in a little oxygen, we didn't die. I made pancakes with questionable heavy cream and not only did we not die, we enjoyed them and didn't even get sick.
You can't ask for a better Valentine's than that now can you?
Oh, wait, actually we can. We toasted the evening, ourselves, and life with almond champagne at the end of the day we survived, having had killer pancakes that turned out to be un-killer!

The pancakes are my standard mix I use around here and occasionally throw something extra in to. Not always something as strange as the cream. You're probably all grossed out now and could care less about the recipe but here it is. My recipe is adapted and modified greatly from one I found on Quaker Oatmeal's website. You can go see the original if my version doesn't float your boat.

Incredibly Heart-y Pancakes
(Good for Valentine's day and the day after.)

1 cup of 100% whole wheat stone ground flour
1/4 cup of ground flax seed
1/2 cup of rolled oats (I usually use a nice heaping 1/2 cup, loves me oats!)
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of grey sea salt
1 1/4 cup of milk, water, kefir or what ever liquid blows your bubbles on the day of making (ie: antique cream thinned with water)

(Optional Add-Ins, please note for me these are not optional they're must haves and all at once)
A handful or more of salted, roasted pecans
a handful of golden raisins
and a nice amount of grated nutmeg, like a teaspoon (I never measure)
Also a sprinkling of poppy seeds until you feel you've got enough.
and one glug of dark rum, (a nice option instead of vanilla)

Mix all together, reveling in the thick hearty batter that you could probably use to spackle any holes you have or glue some bricks together. Fry in a medium heat, lightly greased cast iron skillet. Let them get good and toasty brown, flip and give the same attention to the other side. Be wary of the fact they're so thick that they may need more time then you're used to with pancakes.
Eat with a little dollop of REAL butter, homemade orange marmalade, saigon cinnamon, honey and optional molasses or maple syrup. All of which can be used one at a time or all together.