The Exotic KitKats of Japan

Recently a friend was leaving for a trip to Japan, and I begged for souvenirs.

Very specific souvenirs.

"Bring me the exotic KitKats that I see in Buzzfeed posts! I want to eat the Green Tea KitKats!"

"You can buy those in Knoxville."

"...what?"

"Go buy the Green Tea ones at Sunrise Grocery or Lucky Mart by the mall."

"...what?"

Things have been a little busy at work, so it took me a week or so to get over to Sunrise Grocery. Once there, I paced the candy aisle, but there were no Green Tea KitKats. I checked all of the racks by the registers, but there were no Green Tea KitKats there, either. I whined to friends in our ongoing "Brunch Scheduling and Other Chatter" months-long group text that I couldn't find the Green Tea KitKats, and then, just as I was about to leave, I decided to walk all of the aisles, and found the Green Tea KitKats exactly where you would think to look for candy.

In the produce section.

I can be excused for missing them, at first, because they weren't individually packaged like I thought they'd be. Instead, the Green Tea KitKats at Sunrise Grocery come in a big bag:



that fortunately has an English ingredients label stuck to the back, so I could make sure I wasn't eating anything I was allergic to.



Sunrise Grocery was adventure enough. (Seriously, I might go back for the herb-flavored gelatin cups, because I'm so curious about them.) I didn't also want a trip to the emergency room. I did decide that I might as well also grab the Raspberry KitKats, because why not? They might also be exciting.



Once I got the KitKats home, I tore open the bag



and then tore open a Green Tea KitKat:



I didn't buy any American KitKats for comparison, but I think that's about the same size as a snack sized KitKat that you get in the bags of Halloween candy. It might be slightly smaller, but again, that's a guess, not a definite. I was immediately dismayed to see that they appeared to be made of white chocolate, a vile waxen imitation of real chocolate, but excited to see that they're definitely green.

In the interests of science, I bit one:



and I was immediately disappointed.

They taste like a regular white chocolate KitKat. I drink green tea fairly often, and I didn't get even a hint of it from these. I ate another just to be sure, and still didn't taste anything but white chocolate and KitKat wafers.

Dreams crushed, I turned my attention to the Raspberry KitKats, which were similar to the Green Tea KitKats in appearance:



but also had noticeable differences: as soon as I opened the wrapper, this smelled strongly of raspberries. Granted, it was a little bit of an artificial raspberry candy raspberry smell, but it was way better than the Green Tea KitKats, which smell only of foul white chocolate.

Intrigued and hopeful, I bit one:



These are so good. I can't believe they don't make this flavor in the United States, because it would sell heavily if they could convince people to try it the first time. It might be hard to tell in the picture, but instead of regular KitKat filling, which is actually made of other KitKats ("Soylent Green is people! It's people!"), they are filled with some kind of raspberry jelly or puree and it's so good that my mouth is watering right now just thinking about them even though I just ate one.

I might take the Green Tea ones to work and dump them in my candy dish there. Maybe someone will like them.

Then I might go to the Lucky Mart, and see if they have flavors that Sunrise Grocery didn't.

Potatoes, Candy, and Something That Claims To Be Pie

A week or two ago several of my friends on Facebook were sharing and reposting a recipe for something called "Potato Puffs", which were made out of cheese, sour cream, and mashed potatoes and looked fairly simple. My mom thought they resembled the filling of a twice baked potato, but without the potato, and I found myself intrigued enough to go get some mashed potatoes (I had everything else on hand already) and give it a try.

While buying the potatoes, I also bought these:



but we'll talk about them a little later, while the potato puffs are baking.

Also, because I love myself, I spent the extra dollar to get the pre-mashed potatoes that come in a tub rather than mashing my own or getting instant ones. It's all glamour and glitz all the time around here, I tell you.

