Adventures in Baking : Fire Edition

I done burned my biscuits!

Well, actually, they were peanut butter cookies, but that doesn’t sound as funny.

I had them 90 percent cooked. In fact, they were basically done. But I thought, “Eh, I will turn off the oven and just leave them in there to coast to a finish while I play this video game. ”

Now that’s retarded on the face of it. Thinking I can some how keep track of time while playing a video game is akin to thinking you can still juggle while drowning. Both common sense and historical precedent were against me.

Unsurprisingly, twenty minutes later, I take the cookies out of the oven to find them very, very browned. Not totally burned except on the bottoms a bit, but still bone dry, burned tasting, and generally inedible.

Oh well, at least I still have some banana cake left over from last night.

Oh right, I haven’t told you about the banana cake yet (and I know you’ve been just dying to ask!). Last night I ended up doing my baking at, like, 11 pm, and I was feeling tired and lazy, so I figured, I’ll just do a simple white cake.

But just to jazz it up, I was going to replace half the artificial vanilla extract with artificial orange extract. Orange, you say? Not banana? I’m getting to that.

Could not find the orange extract. I was positive we had it, but it just ain’t there. It may never have existed. When you are as clueless as I am, you have to keep that in mind as a possibility.

But I found the banana, and thought, what the heck. And it turned out pretty good. The banana flavour is a little subtle, but it is distinctly present. Next time, maybe I will make it three quarters banana. Should be even better!

I have a confession

Time for one of my little confessions.

I haven’t had any insulin since last Friday night.

I know, I know, that’s awful of me. I ran out after Friday night’s dose, and told myself “Well, I will just go to the pharmacist (who is ONE BLOCK away) tomorrow and pick up more. ”

Well here it is Wednesday and I still haven’t done it. It’s just really hard to get my ass out the door now. I guess it’s because I haven’t done it in a while. I just sort of… stopped having my little excursions into the outdoors while I was working on the book, and I guess all that progress sort of… slipped away.

Of course, the change in the weather doesn’t help.

But really, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I can’t actually make progress. If I prop one thing up, something else falls down. If I grow in one direction, I shrink in another. If I gain discipline in one area, I lose it in another.

All I can do is hope that I am trading up each time. That when I shift my resources around, while there are both gains and losses, the losses outweigh the gains and the total net worth goes up.

Otherwise, I seriously wonder what the fucking point is.

Worst part is, I probably won’t get my insulin until Friday, when it will be easier because I can just get Joe to drop me off there… again, ONE BLOCK from my home… and like, maximize my laziness and cowardice.

This shit has seriously got to stop. I want to grow the hell up already. I am so tired of being a wimpy scared mama’s boy. I want to grow a pair so I can stand up to my problems and stare them down, or solve them, instead of just turning tail and running away at the slightest sign of pain, fear, doubt, or confusion.

Life cannot and will not accept your submission to it and stop fucking with you.

So the onnly option left is to fight.

The Grand Food Conspiracy

There’s a lot of talk floating about the Internet lately about the evil food industry and all the wily tricks they use to get you addicted to their product. This generally conjures images of evil corporate fatcats sitting around cackling about how they will get everyone addicted to Ding Dongs then laugh as they all die of OBESITY! Just like we planned! Mua ha ha!

But here’s the thing. It’s not necessarily like that at all. Their motives could be totally pure and still produce the same result. Let me use an example.

Say you are am honest, hardworking person with their own small bakery business. You sell a small line of prepackaged baked goods packaged in an old-timey style made with simple, wholesome, easy to pronounce ingredients. You don’t make a lot of money but you make a lot of people happy and that’s just fine by you.

One day, after talking with a few of your customers, you decide that people would love to drink old-fashioned lemonade along with their old-fashioned baked treats. So you decide to branch out into beverages.

All you want is to make the best tasting darn lemonade around. So, sensibly enough, you make up a bunch of different batches of lemonade, all a little different, and give them to people to taste test, and choose the one people like best and say they would most like to try again.

You also look into a little of the science of beverages so you can make your lemonade as satisfying as possible.

You put out your lemonade and it’s a smash hit. People are buying it by the gallon. Everyone says they love and some people say they can’t imagine going a day without it.

Then some angry activists come alone and accuse you of deliberately aiming to get people hooked on your product so they would buy it again and again.

And you say “No, I just wanted to make it taste really good. ”

And the thing is… both sides are partially right. Things that taste good are inherently addictive because they give people pleasure. Nobody has to have any evil on their minds in order to create an addictive product.

They just have to honestly want to make people happy via food.

Puts a kind of a different spin on things, doesn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.