Life is Like A Box of Chocolates

Chocolate has been eaten all over the world for hundreds and hundreds of years. Cacao beans have been used in drinks, sacred rituals, and foods, and the cacao fruit is believed to have been fermented into some sort of alcohol beverage. People ate cacao products for medicinal, nutritional, and even aphrodisiacal purposes. Today, chocolate is everywhere; whether it's a Hershey's Kiss, a cup of hot chocolate, or chocolate covered strawberries, it's not hard to find. People try to justify eating chocolate with "oh, it lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, and it's high in antioxidants." My roommate just told me that chocolate releases endorphins, so I guess that's why chocolate does make you feel happier. And okay, so all of that may be true, but I still think society has gone a little overboard with the whole chocolate thing.

I walked into a candy store on the Fourth of July last summer with a few friends and we ended up having a somewhat lengthy conversation with the woman behind the counter. She ran the store and made all the chocolates herself. We saw chocolate covered strawberries, bananas, pretzels, cherries - all the normal stuff. Then we saw the chocolate covered bacon. Mind you, this was not the chocolate covered bacon at the fair where there's a chocolate bar with little, itty-bitty bacon bits in it. This was a giant piece of meaty bacon dipped in chocolate, as if chocolate or bacon didn't have enough sugar/fat on its own. Now, I get the whole contrasting sweet and salty idea, but chocolate covered bacon just doesn't sound appealing to me. If the chocolate bacon wasn't enough, the woman started telling us about a chocolate covered jalapeño pepper she makes; apparently, that was one of the top three most popular items in her store. (I don't understand. And, in case you were wondering, bacon flavored soda was the most popular item in this store. WTF.)  Other bizarre things I've heard of being dipped in chocolate: crickets, carrots, squid, potato chips, chick peas, the list goes on...

It's gotten to the point where certain foods combined with chocolate are unnecessary and gross. People use chocolate both appropriately and inappropriately, just like commas. I'm not saying that I know how to use commas in the correct manner, and I'm also not one to judge whether some one else is using chocolate in an acceptable fashion. However, I will say that chocolate and squid are like two independent clauses that should never be combined with a comma, or in this case chocolate. Some people use commas excessively, some use them inappropriately, and others just don't know when to use them. If you're dipping squid in chocolate you are obviously an excessive and unnecessary comma user, metaphorically speaking.

If you haven't completely lost your appetite, here's a chocolatey snack.

Milk Chocolate S'mores Popcorn
Popcorn dipped in milk chocolate
Popcorn dipped in caramel
Graham Cracker (small) pieces
Mini Marshmallows
Peanuts (optional)
(Slightly altered recipe from Harry & David's Milk Chocolate S'mores Moose Munch)

Enjoy :)

Caramel Apples

A few people on my floor and I went apple picking this weekend. It was pretty fun, despite the fact that it was cold and rainy the whole time. With a bushel of apples, we returned to the farm stand and bought hot apple cider and fresh donuts (delicious!) and listened to a small band playing Irish folk music. With so many apples, we have to think of creative ways to eat them so that we don't get tired of just eating plain old apples. The first thing we decided to try was caramel apples.

I'm not talking about the professional looking caramel apples on a stick you might find at the fair. We are far too lazy for that. Instead, we heated up a cup of caramel in the microwave, sliced up some apples, and dipped them in the caramel. (We had peanut butter too.) It was fantastic. While I sat there eating my apple, I was trying to think of ways that I could relate this to the public sphere or Barlow or something like that, but nothing came to me. I just kept getting side tracked. I started thinking about who people are on the Internet versus who they are in person. And then (don't judge me) I thought of this scene in Shrek.

This got me thinking about layers. I thought of how a majority of people represent themselves fairly accurately on the Internet but then there's always that moment when you see something on your friend's profile that's a complete misrepresentation of who they are. Although their core personality is portrayed by their profile, they've also got that extra 'layer' where they (intentionally or unintentionally) act or talk like someone they're not. Well, then I thought, that's kind of like a caramel apple. There's that outside layer of caramel that kind of masks and enhances the apple, the core of the snack. In this instance, the apple is someone's personality and adding the caramel is like padding a resume or slightly altering one's profile on the Internet. I admit, this is a questionable comparison, but it's all I got...besides this picture of us waiting for our cider to cool down.