Anyway, here's the recipe for the potato puffs, which will make you a cute side dish when you want to do something different:

3 cups mashed potatoes
2 eggs
1/3 cup sour cream
1 heaping cup shredded cheddar
2 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese (I used shredded, because I had that)
2 tablespoons dried chives or parsley
Salt and pepper

It's pretty simple as recipes go. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and grease/butter/spray with Pam the inside of the cups of a muffin pan. Then crack your eggs into a bowl:



I used my Pyrex Autumn Americana 404 mixing bowl, because I wanted to give my yellow Primary Color bowls a little break. That poor Americana bowl is my little Pyrex orphan. I don't have the other three bowls that go with it, and would prefer the Blue Americana set, but I was buying some other Pyrex at a going out of business sale at a junk shop and the lady running it offered to throw that bowl in with the rest for four more dollars. You can't buy a new four-quart mixing bowl for four dollars, and I don't actively dislike the set. I'd buy the other three if I saw them, but I never see them, so that bowl sits in the closet alone.

Back to the baking, after you beat the eggs, mix in the sour cream:



This smells about as good as you imagine raw eggs and sour cream mixed together smell. After that, you mix in the cheese, throw in the chives, and salt and pepper to taste. I would like to take a moment here to point out that the handheld, squeeze pepper grinder my mom gave me for Christmas several years ago:



is one of the best kitchen gadgets that I own. It lets me grind pepper with one hand, directly over the bowl.

Thanks, mom!

After you thank your mom (which you should probably do regularly even if she didn't give you a pepper grinder), add the potatoes and mix it really well:



and then spoon the mix into the muffin cups, filling them right to the top:



Bake them for 35 minutes, then let them cool in the pan for 5 more minutes. When they're done, they'll look like this:



The odd brown liquid is non-stick cooking spray; I'm pretty sloppy with my spraying. To get the puffs out, I just stuck a fork in the middle and hooked one out of the pan, and they came out like little muffins:



but inside they're creamy like mashed potatoes.

The only suggestion I would make is that they could maybe use some bacon, but that's totally optional.

While the potatoes were cooking, I tore into those red velvet M&M's:



They're a little bigger than regular M&M's, like peanut butter ones.

Spoiler: They're not red inside:



If you eat more than one at a time, you can catch a subtle flavor of cream cheese frosting, but for the most part they just taste like M&M's.

Since the potato puffs turned out so well, I thought I would try another recipe that's been haunting me. I mentioned when Bette Davis and I cooked some hash that the recipe I almost made was attributed to Karen Carpenter, but that she lost by a handful of votes. Well, now that I made Bette's hash, the door was wide open for Karen Carpenter's Chewy Pie.

It's certainly a recipe. Of some kind. For a food. Or "food".

It starts with sixteen saltine crackers:



They need to be crushed, so I put them in a ziploc bag, left some air in it, and crushed them to dust with a rolling pin:



Since I already had a handy bag, I added the sugar and baking powder to it and shook it to mix. After that I chopped some walnuts:



and then spent twenty minutes googling to find out what to set the oven to. The missing oven temperature could be a simple oversight in transcribing the recipe for the book, but I choose to interpret it as evidence that no one ever actually cooked this thing. If you happen to buy the cookbook, pencil in 350 degrees F.

Then beat three egg whites until stiff peaks form:



You have no idea what a sense of achievement doing that gave me. I've seen people beat egg whites on television, and it always seems fraught with disaster, so when I casually beat my egg whites and they actually turned into a bowl of stiff peaks, I let out such a yell of triumph in the kitchen that the neighbors probably looked at the wall for a minute as if expecting me to burst through it like the Kool Aid Man.

After gloating over my stiff peaks, I folded in the saltine mixture and the walnuts, which promptly destroyed my stiff peaks:



and spread it evenly in a pie pan:



While the "pie" was baking, I whipped cream until I created a bowl of whipped cream:



which is supposed to be the topping for this thing that looks like a giant cookie:



That's a pie?

It breaks when you cut it:



It turned out that only the top broke, and the inside is still soft, but the damn thing also stuck to the pan even though I sprayed the hell out of that pan, so the first slice out looked like I chopped it out with a hatchet:





If I wanted this kind of abuse I'd make fudge.

