Hershey's Thingamajig: I'll Take It

Miss Edith is not above gorging herself on chocolate, preferably the kind you buy at drug stores. Some people insist on fancy dark chocolates, and some people will eat milk chocolate as long as it's Swiss or some such nonsense. Miss Edith, however, is happy to eat a Nestle Crunch, a tube of Rolos, or even a Charleston Chew.

Sure thing.

This week, browsing the candy aisle at Walgreen's, I noticed a candy bar I'd never seen before -- a new Hershey product called a Thingamajig. Figuring it was some variant form of a Whatchamacallit, which I enjoy, I glanced at the wrapper to make sure it didn't have anything truly disgusting in it (like some weird fruit flavor -- nothing ruins chocolate for me like the addition of fruit or alcohol) and upon reading that it was a chocolate bar with cocoa crisps and peanut butter, I thought, "All right, then!" and tossed it into my basket.

I've just consumed the Thingamajig and am heartily recommending it to my readers, all three point five of you. Go find this thing. It won't change your life or anything, but it certainly will increase your quality of life while you're eating it.

Thanks, Hershey. Now, would you please figure out how to make and market Chanukkah gelt that doesn't taste godawful?

How things suddenly come together completely inexplicably: Some Thoughts on Making Fried Rice at Home

For years Miss Edith has been a fan of fried rice of the sort you get at Chinese restaurants. Obviously some fried rice is better than others, but basically it's pretty much all good and I can't recall any fried rice that I refused to eat on the grounds of it being too disgusting.

However, I've never been able to make fried rice at home. I know, I know, you have to start with cold, cooked rice; done that. It didn't matter. I'd never made a pan of fried rice worth eating. After several years of trying a few times a year, I eventually gave up, figuring, "Ok, this Just Is Not Worth It."

I then read somewhere that it's nearly impossible for Americans to cook decent Chinese food on their home stoves because the burners don't get nearly as hot as the burners in professional kitchens. This, I can easily believe, and I thought, "Well, fine then; from now on, I will satisfy my jones for fried rice by just buying it from the Chinese takeout places in town, and stop feeling guilty about not making it at home."

Last week, though, I found myself incredibly hungry for lunch and staring into a refrigerator that held many fine comestibles but nothing that was immediately and obviously Lunch. My eye fell on a rather large quantity of cold leftover rice and I thought, "You know, I'll do fried rice. I'm so hungry, even if it sucks, I'll eat it."

So I got out a nice big frying pan (we do not own a wok; never saw the point in acquiring one), heated up some peanut oil, and chopped up the on-their-way-to-sadness scallions that were in the bottom of the vegetable bin. I also had a little onion and some garlic, so I tossed those into the peanut oil. When all the members of the allium family (did I get that right?) were smelling heavenly, I began to crumble the rice into the pan. I stirred efficiently and expertly, as if I'd done this a million times. I turned to beat an egg in a little bowl, and uncapped a bottle of soy sauce and opened my bottle of rooster sauce. Dousing the rice with soy and rooster sauce, I noticed that somehow, for the first time, the stuff in the pan looked like... fried rice. And it smelled incredibly good, like.... proper fried rice. I thought, "Huh." And kept stirring.

I pushed most of the rice toward the edges of the pan, and poured the beaten egg into the middle of the pan. I carefully drew the rice through the egg, and stirred gently for a few more minutes, and by the time the dish was done cooking I was practically floored by how decent the dish looked. Ladling some of the fried rice into a bowl, I thought, "I think I've finally made it." Somehow, after more than ten years of attempting fried rice, something had come together in my head, or in my technique, or something, and I'll never know what, but let me tell you:

It wasn't fancy; there were no shrimps; there wasn't even any chicken. But that was one really, really good bowl of fried rice.
Victory.

Let's see if I'm ever able to pull it off again...

Cadbury Creme Eggs

If you are not a fan of Cadbury Creme Eggs, feel free to utterly ignore this post.
Miss Edith has long been a fan of this creamy, chocolatey, sticky treat, and splurges on them when they become available every spring. (Notarius prefers those candy-coated Cadbury eggs, which I think are horrid, but buy for him anyway because I am slavishly devoted to him... so -- to each his or her own. As long as I can have my Cadbury Creme Eggs.)

This year I note with some sadness that the eggs seem to be smaller than they used to be. Am I just getting old? Are my eyes playing tricks on me? I don't think so. I think that the economy is tanking, and the cost of chocolate has gone up, and that Cadbury is tweaking their product so as to cut costs. And I understand it, but it still makes me very, very sad.

Note: I just went and Googled "Cadbury Creme Eggs Smaller" and discovered that the change was made some time ago... and they really ARE smaller, it's not a trick my eyes are playing on me... so clearly I skipped the eggs last year, and thus didn't really notice the reduction of egg size until this year. In other words, I'm running a couple years late on this one.

I am sad nonetheless.

Shovel Ready

Miss Edith doesn't know for sure where this term came from -- "shovel ready" -- but she's already sick of it.
I looked online and apparently someone's found a citation for it going back to 1995. So we're looking at ten years of shovel-readiness. Fine. But I don't like it, I don't want to hear it anymore, and as far as I'm concerned, when you hear the phrase "shovel ready" you should get ready to be shoveling some shit.

Pardon Miss Edith's French.