You for real or are you just
My sweet fantasy?
I am trying to
Eat less sugar day-to-day
But my will is weak
Peanut M&Ms
Lurking in my boss’s desk
Why did she tell me?
I know they are there
And I hear their siren song
We melt in your mouth
My brain is not dumb
Knows damn well that tea is not
Peanut M&Ms
(I reworked this one some since I last posted it a few days ago.)
As a child who spent most of the 80s sitting six inches away from the TV, my world was populated with many exotic and fascinating creatures, thanks to cereal and snack-food commercials. The myths and legends of Toucan Sam and the Quik Bunny were as real to me as any bedtime story.
Mind you, I had nothing against books—I enjoyed being read to—it was just that the beings I saw on television encouraged me to eat marshmallows for breakfast, something none of the characters in The Wind in the Willows ever did. And can you name a single fairy-tale inspired breakfast cereal? Show me Little Red Riding Hood Flakes, and I’ll show you a cereal that no child ever threw a tantrum in a supermarket aisle to make her parents buy. I’ll bet it wouldn’t have chocolate-covered Grandmother’s houses, let alone marshmallow wolves.
Snack-food mascots usually fell into one of two categories: they were anthropomorphic animals with crippling snack obsessions (Trix Rabbit, you poor bastard), or vaguely creepy people with questionable back-stories and crippling snack obsessions. (There was something off about dead-eyed Lucky the Leprechan. I can’t imagine any of the other cartoon mascots ever wanting to hang out with him outside of work). They sometimes had some sort of magical power—although often it was just the power of being chronically able or unable to obtain the object of their snack obsessions. Not the most enviable or inspiring power.
Having grown up with these rather petty food-related archetypes, I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Japan for three weeks in high school. There I was introduced to Anapanman, Japan ‘s most popular superhero. He has a giant round head, a big red nose, and small, kind eyes. “His name means ‘Bread Man’.” My host student, Mariko, explained. “His head is made of bread filled with bean-paste. He goes around rescuing hungry people by letting them eat his head. Then a new one is baked for him by his creator.” This was certainly a new spin on things.
The only remotely edible characters that come to mind from my childhood are the California Raisins. Even so, I can’t imagine them, as hip as they were, ever taking off their shades and letting themselves be gnawed on, even by the hungry. You didn’t mess with the California Raisins. Their success as spokes-food was also dubious; they didn’t make you want to eat raisins as much as they made you want to be a Motown singing raisin with tiny arms and legs and a slamming hat. Which is not beneficial to the raisin industry, although it is beneficial to my imagination.
It seemed that Anpanman’s premise was not to promote bean-paste filled bread, but to feed and empower the hungry. It was strange and exhilarating for me to see a food-related entity with its own liberal, humanitarian agenda. Rather than endorsing greed and selfishness, as the characters of my youth did; encouraging children to obsess over food and even withhold it from their others(those Trix commercials clearly scarred me), Anpanman gives up part of himself for the good and nourishment of those in need. Deep stuff for a cartoon superhero whose posse is made up of creatures with giant food for heads. (I particularly like his companion Tendonman, whose head is a bowl of rice with shrimp Tempura sticking out of it). And Anpanman’s lack of affiliation with any sort of brand name or sponsorship is a vital part of his appeal. A regenerating loaf-man who feeds the hungry? That really is magically delicious.
I’ve been thinking about food more often than usual lately, probably since I’ve been spending a lot of time in the cafeteria the last few weeks. It may be senior year phenomenon, because I’ve noticed many of my senior friends doing the same thing. Perhaps it’s because we’ve discovered that sitting in the cafeteria for hours at a time is far easier than doing almost anything else, except maybe for lying down in the cafeteria. In fact, if you’re reading this column in the cafeteria, stop and look around, I’m probably here somewhere. Please don’t wave, because I probably won’t like that.
The cafeteria is a great place to be to feel productive without actually being productive. I’m drinking juice, you can think. I’m hydrating my body. Now I’m getting up to get more juice. I’m exercising. Now I’m elbowing people out of the way to get to the wing bar, which is also exercise. Man, remember exercise?
College has definitely put a strain on my relationship with my body. I alternate between treating it like a temple and treating it like a gas station bathroom. It never knows what to expect from me anymore; one day I’ll eat vegetables at every meal and drink eight glasses of water, and the next day I’ll eat an entire avocado in one sitting, wash it down with peanut butter cookies and jug wine and call it dinner.
Last week I woke up at five in the morning and was so thirsty that I almost drank applesauce. It was either that or warm Bud Light (which had most likely already contributed in part to my great thirst). At least I’ve gotten better at eating less junk food. If you are what you eat, then freshman year I was the vending machine in the campus center.
