Adventures in Baking : Chocolate Oaty Gut Bombs edition
I made these today : 60 Second Chocolate Oat etc.
It’s my fourth time making them because they are just plain that good. It’s a recipe with everything : tastes great, fairly nutritious, easy as heck to make, and it has a huge yield.
I mean, I got 42 oat… things out of that recipe. It’s the perfect thing for filling that cookie jar when you want to make space in your baking schedule for something non-dessert.
Yeah, I am talking about biscuits. Those garlic biscuits I love so much! And this time, I have the actual half and half the recipe calls for and don’t need to make a substitute, which is where I keep messing up.
So will this make them even better? Time will tell!
The only downside, and it’s not even really a downside, to my little oat…. thingies is that they incredibly filling. They are very tight little clusters of chocolate, peanut butter, and oats, and so two of them will fill you right up. Some people don’t like really dense desserts and I have been one of those people in the past.
But these things taste too darn good for me to hold that against them!
I did ponder experimenting with the flavouring a little. The recipe calls for a teaspoon of vanilla, and that opens the door for my little collection of extracts.
But none of them seemed right. Caramel would disappear into the chocolate flavour. Maple would make things WAY too sweet. Peppermint/mint would go great with the chocolate but clash quite violently with the peanut butter.
Just thinking about it makes me a little erfy.
But I do have one extract that might have worked : banana. Banana works with both chocolate and peanut butter. But in the end, I decided not to mess with perfection this time and just used the regular recipe.
Next time, though, who knows? I got a huge big of quick oats and lots of time!
I feel better today than I have lately. Got to spend more time awake, which is a plus. I feel like I hit the bottom of a negative mood cycle and now I have a chance to start building my way to the top again. Dunno whether that’s brain chemistry, sleep cycle, blood sugar, or what. But I feel like I caught up today, at least somewhat.
I still get sleepy in front of this darn computer, though. The warmth from the base heaters just feels so darn nice and cozy that it makes me want to slip between the sheets and sliiide away. I am such a sucker for coziness.
Of course, the cruel irony is that my bed, which is extremely close to me… so close I can lean out of my seat and flop directly into bed… is not all cozy and warm. It’s much colder, because apparently something in that intervening foot or so sucks the heat right out of air.
So I keep getting sleepy in front of the computer, so I lie down, but then the cold wakes me back up again. I am getting better at resisting lying down in the first place, which is the only way to break the cycle, but what I would not give to have my bed be as cozy as my seat at the computer. I would sleep so damned well.
Oh right. I know what keeps my bed from being this warm. Hot air rises. Damn it.
Anyhow, the mood thing seems to be improving. I don’t feel as dragged down and I feel more interested in the world and more capable of looking forward to things.
I’m not out of the woods yet. This is depression, after all, and that doesn’t just go away. I feel like I still have some napping to do before I am back up to speed entirely.
But as I regain energy, I regain ambition, and ambition’s other half, boredom. When I feel well enough to get really bored with my usual bullshit, that is when things get done.
Who knows, might start that next book yet. Or at least start editing the last one.
The Soul Cost Of Permafrost
Last night, my friends and I watched a great movie called Beyond The Mat . It’s a documentary about professional wrestling, and despite a very annoying narrator and some incredibly cheesy music choices, it was really good documentary work that really made you feel like you were seeing what it is really like to be behind the scenes of the world of pro wrestling.
I was especially happy that they focused in on a wrestler of whom I was a huge fan way back in The Day, Jake “The Snake” Roberts. He was amazing in his day, the only wrestler who was scarier speaking softly during a demo than any other wrestler shouting his fool head off. He had this air of quiet but unmistakable menace that I just loved back when I was a big WWF fan in my mid-teens.
And they showed him warts and all. And we are talking a lot of warts. The one that really struck me, though, was his inability to open up emotionally to his daughter. What he said was “I don’t know how to do it… I can’t do that.. melting… thing. ”
That hit me like a bullet because I have been thinking about my own problems in those exact terms. I can’t… melt. I can’t let go that last bit. I can’t… intermingle. Whether it’s with a single person or an entire organization, I can’t truly join. I can’t mix my identity with another, or let mine be subsumed. I just… can’t.
And I know that’s wrong. If I can’t let go like that, I will never know true intimacy. I will never truly connect with another.
And it’s been that way for a long, long time. Those kids who tried to befriend me when I was in elementary school hell all failed because I could not let them in. Something in me is broken and I think it might be the source of a lot of my problems.
Maybe some people can sense this broken wrongness in me, and it bothers them. I definitely feel like it is a developmental thing, like I didn’t get what I needed at a vital time in my early development and so this part of me, the part that connects with others, never developed properly. I’m like a baby bird with a broken beak.
I bet if my little connector worked, I would find some peace in this world and I would have found my way out of my intellectual deep freeze decades ago.
But I don’t know how to fix it.
I don’t know if fixing it is even possible at this point.
I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.