I managed to carefully remove a second piece and then use the whipped cream to cover the flaws:



so I finally got a decent photo. In case you're curious, a "pie" made of crackers, egg whites, and walnuts tastes like walnuts.

At this point, you're probably wondering two things, and I can answer both of those questions:

No, I don't know for sure if Karen Carpenter ever actually ate this.

And yes, it actually is chewy. Really chewy. Excessively so.

I bet Greer Garson's creation won't be nearly this strange.

Forty Days in the Desert Without Candy

Giving up things for Lent is still kind of new for me. The year that I gave up Pop Tarts two years ago was the first year that I did it in any kind of a serious sense, and then last year I didn't give up anything because I was still working on my faith. I don't mean to say that like my faith is totally worked out now, because it's not. It's evolving, and part of that evolution is thinking and testing and, sometimes, giving things up for Lent.

This year, I gave up candy for Lent, and it totally made me a better person.

I know what you're thinking. You're probably sitting back and thinking something like, "Whatever. During Lent, we should be working hard to better ourselves. Sure, you can give up chocolate and post it to facebook to receive attention to replace the candy, but does that better you?" and I want to say that yes, it did.

Giving up candy taught me the meaning of sacrifice, because nothing takes the place of candy.



If you give up soda, you can drink juice and water. I know, because I've been doing that since January, when I gave up soda for New Year's. I've been drinking a lot of Crystal Light at home (store brand, mostly), and at work I drink cold tap water all day long. I haven't had any soda this year, at all, not even a little, but it really hasn't been that bad because you can drink other things. When I go out, I have a lemonade or a milkshake or a juice, and I'm fine. Sure, for the first couple of weeks of January I had blinding headaches from caffeine withdrawal and I went to bed ridiculously early, but giving up soda hasn't taught me anything because I can drink something else.

The same thing happened the year I gave up Pop Tarts. I was eating Pop Tarts for breakfast every morning, but I didn't suddenly stop eating breakfast because I gave them up. Instead I had an apple or a yogurt, mostly yogurt. Giving up Pop Tarts was a minor inconvenience, at best, and mostly just left me with a feeling of semi-shallow "I gave something up for Lent this year!" accomplishment.

To be blunt: When I gave up Pop Tarts for Lent, I didn't learn a damn thing.

But, like I said, you can't replace candy with anything.



When you're sad, candy is a pick-me-up. When you're hungry, a bite of candy from the dish in your office can tide you over until lunch. When your coworkers want to cheer you up or distract you from the fact that they're bringing you something a week late and still only half complete, they show up at your office with peanut butter cups. When you forgot to eat breakfast, a handful of Starburst is practically a fruit salad. Sure, you can feed yourself that line that you can have fruit, and that raisins are nature's candy, but we all know that's a crock.

Daria said it best in "Pinch Sitter": "Then why do they have to cover them in chocolate to sell them at the movies?"

Not only is candy irreplaceable, but it is also ubiquitous. Every store I go to in my regular routine has candy by the register except for the comic store and the used bookstore. (For the same reason: You don't put food near things that are damaged by food. I'm not sure why Barnes and Noble doesn't get this, but their candy selection rivals a hospital gift shop.) A number of my colleagues in other offices have candy dishes on their desks or front counters. I can't even pay for gas without seeing candy, and gas and candy have nothing to do with each other. They shouldn't even be near each other, but somehow, they are, and every time I stopped to fill my tank I had to stare into the station and look at the candy and not have any.

So, what did I learn?

I learned to appreciate the things that I have. I lead a very fortunate life if the worst problem I run into over the course of a month is, "I really want a peanut butter cup." I have the freedom to give something up, rather than the forced neccessity of going without.

