What I eat, apparently

Let’s be honest here. There are few problems in life that a nicely charred wiener wouldn’t fix. Especially a big fat wiener. And, it being July 5th, it’s about one day after the ideal time for such wieners.

And boy, are they some fat wieners!

I must confess, that as much of a cheap bastard as I am, I have ethical difficulties with being cheap when it comes to hot dogs and similar wieners. Well, ‘cheaper’, as the case may be. Generally, the cheapest you can go is a 10 pack of short little wieners. These will not only inevitably leave an extra 2+ inches at the end of your bun that is bun-only, but you’ll have 2 wieners left over after all the buns are gone. Were I really thrifty, I could hack those last 2 dogs into fourths, and place each piece in that 2 inch space at the end of the other 2 hot dogs on buns. But, that whole ‘effort and foresight’ thing just kind of eludes me sometimes. Also, there’s the fact that purchasing these measly wieners in 10 packs will only encourage the manufacturers to make more. This, the cheapest I go is the ‘bun length’ types in the 8 pack, and if I’m feeling saucy, I’ll straight up go for the bratwursts or Italian sausage.

And, to counterbalance the wiener situation, an often appropriate accompaniment is said to be the raw veggie tray:

(Ooh, it’s an action shot! It’s like you can feel that green thing getting dipped!)

I actually struggle with the concept of veggie tray as ‘appropriate accompaniment’. Mind you, it beats potato salad any day, but nonetheless, the majority of vegetables on such things are unacceptable. Raw broccoli? Raw carrots? Raw cauliflower?! I’ll happily down all the cherry tomatoes, mind you, and also nibble a bit on the celery and whatever peppers might be found. But there’s some things that are just not meant to be consumed raw. Or at all. I mean, cauliflower? Really.

And of course, an excellent counterpart to the veggie tray (and, by extension, an artery-clogging partner in crime with the hot dogs) is the massive pile of brownies. At the point of this photograph, they had diminished to the minor pile, which is why I defaulted to Über Closeup Time to achieve the proper effect.

These were mildly experimental, in that, while in the process of making said brownies, I was overtaken by a fit of hysterics and immediately threw in 10 caramel pieces. It worked out quite well, I think, assuming we define ‘quite well’ as ‘there were several times when one would bite into a brownie and find their jaws stuck together, but in a good way’. But then again, if there are brownies involved, is the concept of ‘bad way’ even possible?

So there was this discussion about brownies going on, after having just baked a delightful batch of not quite chocolatey enough brownies. See, undercooked brownies are always superior to any other sort of brownies, as it is the only real way to guarantee that the brownies will be appropriately squishy. It’s not that no-gooey brownies are necessarily bad, you see, it’s simply a fact that gooey brownies are so overwhelmingly delicious that it’s practically a crime to purposely create non-gooey brownies.

But anyhow. If given a choice between ‘underdone’ and ‘overdone’, there’s a range of food that fall into each category in terms of maximum deliciousness:

Underdone
-Cookies (for similar reasons as brownies)
-Steak (not raw, mind you, but a little blood is quite endearing)
-Tuna (mm..seared tuna)
-Many types of seafood that are delicious raw, in fact

Overdone
-Marshmallows
-Hot Dogs (specifically campfire hot dogs, this also applies to the marshmallows. There’s just something about food charred in a fire that screams ‘delicious’)
-Pasta
-Rice
-Chicken (well, much of this is for health reasons, actually)

Hmm, can’t think of any more. Dang! Anyhow, these are the actual brownies that got made and eaten. Quite tasty!

So, a few weeks back Drew and I came into a boon. Easter had ended, and anything that was vaguely being marketed for easter was hardcore discounted. At Ye Local Grocery Store, there was a lovely discount bin filled with unwanted candies. This is how we came to acquire 20 bars (or rather, $5 worth) of giant ‘Disney Princess’ chocolate bars (hereafter known as Princess bars).

Ordinary peanut butter brownies often need a little spicing up, and here’s where a Princess bar comes quite in handy. We bagged it up, and smashed it up. Err, smooshed it up, rather. Apparently it’s hard to smash a bar into small chunks when it’s been sitting in 70-80 degree temperatures all day. Nonetheless, Large Chunk of Chocolate became Small Chunks of Chocolate, so all was good.

As an aside, if you are looking to effortlessly rid yourself of some Do-si-do girl scout cookies, I recommend smashing them up and putting them into peanut butter brownies as, much to my chagrin, they seamlessly integrate themselves, leaving not a trace of tangible cookie behind.

The remainder of some chocolate chips were sprinkled on top. When they came out of the oven, I was all like ‘Hey! I’ll spread the chocolate around and make it look like frosting!’ This obviously did not succeed very well:

The advantage of this closeup top-of-the-brownie-conglomerate mixture is that you can totally imagine there’s some magic brownie planet out there in the universe whose surface looks like this. And someday, when the US space program gets crackin’ and starts zipping all over the galaxy, some lucky astronaut will get to sink his/her foot into this gooey dirt and roll around in it and have brownie fights with the other astronauts. Who knows, maybe some hungry grad student is busy staring at this from a telescope right now.

So this is what the brownies looked like in edible Earth form!

Alas, the batch barely lived over a day. But then, such is life when you are delicious and made with peanut butter and chocolate.