Delicious Poison
I’m no hippy when it comes to food – or rather I am, if we’re talking about free love. See, I generally believe you should eat what tastes good first and what makes you feel good second. Except for the obvious new point: those two rules are often in direct opposition to one another.
Or are they? The fact of the matter is I just don’t see it as black-and-white at all. Life is all about making these complicated, conditional grey choices.
Let’s use an example here. I love brownies from a box. I love them. In fact, I don’t ever eat brownies unless I’ve made them from a mix, and I used to bake professionally. I tried for years to make something like the stuff from a box, that perfectly chewy, dense, crackly brownie and I could never get it right. After a few years you have to ask yourself, what am I gaining by not making these from the box? I assumed all along that they were made from nasty shit, and to be sure, some of them are.
In the Ghirardelli mix, the ingredients are:
sugar, flour, walnuts, partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil, cocoa, modified food starch, artificial flavor, sodium bicarbonate
Alright, partially hydrogenated oils are poison, that is true, and they are here in the place of good ol’ butter. That is sad. The only other iffy ingredient is artificial flavoring, which is probably vanillin for all we know, and I don’t give a shit about it. So, all this struggle and pining when I could just eat some trans fats every once and a while and be happy. You know what? I’m going to go ahead and vote for “happy” because I don’t get a vote too often.
I don’t even know if — under pressure — I can trot out the “all things in moderation” mantra. I understand it as a statistical key in wagering for a longer life, but even then I wonder if we aren’t denying ourselves the little things all for a blanket philosophy.
Not to get all Sandra Lee on you, but my mom taught me a little trick back in the bakery days: coconut mixed 4-to-1 with sweetened condensed milk and dropped onto any brownie recipe magically results in “coconut macaroon brownies”. In other words, for every cup of coconut you use, pour over about 1/4 cup of sweetened condensed milk. That will make enough for a 9×9 pan.
You’ll have to bake the brownies a little longer to make up for the new moisture and mass of the coconut & milk paste, but if you keep testing with a toothpick you’ll get it eventually.
While you’re waiting, prepare yourself a real American treat: sweetened condensed milk over a saltine cracker. My dad and Carson McCullers can back me up on this one — in the American South, a can of sweetened condensed milk was (is!) cheap and could be stretched long enough to sate many a sweet tooth when drizzled over a few saltine crackers. If you pretend it’s homemade dulce de leche on a fleur de sel’d homemade soda cracker then ta-da! Look how authentic you are!
Ummmm … I know what I’m baking next week!
I had forgotten about the macaroon brownies yer ma makes. Don’t forget her raspberry-swirled brownies also. Hey, I’m thinkin’ raspberry-macaroon brownies … fuck yeah!
Another good commercial mix (for we Nor’wester folks) is Krusteez brand. Perfectly schleppy corporate brownies every time, that consistently taste like you stopped at a 7-11 on Route 66 … heh
people always gasp when i say this, but. . . I don’t like brownies. whenever they’re around i will always try one, because come on! they’re brownies! but no. i never have more than a bite or two. i just don’t like them.
@ Aaron … Communist!
Aaron, I don’t really like brownies either. I mean, there is only one kind I like (uh, as mentioned) but I would never purchase one from a bakery or anything. So like, 99 times out of 100 I’d much rather have a slice of chocolate cake.
@Sunday …Communist!
i umm. . . don’t really care for cake either.
Oh, man, box brownies are THE BEST. I haven’t really tried the hippie box brownies, but they probably aren’t as good. I’m definitely not cool with the trans fats and excessive poisons right now ’cause I’m producing a 15 pound person’s entire diet inside my body, but when I’m not lactating, I’m totally making the coconut brownies.
Have you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma? I’m reading it right now and this post was somewhat germane.
@Zombie, the Undead Jesus: finally, a non-communistic comment by a ghetto-brownie lover. UP The Revolution!
BTW: Where & when is yer clan moving (unless you’d rather not say here, natch).
This goes out to Aaron, mostly, but there are plenty of popular bakery/dessert items I’m not totally on board with. I’m not a big fan of most breakfast pastries, for example. I look at rows and rows of croissants and muffins and scones in the cafes and think “I want nothing here.” I think a large part of it is how I know that most cafes use totally pre-manufactured shit now, which I have zero interest in. I assume, for example, that a croissant fresh from the oven while I stood in a cafe in Paris would most certainly make its way into my piehole.
Zombie: You know, I haven’t really tried the hippie brands yet either, I should probably try them before I start spouting off defensive odes to trans fats. I haven’t read the omnivore’s dilemma yet, purely out of laziness.
I just realized how totally cretinous my sentence I just wrote reads:
“I think a large part of it is how I know that most cafes use totally pre-manufactured shit now, which I have zero interest in.”
What I mean is, when I can make that pre-manufactured shit at home and have it warm from the oven.
General Major Webelo Quagmire: We scored a very nice duplex a couple blocks from the DNR building downtown. We moved a whopping 2 miles :)
Every time you mention brownie…I want NINJA BROWNIES dammit sunday! DAMMIT.
Also, when I was growing up every woman I knew took SCM in her coffee (only the ladies, Texas men don’t take milk or cream- its fey). They had it on the counter of every diner.
Never eaten it on crackers for god’s sake. Quag’s apparently from the crazy south.