Glorious pug morning

I walked the pugs to the farmer's market this morning and shared a brioche with them. Usually only Rose will come with me, but this time Lilly condescended to accompany us.

Just as we were finishing, the man at the bakery came running over. He had dropped a croissant on the floor, so he gave it to me for the pugs. For them, of course, this was like winning the lottery.

This is just how Lilly is, she's that lucky person that these things happen to.

I bet she remembers this and I don't have trouble convincing her to come next week. If the baker drops a croissant again I hope he does it sooner, though. It would have been nice to be able to eat my whole brioche myself.

The rare and elusive Pistachio Frog

On Thursday evening we had our fundraiser at the zoo that involves many restaurants. The theme was Year of the Frog. I looked at every booth hoping to find a restaurant that had the nerve to serve frog legs. I didn't see any, although later when I was doing a demo a visitor told me he had eaten some, but it was too late for me to go find it.

However, I did find these lovely pistachio frog macaroons and spent the rest of the evening looking forward to the opportunity to make a post that would be tagged both 'amphibians' and 'baked goods.'

Species-specific abilities

The other night at bedtime, I wanted to open a package of cookies without disturbing Rose, who was curled up on the couch in a way that was A, very cute, and B, very far from where I'd hear her snoring like a bulldozer while I was trying to fall asleep. So I turned the water on very loudly in the kitchen sink and opened the package right next to it so the noise of the running water would drown out the crackly food-wrapper sound.

In a flash, there were two pugs in the room with me. It is obviously not that easy to deceive their acute canine senses and the amazing animal mind.

Nice Cup of... oh you know. Again. (Part 3)

The West Coast legal department's shipment contained a box of Thin Mints. Having discovered the difference between the two versions of the peanut butter cookies, how could I not go out and find a local version of the Thin Mints? I owed it to society. Particularly because when I opened the box of Thin Mints and tried one, there was definitely something not right about it. It was not the cookie I remembered.

The two versions look different (West Coast on the left again, more dimpled), and have different textures (the West has more of a snap to it).

The West Coast version is again inferior. (Hooray!) Much less mint taste, for one thing. I think also less chocolate.

Oddly, despite all these differences, in this case the ingredients list are pretty much identical. I guess it's all in the execution.

The East Coast version, though, is still different from what I remember. It used to be perfectly smooth on top, not dimpled at all, and the chocolate was thicker. But it's OK that you can't go home again in this case because I don't care that much about Thin Mints anyway.

Nice Cup of Milk and a Sit Down, part 2

(Continuing apologies to Nicey and Wifey.)

The original Girl Scout cookie plan was amended when a box of late birthday presents arrived from Wombatarama's West Coast legal office. This permitted the review of one more newfangled cookie (to come later, as we've got too many open boxes of cookies now) as well as a comparison taste test.

Girl Scout cookies are baked by two different companies. So along with our local box of Do-si-dos, we have a box of west coast Peanut Butter Sandwiches. They appear to use different recipes. The ingredient lists are different, and they look different. Do they taste different? Will this be yet another reason for me to bemoan not living in California, sitting by the pool under the palm tree in a t-shirt in March eating Peanut Butter Sandwiches with a glass of milk with a paper umbrella in it?

An interesting accidental experiment occurred at the start of the taste test. I got distracted and didn't realize that I was eating the West Coast cookie (the lighter one, on the left) when I meant to eat the East Coast one first. And at first I didn't know anything was wrong.

But when I tasted the East Coast cookie afterwards the difference was obvious. It's much richer in flavor and more peanutty. Going back to the West Coast one afterwards it's clear that the taste of that one is more dominated by sweet, and much less by peanut and fat.

This makes sense when you read the ingredients. The West Coast lists sugar first, before even flour, and shortening is above peanuts. (Everyone knows that ingredients are listed in order of quantity, right?) The East Coast cookie has the reverse proportion of both pairs, so less sugar and more peanut. It also uses peanut butter rather than peanuts, which I suppose might also matter.

Such a relief. It's nice for the East Coast to win out in the food department once in a while, although it doesn't really make up for the Japanese and Mexican. And the accidental experiment shows that if I did live in California I might not consciously realize what I was missing in the peanut butter cookie department. I might just eventually stop bothering to go look for them in cookie season after a couple of years without realizing exactly why I'd decided they weren't worth the effort. Which would probably be for the best, after all.

One thumb up

The Technical Staff demands that I report his opinion that there was 'nothing wrong' with the Lemon Cremes. But even he could tell that the east coast Do-si-dos were superior.

He had more to say but I told him to get his own dang blog.

Nice Cup of Milk and a Sit Down, part 1

(Apologies to Nicey and Wifey)

As a public service, this year I bought some newfangled kinds of Girl Scout cookies to report on, along with the usual "Do-si-dos" peanut butter sandwich. (I'm not going to talk about how good these are or you'll want some of mine, but more on these in part 2 of my report.)

Lemon Chalet Cremes: After repeated testing I am sorry to have to conclude that these are nasty. The "creme" is very odd. It tastes like nothing at first and then like lemon extract after a couple of seconds, which is disconcerting. The cookies themselves taste like nothing the whole time, and I am unmoved by the chalet and pine trees that are nicely embossed on them.

These are so bad that I took two out to jog my memory while I wrote this post, and only ate about 2/3 of one. I didn't want to finish the rest. This is very much not my usual approach to cookies.

"All Abouts": these are a plain cookie dipped in chocolate on one side. I hoped from the picture that this was dark chocolate, but instead it's that kind of thing the cookie companies call "fudge," which is neither particularly chocolately nor anything like fudge.

These were mostly inoffensive. I kept wanting to eat another, but I don't think that's because they were good. More that I kept waiting to feel like I'd eaten some chocolate.

Now, these cookies turn out to also need another sort of review, because they contain writing. They're embossed on the non-chocolate side with words embodying Girl Scout virtues, like "courage" and "confidence" and "fun."

It seems to me that some of them should say "out of touch with modern business methods." Because you still can't buy Girl Scout cookies on the Web. I read on their web site that troops aren't even allowed to do this on their own.

So, great. Girls are learning these business skills: having your parents sell things for you at work, and standing at a sales table in front of a grocery store all weekend. As far I can tell they're not even getting the nineteenth-century skill of selling door to door, because I've been working at home a lot over the past few years and no one has ever come to sell me any cookies.

And if they're really afraid that internet predators are going to stalk girls via cookie sales, I say: What better modern skill to teach than how to identify and avoid creepy people on the internet?

OK, I'm just cranky because it was so hard to find the danged cookies. A few more concrete remarks:

One way in which neither of these newfangled cookies is as good as Do-si-dos is the way they're packaged. Do-si-dos are wrapped in two rows, so you don't eat more than half a box at a time. In the other two, all the cookies are wrapped together. But I guess since they're not very good, there's not that much risk of eating the whole box at once.

Finally, it's odd that both contain partially hydrogenated shortening but are listed as having zero trans fat. Seems like someone's playing with the rules for rounding down here.

Well, that was disappointing. I'm going to go have some more Do-si-dos now to recover.

The writing life

From The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee:

At his peak, he wrote maybe a hundred fortunes a month. The effort drained him. A decade into his soothsaying career, Lau because stymied by writer's block. He retired as their chief fortune cookie writer in 1995. "He told me it was the hardest job he ever got," said Derrick.

Also see the entertaining story here.