Monday, April 1, 2013

Of recipe disasters, kitchen meltdowns and Peeps


It all began with a phone call to Virginia Kantra (a fab author you should really be reading if you’re not already) that started with a discussion of advertising and ended with a “my cowboy hero is hunkier than your marine hero and I’m gonna prove it” (and vice versa). Which led to exchanges of sexy (and not so sexy) bacon memes on Twitter, followed by a challenge to come up with original Peep art for our books.

Et voila!





[To check out more Hero Humor, connect with us on Facebook (click for Jesse and Virginia) and Twitter (click for Jesse and Virginia).]

I had a ton of fun putting together my picture, especially when Pixel T. Kitten got involved in my photo shoot, looking like a wooly mammoth in my fluorescent marshmallow herd. But when it was all over, I had four big boxes of Peeps and zero desire to eat the dang things.

Sure, most people would probably just throw them out. However, ever since being read The Velveteen Rabbit as a child, I’ve had a real hang-up about rejecting things with faces. I can’t throw out stuffed animals, dolls, or Peeps. Instead, I must use them for their intended purpose, whether it be snuggling or ingesting. I know this about myself. I accept it. I work with it.

But while I can manage to eat a six-pack of Peeps now and then when my mom sends them to me, there was no way I could gag down four twelve-packs. And have you ever tried to throw Peeps in the back yard for the raccoons or neighborhood dogs? Trust me, they’ll still be there when it’s time to mow the lawn. And, well, yeah. Not a pretty way to go, for either the Peeps or Mr. Mower.

But then came the lightbulb moment: I had Rice Krispies! I could make Rice Krispy Treeps! Envisioning pretty swirls of yellow, pink and blue, I got to work melting the butter and confirming that the Cabinet of Man Cereal did, in fact, contain multiple boxes of Rice Krispies. Then I tossed the Peeps in, and started stirring. Whereupon I discovered two miscalculations:

One. Despite my plan to give the Peeps a glorious end, melting is not a pretty way to die.

Two. When melting sugar, bright pink + fluorescent yellow + speckled robin’s egg blue do not equal pretty pastel swirls of those colors. Instead, it equals a nasty oozing swampy sort of brown. Into this brown ooze the melting Peeps subsided, their little faces disappearing last, staring up at me with marshmallow expressions of, “Whyyyyyy?”

It was pretty awful—almost as bad as the time I made pork chops with an olives-and-wine sauce, didn’t have cornstarch or flour to thicken the sauce, and figured baking soda should work. It didn’t. Instead, it created the sort of vinegar + baking soda volcano we used to make in science class, the foam tinged an unfortunate green from the less than stellar olives I had pressed into service. Enter Jesse’s famous Slimy Green Pork Chops. I’ll send you the recipe if you’d like.

But I digress.

Once the Peeps were melted and I stopped twitching in a corner of the kitchen, I mixed in the Krispies and everything else went more or less according to plan. And you know what? Darned if the swampy brown didn’t become a lovely caramel color once it was mixed with the Krispies. So much so that Arizona, in digging into his first Treep, said, “How did you get the colors off? Did you skin them before you cooked them?”

(Shudders.)

So that’s my cooking oops moment for the week (and if we’re lucky, the month). How about you? Got any good cooking oopses for me, or any good Peep memories? Want to say ‘hi’? Give me a shout out and you’re entered to win a couple of signed backlist books from my Bag O Books!

13 comments:

  1. I always got peeps in my Easter basket as a kid...as I'm sure everyone else did. I had to pop the plastic on my packages and let the air get to them for about 24 hours before I'd eat them...I just like them a bit hard.
    There was a story on the news on Friday about peeps turning 60. I thought I'd share it.
    http://dailynightly.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/30/17532468-5-things-you-didnt-know-about-peeps?lite

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  2. Jennifer-Thanks for the link. Very cool!

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  3. Loved the idea of skinning the peeps! Thanks for the gruesome and funny blog!

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    1. That's what I get for marrying a guy who grew up riding out into the wilderness on his trusty appy, toting a rifle. Skinned Peeps. ;-)

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  4. I am before the age of Peeps and after the age of Rice Krispies, but I have the color answer for that brown undesirable image. If you mix any colors that are complements of each other, you get brown. Like, mixing blue & orange,or red & green,or purple & yellow. And, if you mix all of them, you get a mess of brown too. But, no worries, sounds like Rice Krispies saved the day with the lovely caramel color from the addition of its deadly sugar, reminding you of delicious chewy caramels. I don't eat them anymore b/c they threaten my precious teeth. Will you please tell me what a peep is and does? Does it have anything to do with hide and seek?

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    1. Hi Gail, and way cool on the color theory. Thank you for that! Yes, it all turned out just fine (and plenty sweet) in the end.

      While I'm sure you could play hide and seek with Peeps (and find them hidden years later, still in their original form), they are actually the brightly colored chicks and bunnies in the above pictures, which are made of marshmallow and covered with fluorescent-dyed sugar.

      They've become something of a pop culture phenom, with an annual contest for making dioramas called 'peep shows'.

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/peeps-show-vii-2013-diorama-contest-winners/2013/03/26/9bdbb408-9638-11e2-9e23-09dce87f75a1_gallery.html

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    2. oh! Thanks. Now I'm "in." Whew, another candy to contemplate. Fortunately, I don't like marshmallow. Aren't I lucky?

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  5. Hehee...While I sympathize with your cooking error, may I still say thank you for sharing? You've made my week, I think, with this story. The poor Peeps! I never could eat them...yet I have a few packs in my house right now. Perhaps I'll have to try this. :D

    A few weeks back, I tried making a cake (it was my birthday, I hate store bought cakes with a passion, and no one else bakes, so...if I want a cake, I have to bake it). I decided to try a new recipe I found online--it was a simple recipe, for a simple chocolate cake, with a raspberry whip cream "frosting". Did everything like it said, put it in the pans (the batter was water thin, but that's what it was suppose to look like at this point, according to my recipe card), and put 'em in the oven. Looked in the oven 15 minutes later to check on them...and I had chocolate soup ALL over my oven. ACK! I'm still cleaning it up, by the way. Not sure what happened, but needless to say I didn't get my birthday cake. I did, however, get a spoonful of the batter before the disaster. :D

    Enjoy!
    TBQ

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    1. Hey TBQ! Happy to share, and thanks for sharing your cake soup story! I'm LOLing with all the sympathy in the world, having had to do the 'scrape out the stove' thing a few times in my questionable culinary career. The crock pot is my friend.

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  6. I love Peeps! Blue bunnies are my favorite! Ate 3 yesterday!

    As for cooking....one time when I was home from college, I wanted to make a pot of my mom's homemade beef vegetable soup. I put the meat in the pot with water and turned on the stove. I needed to go down to the corner store (4 minutes away) to get carrots and celery. Ran into a friend...talked for 30 minutes....went back home. I open the door and the house is filled with smoke. I had put the gas up to high, boiled away all the water and was burning the meat in a waterless pot. House stunk for days!

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    1. Hi Sue (waves)- Oh, noes (and LOLs)! And the smell of burnt meat gets into everything. (Yes, speaking from experience, too.)

      Okay, will put you into the 'actually likes eating Peeps' category. Will remember that the next time I get the itch to use them as extras!

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  7. When I saw the Peeps cover, my mind immediately went to "The Force is strong in these delicious marshmallow Jedi!" If you can identify the reference, I'll fling chocolate at you!

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    1. Hey, Gerard! Hmmm... I want it to be Spaceballs, but I know it's not. Did I miss a parody? Do share, oh trebuchet of Lindt!

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