I learned that temptation really is everywhere, and when you're trying to avoid something it ends up being the only thing you see. Everywhere you go, you see candy. I couldn't tell you a single headline on any of the magazines I saw at Kroger last night (Something about Kim Kardashian? More reminders that Jennifer Aniston is going to die alone while Brad Pitt raises an entire baseball team of children?) but I can tell you that Cadbury Cream Eggs are three for a dollar.

And, finally, I learned that when you spend a really long time coveting something, and building it up in your head, and convincing yourself that it's going to be the best thing ever, it often turns out to be a disappointment.



I've only eaten seven pieces of candy this morning.

Staycation Day 1: Gummi Candy Finger Puppets

I'm on vacation for a few days, but it's more of a staycation since I'm not planning to leave town. As it is, I might not even leave my house, because when I did today to go to a lunch meeting at work (which Kristin and Richie offered to reschedule, but I declined), pick up a book my friend Donna put on reserve for me at the library, and stop at McKay's to trade in some books, this happened:



108 degrees? I realize the car was parked in the sun, but still, 108 degrees?

It is officially too hot to leave the house for the rest of the day.

Just because I stayed in, though, doesn't mean I didn't find something fun to do, besides reading, cleaning the bathroom, making hummus, and playing video games. I've been saving something special for a rainy day, but a scorchingly hot day when you can't go outside without drying out like a piece of jerky totally counts, too. My home confinement meant that it was time to amuse myself with something truly special:



Gummi candy finger puppets.

Unlike the gummi hot dog, which sort of vaguely looked like a hot dog but could have also been a gummi internal organ, the gummi candy finger puppets are shockingly detailed and true to the original Marvel Comics source material. They're not perfect, but they are clearly recognizable as your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man:



reformed alcoholic Iron Man:



the jade giant, the emerald berserker known as the Incredible Hulk:



and the man who's the best he is at what he does, and what he does isn't pretty:



Wolverine, an amnesiac hairy hundred year old five foot tall Canadian who is somehow the epitome of "cool" in the Marvel Universe. Of course, Wolverine will be finding it a little bit more difficult than usual to claw things since I ate his arms:



But sometimes that's just how these things go.

Gummi Lunch

The other day, I was in the candy section of Mast General (because why would you go to Mast General and not go to the candy section?), and I noticed gummi hamburgers and hot dogs:



I like candy, and I like gummi candy, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had a vague memory of not liking these particular gummi candies. I tried to remember why, but couldn't come up with anything. Did they actually taste like hamburgers? Chewy hamburgers? Because that would be disgusting, and might explain it. I think I'd remember if I'd eaten that, though. Maybe I had some deap-seated psychological reason for not liking them? Like a long-buried memory of some guy that I thought was really hot but wouldn't give me the time of day as he sat eating hamburger gummi candies and I wallowed in misery and loneliness and swore in my cold, black heart that I would never, ever eat gummi hamburgers as long as I lived? No, I'd probably remember that, too.

There must be some reason I remember not liking them, though. In the interests of science, I decided to try to figure it out. I bought one of each, and then today I decided to eat them.

The first step, of course, would be unwrapping them:



They're pretty tiny. The top bun of the burger is somewhere between the size of a dime and a penny. They felt, like most gummies that haven't been in your pocket getting nice and warm, a little firm and rubbery, and they smelled vaguely fruity. Not like any specific fruit, but that random smell of fruit flavoring that gummies always have.

I dissected the burger first:



I was impressed with the level of detail. The patty has little grill marks, and the lettuce leaf really does look leafy. The fruit smell was maybe cherry? Like cough drop cherry?

So far nothing seemed offensive, so I reassembled the burger and bit:



Now I remember why I don't like gummi hamburgers.

They taste like nothing. Rubbery, slightly tough, flavorless nothing. They're not even sweet. It's just a little lump that you chew up and swallow as quickly as possible.

Given the letdown of the burger, I had pretty low expectations for the hot dog, which breaks down into two unimpressive pieces:



I guess there's not a lot of creativity you can do with something that's pretty bland to begin with, design-wise. It looks like a hot dog. Like the burger, it smelled vaguely fruity and seemed a little rubbery. I put it back together, took a deep breath, and bit down:



That has to be the least appetizing photo of food that I have ever taken, but a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially if those words include things like, "flavorless", "rubbery", or "kind of gross".

