Friday, June 29, 2012

Chocolate -- sort of

It is after one, and I am alone in the office, as I have been all day except for maybe an hour this morning when Doug was here.  It is Friday, howev, and summertime, so you can see why.  Lovely day, too, warm, but overcast, with a bright white sky and buoyant quality to the air.  I am not feeling at all lonely, but instead enjoying those things which make the office a good place to be, to wit: a rapidly-moving computer, with a clean, smoothly finctioning keyboard;  fresh, hot, strong coffee (yum!) made by me; Pandora playing Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (at the moment) and a comfortable (mostly) chair.

I've just stopped trying to eat a Brownie Parfait (made by Fred Meyer) which one of the agents brought me.  She started bring me a cupcake anytime I called her and told her she had a commission check waiting for her.  Today she sprang for this confection, surely more expensive than even a dozen tiny cupcakes, but truly, quite inedible.  I've been trying to imagine the sort of person who could swallow this whole thing, and the mere thuoght of such a person, their tastes and history of eating, is making me feel sick.  Possibly this requires thinking of this on top of a stomach already protesting about the one-third of this dessert I have been able to consume.  It brought to mind the feeling I have always had about the prevailing school of thought in modern American cooking/eating, which is, put simply, if this is good, than more is better.  It's the sort of thing that caused me, years back, to decide that I only really liked cheese pizza.  Because if a ham sandwich is good, than a ham-and-cheese must be better.  And a ham-and-cheese-and meatball must be better yet! 

This Brownie Parfait consists of the following, all commercially produced, of course: first a large dollop, maybe a quarter cup, of chocolate frosting, in the bottom of the plastic cup.  On top of this is chunks of brownie, about a cup's worth, interspersed with chunks of semi-sweet chocolate.  On top of this is what passes for chocolate mousse in the Fred Meyer bakery, about a third of a cupful, and chocolate sauce drizzled over all.  So five types of chocolate, with almost no difference in flavor from bite to bite, although intensity of sugar gives way to greasy slickness on the tongue.  Brrr, shudder.

...Waiting / for a change in the weather / I'm waiting / For a shift in the air..

And yes, I realize that is not Frankie Valli, but you must see that it took me at least a song's worth of time to type the above.  That is Alphaville.