Easter Candy

A friend of mine mentioned the other day that he believes the Easter M&Ms taste better than regular M&Ms.  I have very strong feelings about this and my husband, unfortunately, falls on the opposite side of the argument.  This is a big cause for contention in our marriage. 

Any chocolate connoisseur will tell you that, first of all, the red M&Ms taste the best.  Secondly, holiday versions of any kind of candy always taste better.  My husband disagrees and insists that I am simply falling prey to a marketing scheme.  I disregard his argument because he also makes statements like, "I'm not in the mood for chocolate."  I know those words, but that sentence makes no sense.  If I'm breathing, I'm in the mood for chocolate.  I honestly don't even need to be awake.  Seriously, I have eaten cookies while sleep walking.  It's a real problem.

Holiday themed candy always tastes better than ordinary, run-of-the-mill candy.  This also applies to Oreos with the special colored filling.  An Oreo always tastes better with robin-egg blue or sunny yellow filling in the Spring, red or green in December, and orange in October.  My husband can claim any kind of marketing blabidy-blah that he wants, but I know better.  I know that it really does taste better.

I have a gift for candy.  I was once at work talking to my mom on the phone.  Suddenly, I heard a distinct sound in the background.  "Did someone just pour some M&Ms into a glass bowl?" I asked.  Indeed, my sister had just gone into the kitchen and poured a satisfying pile of candy into a bowl.  I also was able to detect, over the phone, mind you, that they were peanut M&Ms.  It's a gift... and a curse.

Chocolate that is won as a prize is also more delicious.  When I was a kid I entered a contest in the Irondequoit Press and won a 3-foot chocolate rabbit from Stever's Candy Shop.  It was one of the three things that I ever won in my entire life.  Truly, anything from Stever's is a win.  My husband recently bought me (well, us) a box of dark chocolate orange bark from the charming little chocolate shop.  (By the way, for someone who has to be "in the mood" for chocolate, he sure did pound it down!  Guess he was in the mood!)  While the orange bark was scrumptious, there was something especially satisfying about eating the chocolate that I had won, the chocolate that I obtained by defeating other children.  It was the spoils of competition.  I could taste the victory, and I liked it!

Possibly the only thing that tastes better than candy that is won, is candy that is stolen from your children when they aren't looking.  I know how that sounds, but I don't care.  Candy is not good for kids.  I like to think of it as providing a service for them that keeps them from over eating and making themselves sick.  Any parent knows that a mini Twix bar discreetly pulled from a Halloween bag tastes better than one you just pick up in the grocery store check-out lane.  I guess it's the thrill of the hunt.

Even after my very solid arguments, my husband is not convinced there is a difference.  He can think anything he wants, as long as he doesn't mind being wrong.  Besides, that leaves more pastel M&Ms for me.  :-)

Permission Slips and Other Strange Things

Some things just strike me as being so strange or unbelievable... or both. 

Just recently my daughter came home with a permission slip for me to sign so that she could decorate a sugar cookie at school.  A permission slip.... for a cookie.  Really?  What's in this cookie that I have to give explicit permission for my kid to decorate it?  Is this what the world has come to?  Teachers and school administrators can't use their best judgement regarding cookies?

The permission slip stated that although the cookies did not contain nuts they may have "trace amounts of nuts due to shared equipment."  It also stated that the frosting had no nuts, but contains soy, and went on to warn us that sprinkles may be used to decorate the cookies.  Oh, no!  Not Jimmies! 

Now, I realize that food allergies can be very serious.  I do.  Really.  My husband's cousins have some very serious food allergies that have landed them in the hospital on several occasions.  I've always been impressed by the little girl's ability to casually resist yummy treats unwittingly offered to her because she knows what eating them will do to her.  So my question is, is there really a need for all of this?  Maybe it's just me, but if I could be taken out by a legume or a cookie, I would probably be on pretty high alert about it from a young age without the rest of the world watching out for me.

Not to mention, wouldn't it have been easier to send the notice home to just the kids who have an issue with it?  I mean, are there parents who are adamantly against cookie decorating in general?  My favorite part of the permission slip was, "children will NOT be able to change their minds the day of cookie decorating."  Not was in all caps.  It seemed so serious.   All decisions regarding the decorating of cookies are final.  You cannot change your mind about a cookie. You just can't.

This has nothing to do with what I'm writing.
 I just thought it was a weird thing to show up
in a Google search for pics of peanuts.