I think I'll stick to the gummi candies that I like from now on.

Candy Everybody Wants

Back in June, our maintenance staff sent an email to let us know that a bunch of furniture from various places around campus was about to be sent out to the surplus furniture warehouse, and they asked if any of us wanted any of it before it was trucked over. Looking through the pictures attached to the email, I decided that my office needed an end table, so I wrote back and the next day my table was promptly delivered:



It really classes up the office, right? Not as much as cleaning out that bookcase and getting rid of all those sloppy stacks of unfiled papers on it did, or moving that shredder to someone else's office did, but it was a step in the right direction. The table was nice looking, and paired nicely with the fancy armchair that Angi and I rescued from the hallway when someone at the other end of the building was sending it out to be surplussed.

Once I had the table, though, I had a small problem: It needed something on it. Just look at it. It cries out for ornamentation of some sort, but what? I couldn't get a plant, because my office has no windows and plants die. I didn't want one of those little office fountains, because the noise would be grating, rather than soothing. Fish were out of the question, too, because then I'd just feel sad when the fish died since it would just reiterate that I'm incapable of nurturing. Maybe some art? Possibly a sculpture?

Yes, I thought. Perhaps I'll place a bust of Pallas, there beside my chamber door? Maybe not. After all, a raven might perch upon the bust of Pallas, there beside my chamber door. It might perch and sit and nothing more, and then perhaps might quoth the raven, "Nevermore."

Maybe not a sculpture. I have to work in there, and don't have time to beg phantom birds to take thy beaks from out my heart, you know?

I decided instead to get a candy dish. People like candy dishes, because people like candy. I could fill the dish with candy, people would come and eat it, and they would leave my office happy. Putting a candy dish on my shiny table was a win/win situation, and even better was the fact that I already had an empty glass pumpkin on the shelf above my desk, because my staff gave it to me filled with candy for my birthday the year before.

For a while, the candy dish worked out exactly as planned, but then I was reminded of something horrible that I already knew and had somehow forgotten: No good deed goes unpunished. In this particular case, I learned that if you steadily provide candy, people will eventually feel entitled to it, and then they will start to feel entitled to give opinions about it.

"All you have are Jolly Ranchers? You should get some other candy."

"Are you going to get chocolate next time? I really like chocolate."

"Why are the Skittles that color? Are they the regular kind?"

Today a person who will remain nameless leaned into my office, noticed that someone had finally eaten all of the Christmas candy left in the dish, and told me, "You're out of candy. You better go get some more."

Oh really?

Fortunately, they left my office before I could smash the candy dish over their head, but I spent a good portion of the next ten minutes before I was distracted by the telephone seething with rage. I realize that, by giving candy freely for several months now, I have tacitly agreed to continue doing so for as long as I continue to work here, but still, a little gratitude or at the very least a little bit of manners doesn't seem like too much to ask. I thought about not refilling the candy dish, but then a worse thought occured to me, and I suddenly felt all warm and cheery inside.

I better go get some candy? I better go get some candy? Oh, you bet I will. I know exactly what kind of candy that dish needs, because I know that sometimes candy is not your friend. Sometimes candy is the enemy, because sometimes candy... is Durian Candy.

My friend Sandy introduced me to the horrorshow known as durian candy way back in 2006, in the parking lot of an IHOP near Chattanooga. Sandy warned me that Durian Candy, which you can sometimes find at the Asian grocery, "has kind of a strong flavor," and offered to hold my camera while I tasted a piece.

What follows is a frame by frame documentary of the Durian Candy experience.