I tend to become obsessed with certain foods the way normal people have crushes; this week it’s avocados. Ooh, they’re so good. I was slightly ashamed the other day when my friend used my computer and discovered that I’d been to Avocado.org, even though I was only there for the articles. Actually I’m rather proud of my avocado obsession, because at least they’re relatively good for you (or so say the good people at Avocado.org. They’re high in fat, but it’s ‘good’ fat. I don’t really care what that means.)
I usually just get crushes on bad foods, the ones with no nutritional value that attract you with bright wrappers that say ‘Now Even More Great Chocolatey Taste’ (can there ever be enough great chocolatey taste?). These foods make you fall for them and then treat you badly, only to leave you for your best friend and get her pregnant. Don’t tell me that hasn’t happened to you.
A recent viewing of the cult classic “Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter” justified the purchase of several jumbo boxes of Movie Candy, including Milk Duds, Raisinettes, and, of course, the original malted milk balls themselves, Whoppers. I mercifully don’t remember much about the movie, but I do remember glancing at the box of Whoppers and noticing that one full panel was devoted to suggested recipes. That’s right, recipes built around Whoppers. I’ll never claim to have the best desk-job ever, but at that moment I was glad that my list of working responsibilities has never included inventing recipes based on an ingredient that is used as the “O” in its own name on the box.
I tried to imagine the direction I would have gone in. High-brow, with dishes like Whopper-Crusted Salmon? Baked Asparagus with Whopper Apricot Glaze? Given that the recipes were displayed under the heading, “Whoppin’ Recipes”, I decided this was probably not the route that had been taken. In fact, upon closer inspection, two of the three recipes ended with the word Pie. This was not surprising. I should probably be a little more forgiving of the creative spirit of the Whopper box recipe suggestions. After all, my own culinary creativity tends to stem from sheer laziness and an understocked kitchen. Craving midnight Mac & Cheese, but out of milk? Flavored coffee creamer will do in a pinch! So will soy milk, half & half, and, once during the holidays, Eggnog.
In fact, I am a big fan of recipe substitutions. It is much easier to hunt through your cabinets and find some other, similarly-colored ingredient to use than to put on your coat and go around the corner to the store. Thus I once used heavy cream in lieu of buttermilk, and shortly thereafter was told by two people that you can essentially make buttermilk by adding lemon juice– not butter! to milk. But really, who has lemon juice lying around? And forget about milk.
While my earliest childhood forays into the culinary field involved making ‘soup’ out of things that dissolved in water (think mints), the seeds of my real interest in cooking blossomed on a stony path bordered by an EZ Bake Oven. For those of us who never had the privilege, baking with an EZ Bake Oven in the late eighties was baking by lightbulb. I use the term ‘baking’ in the broadest sense possible, because often it was more like ‘warming’, or ‘shining a bright light on’ your tiny confections. Cakes and cookies that sprang fully-formed from the forehead of the EZ Bake Oven were clearly inferior in every way to the real thing, particularly where texture and portion size were concerned, unless you like spending an hour to bake four pale cookies the size of nickels. I don’t blame my mother for holding me off of the real oven for as long as possible, however, especially considering that my recipe repetoire at that point was limited to Tic Tac Soup.
I still remember fondly the time my little sister and I, given the job of making dessert for that evening, worked all day baking cakes the size of decks of cards and batch after four cookie batch. We made signs advertising the event and hung them up around the apartment. The dessert menu we devised that night included sugar cookies and imaginatively titled “Brownie Balls”. One of my signs cleverly alternated between words written in large inch-high letters and words in tiny print. Thus, when read from afar you missed the words ‘cookie’ and ‘brownie’ and the sign announced, “SUGAR AND BALLS FOR DESSERT TONIGHT”. My four year old sister’s sign read, in large shaky letters, “IF YOU LIKK COOKIES, YOU WILL LIKK OUR COOKIES”. My parents still have those signs. It was not until later that I realized our posters were more responsible than our dessert for the amount of choking they did that evening.
Now, I use the grown-up oven! And most of my recipes do not involve adding water to powdered mixes (I said most). My interest in cooking and baking has grown, though my ambition, sadly, has stayed the same size. I have made many of the dishes in my roomate’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, and have had moderate success following several online recipes. But the gauntlet landed at my feet when I purchased my very own copy of Joy of Cooking. Flipping through it in my initial excitement, I found I had trouble identifying and/or pronouncing the names of roughtly 70% of the recipes (Quick Pink Chaud-Froid, I’m looking in your direction).
