Nom-Able

Carrots? Check.

Nuts? Check.

Healthy? Not so much, but when there’s healthy protein and veggies in a cake, it’s kinda hard not to pretend it’s health — or at least rationalize that if you weren’t eating this, then you’d be eating some kind of Death By Chocolate Chocolate cake, and that’d kill you, so this is definitely healthier and therefore better, so why not have a second slice, hmm?

I have to say that I’ve always hated carrot cake. It’s the raisins, you see — I absolutely hate dried fruit, and raisins are up there with prunes in the “Most Evil Dried Fruit from a Delicious Fruit Ever” category. In fact, in my mind, they duke it out regularly, vying for this most prestigious title, while somewhere else in the world, okra realizes that no one else is competing against it for “Most Evil Vegetable Ever!” this year. Or any year. Ever.

I digress.
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Confession time: food blogging is not my day job. Not only do I not make a dime testing other people’s recipes and posting my photos of them online, but I actually lose about $130 annually keeping this site up for your reading and viewing pleasure. But that’s okay, because I have a day job that can support that habit. That is, until the governor ordered all employees to take unpaid days off; the money I’m losing today, pre-taxes, is exactly the amount it takes to maintain this site for a year.

I’m not complaining, I’m just saying.
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Does anyone else remember the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ads from the early 90s, where two people — one holding a bar of chocolate, the other holding a jar of peanut butter — bump into each other, causing the chocolate bar to drop into the peanut butter jar?

“You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” one exclaims.

“You got peanut butter on my chocolate!”

The new ads for Reese’s special holiday Peanut Butter eggs — where a chocolate Easter bunny finds itself inexplicably attracted to a jar of Reese’s peanut butter — also explores the mystery of how someone thought to put chocolate and peanut butter together to make one absolutely fantastic snack food that changed America forever. (Hershey, the chocolate company that makes Reese’s cups, does not say how Mr. Reese — the dairy man who invented the confection — came up with the idea for peanut butter-covered chocolate, but I think it had something to do with beer or drugs. Most good inventions do.)

All of this digression brings me back to the point at hand: making something chocolate peanut buttery at home. If you’ve picked up the book Top Secret Recipes like I did when I was a kid, you know that the recipe for a “clone” of the iconic Reese’s cups exists (a picture of it is right on the cover!) though it’s really not the same and didn’t satisfy the same sweet spot that the real Reese’s cups always did.

That, however, has changed.
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Wordpress ate this post. Boo-urns!

For the past few days, I’ve simply, flat-out refused to edit this entry in my great strike against WordPress for nomming my (admittedly “nom-able”) entry. Damn it. I typed out an entire long rant about my hatred of raisins, complete with pithy reference to my favorite children’s book of all time, and hit publish. Bam! The entry appeared, just like I wanted it to, so I toddled off to bed, satisfied that I’d done well and gotten a post up on time.

Except the next day, when I went to copy the formatting to post a new entry about Vegan With a Vengeance and muffins, guess what? No entry.

My rage was palpable.

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Hello, my name is Elizabeth, and I’m a curry addict.

I had been sober 30+ days, until fate intervened. When David and I got our income tax rebate from the IRS, the very first thing we did was go to an Indian restaurant called Palace of Asia for curry. (In the spirit of my Lent sacrifice, I had panir masala instead of my usual choice, which was just as nice. ) Before then, however, I’d managed to quit curry cold turkey — no at home curry messes, no Red Thai Curry microwave entrees from Lean Cuisine, no “curry chicken” from the Chinese place (accurately named “No. 1 Chinese Restaurant”) down the street. Oh no, I was not going to continue to live in the grip of this addiction.

Oh hell, of course I was.

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