It started out with a deceptively innocent looking piece of wrapped hard candy:



which I carefully unwrapped:



and then put in my mouth. The effect was immediate:



This candy was not good. Really not good. The longer it sat in my mouth, the more not good it became:



Oh, God, it was disgusting. It was like a fruity candy wrapped in rotting meat and then doused with turpentine and photo-developing chemicals. I don't think I even made it through a full thirty seconds before I couldn't take it any more and spit it across the parking lot:





After that I spent about five minutes spitting continuously, trying to clear my mouth, before we went inside and I let the waitress know that I needed an orange juice RIGHT NOW while Sandy giggled and pretended to be sympathetic.

If they had candy in hell, it would be Durian Candy.

And I think I might head to the Asian grocery store this weekend and see about getting some for my candy dish.

questions from the weekend

I saw things this week. Strange things. Things that left me with questions.

1) Why is there a head in the back of this car?



We went over some serious bumps while driving behind these people on the way to the game against UT Martin (a shutout, but a disgrace, since rumor has it that Martin was recruiting walk ons the week before the game just to have a full roster of players) and that head didn't move. There's either a lot of tape, or that thing is attached to the back dash of that car.

And if it is attached, why? I probably have no room to talk since I have a toy on the dashboard of my car, but a cosmetology school model head? That seems excessive, even to me. Unless it has a name, I guess.

2) Why would you waste an entire bag of gummi worms?



What kind of monster throws candy on the ground and lets it rot? Won't somebody think of the children, with their bright eyes and scrawny arms and mouths full of perfect white teeth? Don't they need a giant bag of chemically engineered fructose and vaguely fruitlike flavoring? This seems like a horrible waste, but it was also odd and kind of intriguing. Why aren't there any bugs eating it? Or animals? Aren't there hungry squirrels or ants or rats or something that aren't getting enough high fructose corn syrup?

And where did the bag go? Did they melt together in the bag in the hot sun, and then someone dumped them out? But if they did that, shouldn't the bag be there, too? Why would you throw one away and not the other?

3) How is this toy somehow less spooky in the picture than it was in real life?



I saw this finger puppet in one of the stores on Market Square, and I think I might have actually shuddered, if only for a second. There was a finger puppet of Satan in the same store that was somehow less disturbing than this puppet. Why would you buy this for a child? That thing is nightmare fuel, pure horror in rubberized form. It's totally appropriate for a child you don't like, I guess, but why not just give them socks or vegetables?

4) Shouldn't this be in a refrigerator?



Vacuum sealed raw meat creeps me out. I know it's supposedly perfectly safe and all that, but even in the vacuum bag there can be temperature fluctuations, long slow sleaks (entropy will eventually fill any vacuum), and it just looks gross. Anything that unruly children in Mast General can pick up and hit each other with and then put back when their lazy mother finally notices that her bratty kids are treating the store like a playground is not fit to be served at a meal.

But don't you want to slap someone in the face with a pack of raw bacon now, just to see what it's like?

A few things I've learned this week

My friend Bryan, who goes on random adventures with me and is frequently mentioned here, has been in the hospital for nine days. He is very, very sick and I am very worried. Several of us have been going to the hospital each day, but none of us every day. I myself have only made it seven out of nine days, but am trying to do better. Given the time of year that it is, though, this basically means that the last week for me has been "Work, Hospital, Sleep" and very little else.

I've managed to learn a few interesting things along the way, though.

1) Hospital food really is disgusting, and that's not just a punchline. The other night the staff made a mistake and brought an apple cobbler that Bryan wasn't allowed to have, and he and the nurse both insisted that I eat it rather than just letting the nurse throw it away.

They really did. This wasn't one of the deals where I stared longingly at it and mentioned how hungry I was.

No, really.

I wasn't even looking at it, and the nurse was like, "Bryan, you're not allowed to have that. I'm gonna throw it away. Wait, do you want it?"

I should have said no. Why?



That's me, holding the apple cobbler perpendicular to the floor, and that's the apple cobbler, not moving. Even more frightening is that it's the second photo. I held it up long enough to take a picture, check the camera while still holding the cobbler up and decide that I didn't like the first one, and then take a second picture.