Joy of Cooking is a cookbook which takes for granted that you have access to as well as a working knowledge of Buckwheat Groats (which I capitalize out of concern that it is the name of a person), and that you may someday need to know how to prepare and cook a bear. It is the only cookbook I ever felt like apologizing to. “Um, Octopus Pasta Sauce sounds really good, Joy of Cooking, but I kind of just wanted to make spinach dip, if you don’t mind.” It is no small thing to go from recipes that show a measuring-cup half filled with light-blue liquid to indicate that you need to add a half-cup of water, with a diagram of a spoon to indicate stirring (thanks, Betty Crocker!), to recipes that begin with the words, “Draw and cut free from the shell 1 armadillo. Discard fat and all but the back meat.”
If you think Twister when you read the word ‘Game’; if you prefer pretty photographs of cakes to chilling line drawings of a hiking boot firmly planted on the head of a squirrel as the squirrel is stripped of its hide, then this may not be the cook book for you. Sometimes I feel that Joy of Cooking would be more accurately titled if the word ‘Joy’ were replaced by the word ‘Fear’ and the words ‘of Cooking’ were replaced by the words ‘of Joy of Cooking’. The first recipe I made from this book was a simple coffeecake, and throughout the ordeal I almost expected Irma S. Rombauer to jump from the pages, rap my knuckles with a wooden spoon and cry, “I said UNSALTED butter, you fool!” Like some sort of mystical Tome of Spirits, to this day every time I open that book I can hear spirits moaning, “You call that braaaaaising?”
Nonetheless, I will keep trying. While I may never churn my own butter, will continue to insist that chocolate chips are an appropriate substitution for nearly every ingredient, and will probably never perfect a Blanquette De Veau (I bet you don’t know what that is either), hopefully I will someday return the investment my parents made in my future by buying me that lightbulb oven.
Tear out your hair, beat your breast, fill your pants with dirt and howl in misery, all those who missed the Pumpkin Carving Contest last week in the multipurpose room. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.
Yes, it was that much fun. My team made a robot pumpkin. I was so excited about it that when we finished, I decided to carve another pumpkin all by myself. It was soon plain to me that I had followed in the footsteps of most artists of questionable talent who attempt solo careers. While the pumpkin I worked on as part of a team came out looking sassy and robotic, my pirate pumpkin, embarked upon in a selfish quest for personal glory, was neither sassy nor robotic, but it did inspire several curious onlookers to question and ultimately discard the idea of the existence of God.
It didn’t look anything like a pirate. I don’t know what it looked like. In any case it was a lopsided, toothless token of my artistic inadequacy. It reminded me of a pumpkin I decorated with a green magic marker when I was four. There is a picture of me, taken that Halloween, with my arms around it, staring into the camera with the direct, pained gaze of a misunderstood artist. My creation had an enormous raggedy maw full of shark teeth, rimmed by two eyes of different sizes, with a nose on his forehead. Examining my latest pumpkin attempt has confirmed my suspicions. Artistically, I peaked at four.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I grew up believing that I was a good artist. Perhaps I had one too many encouraging babysitters or overenthusiastic arts and crafts instructors at camp. As it is, nothing I ever draw looks like what it’s supposed to be. When I was little, I solved this problem by telling my Mom what my scribbled drawings were–there were a lot of cowboys–and having her write it at the bottom. Now that I can read and write, I do that part myself. No matter how much they disagreed with it, few art teachers could disregard the pure efficiency of this method.
I still remember the high school art teacher who broke my gentle, deluded spirit. She is the one to whom all credit is due for my sadly realistic view of my meager artistic talents. She made us paint from still-life arrangements which consisted of mountains of elaborately arranged fruits and vegetables, which, amazingly enough, after four or five months, rotted away. This infuriated her.
She was less than five feet tall and shaped like a mini-fridge, wore long beaded necklaces and made me hate myself from 2:00-4:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays. This was because she made me use color. A student of the doodling-with-a-pen-on-lined-paper-during-math-class school of art, color did not belong in my artistic world. Nor did fruit, or, for that matter, Mrs. Thompson.
After a semester, my canvas was filled with pears that looked like neon light-bulbs and bunches of grapes that looked like they were caught in midexplosion. I told myself that my fruit picture looked inept and distorted because I was working so close to it. Once in awhile I would tack it to the wall and look at it while backing away slowly, hoping that distance would resolve the colorful mess into something that didn’t make you want to stop eating fruit (or perhaps into something that didn’t look like the tragic result of not eating fruit. I don’t know what I meant by that, exactly.) The further away I got, the better I felt, not because the picture looked any better, but simply because I was farther away from it.
Near the end of the year, I came to class to find that my painting had been cut neatly into three pieces and stacked in the corner, to be used by students as scrap paper. I brought them to Mrs. Thompson and demanded an explanation. She looked shocked and apologized, claiming that she had only seen the blank back of my picture, and hadn’t realized that it had a painting on the other side. But a look of understanding passed between us.
I Heard Tell 
