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!