Not only was it immobile, but it tasted like pure flour. I have no idea how they did it, but I even fished an apple out with my fork and tasted it by itself, and the apple tasted like flour. It was disgusting, but I was hungry, so I ate the whole thing anyway.

2) There's always something worse that could happen:



As tired and cranky as I may be, at least I didn't leave some of my groceries in the cart and then drive away, like some people.

3) The hole in the side of the music building never stops looking absurd, no matter how many times you drive past it:



It looks like the Tasmanian Devil exploded through the side of the wall. They're demolishing the music building right now, so that they can build a bigger, better one, but it looks like they took one swipe at the wall and then called it a day:



4) Spelling is hard.



On the one hand, I'm kind of giggly snickering and "Oh, hey, ICU Waiting Room, dictionaries are also available," but on the other hand I'm kind of wondering if I would entrust my medical care to people who can't spell. You read stories about hospitals amputating the wrong limbs or leaving forceps inside surgical patients and wonder how it happens, but the writing is, literally, on the wall: some people are not only ignorant, but are also willing to post their ignorance where everyone can see it.

I kind of think I'll stick to the other hospital nearby instead. They may have thought that I was a wife beater, but at least they spelled it correctly.

5) These exist:



Am I the only one who didn't know about Coconut M&M's? I saw them at the hospital gift shop and decided that I needed to try them:



They taste like little tiny nuggets of Mounds bars. I don't see any actual coconut in them when I bite them in half, but they are really, really strongly coconut flavored.

That's it for now. Bryan starts a new treatment tomorrow, so if anybody has any spare prayers around that they're not using, please offer them to the diety/dieties of your choice. Or just wish him positive energy and good karma, or whatever else you think might work.

Thanks, in advance.

holidaze

Hallowthankmas is almost over, but there's still time to squeeze in a few Christmas parties at work:



Last year Frosty had a dance number, but this year he settled for just hugging. I haven't decided if that was more or less creepy, but I had fewer nightmares this year, so I'm going with less.

We also had a children's choir this year:



They were an improvement over last year's R&B singing staff member, who started out singing "I've Got Sunshine" before making a smooth transition into that perennial Christmas classic, "Let's Get it On", but they weren't really that good. They screamed along to taped music that had vocals on it, they couldn't clap together or on beat, and a few of them forgot what they were doing and wandered off the stage during the songs. I applauded politely, but refused to stand when the rest of the room decided to give them an ovation.

Jeannie tried to make me stand.

"Why aren't you standing?"

"They were awful."

"They're FOUR!"

"I clapped."

"They're only FOUR!"

"And? If you start rewarding them for mediocrity now, they'll expect it the rest of their lives. That's how we end up with run-away self-esteem based education and Generation Me kids with overinflated feelings of entitlement."

"Scrooge."

Whatever. I know I'm right. Clapping was generous, but an ovation was ludicrous based on that performance.

I was still feeling the sting of the Scrooge label at the grocery store, though, so I remembered seeing Ina Garten make chocolate bark a couple weeks ago on the Food Network and decided I would whip up some Christmas candy for "Top Chef" night. I haven't worked with chocolate, really, since doing it as a kid with mom a couple decades ago, but it didn't look that hard on TV.

I got white chips, chocolate chips (which I ended up not using), and a container of fruitcake fruit (cherries, pineapple, and candied citrus peels) all diced up into small pieces:



The bag of chips said you could microwave them, but something went wrong there even though I did exactly what it said on the bag, and the chips in the measuring cup burned. Not having a double boiler, I set a stoneware bowl above a pot of boiling water, and started stirring and praying:



It worked pretty quickly:



When the chips were all melted, I poured the bowl onto a non-stick pizza pan, sprinkled on the fruit, and pressed it in a little so it wouldn't slide off. Then I stuck the whole thing in the freezer:



When it was hardened up, I cut it into tiny chunks. I meant for them to be square, but it broke along its own lines, so I just went with it:



Jeannie didn't seem to think I was Scrooge when she ate a whole bunch and took a bag home with her.