I didn't know a single person growing up with a food allergy until high school. I found out about it in the worst possible way. We were at a party where he pounded down cookies as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. I think he was swallowing them whole. About half a dozen cookies in, he pause and asked, "Do these cookies have nuts?" We didn't even need to answer the question because his tongue immediately swelled to the size of a brisket, his eyes puffed to almost closed and his face turned a very odd shade of blotchy red. He asked for milk and Kleenex and sat outside in the cold with his fat tongue hanging out of his puffy face until he became... well, less swollen. "Emb oday," he would periodically say to worried friends.  Perhaps a permission slip would have been helpful to him, after all.

The permission slip was not the only thing that had me smh.  (That's "Shaking My Head" for those of you who are not as hip as I am.  Although using the word "hip" may have proven that I am not... Anyhow...)  The other night I came home from the gym to find my husband watching the movie "Thor."  Okay, this is one of the weirdest movies I have ever seen.  Maybe I would have a different opinion of it if I had seen it from the beginning, but this movie was terrible.

First of all, I don't buy into the premise that Natalie Portman/Kiera Knightly/Queen Padmay/WhoeverSheIs is an atmospheric scientist.  First of all, that job title sounds made up.  I'm sure there are a group of scientists that study the atmosphere, but they have to have a better name than that.  Seriously.  It's terrible.  I also do not believe that any of them look like her.  Not one.

Thor skipping down the
Rainbow Bridge

The bad guy's name is Loki (pronounced LOW-key).  It's not really a tough-guy name, is it?  It makes me feel a little sleepy.  Loki and his brother, Thor, are from a place called Asgard.  Asguard.  It sounds like the name of the company that manufactures the Hubba Hubba Hiney.  Tough-guy Thor travels between Asgard and Earth via a Rainbow Bridge.  A bridge... made out of a rainbow.  Now, I may have someday been able to overlook all of these very girly themes trying to be tough, but when I joked about there being flying ponies, my husband admitted that in the comic book there are actually flying horses.  Honestly, I would think a Norse legend would be less sissified than this. 

I sat through the rest of the movie waiting for Robert Downey, Jr. to show up.  He didn't.  Just the dude with the eye patch.

smh.

Robert Downey, Jr.
He's just so nice to look at!
:-)

A Graham Cracker is NOT a Cookie

I recently got an email with a teaser line about making “Quick and Easy Donuts at Home!”  Well, how could I pass up reading more about making a delicious confection that was so quick and easy?  I clicked on the link and was directed to a recipe for "donuts" that involved cutting a hole in the center of a refrigerated buttermilk biscuit, deep frying it and then sprinkling it with confectioner’s sugar.  Now, I like biscuits, they don’t even need to be homemade for me to appreciate them, but a biscuit, even a deep-fried one, is not a donut.  Not by a long shot, my friend.

When I was a little kid my Mom was in a bowling league.  Every Saturday while the moms bowled the kids would be sent down to the basement of the bowling alley to the day care.  (There is either a horror movie or a 20/20 special in there somewhere.)  Anyhow, while in the basement of the bowling alley the baby sitters would roll out these nasty old mats and make all of the kids lie down and take a nap.  A nap… in a bowling alley… with bowling balls and falling pins above our heads.  Really?  Even at the age of 4 or 5 I knew this was a fruitless effort.  Even an exhausted child isn’t going to sleep well under a bowling alley!

The highlight of this weekly misadventure was always snack time.  Once we got popsicles.  Sometimes we got chocolate chip cookies.  There was one woman who made the promise of cookies, but it was always a disappointment.  After lying on the nasty mats for what seemed like an eternity we would be called to the endless row of folding tables for a cookie. 

She called it a cookie, but it was a graham cracker. It wasn't even the kind of graham cracker with cinnamon and sugar on it.  Just a plain old cracker. One day she held out the graham cracker to me and asked, “Would you like a cookie?”  I replied, “I would like a cookie, but this isn’t one.  It’s a graham cracker.”  She told me that a graham cracker is like a cookie.  I don’t remember if I actually voiced my disagreement with her statement or if I just thought, “I don’t know what the heck you’ve been eating all your life, but this is not a cookie!”  Either way, my mom didn’t bowl much after that day.

It’s been about 30 years since the bowling alley incident, but my belief is as firm today as it was then; No matter how it crumbles, a graham cracker is not a cookie.