Monday Recipe – Brownies

BROWNIES

HISTORY: While I was growing up, my parents were friends with another couple with kids, and my mom made this recipe for them EVERY time they came over, for some unknown reason.  But I think they kept coming because they knew they’d get these brownies.  People’s brains are so tied to food, even when they don’t realize it!  This was also a great go-to for birthday “cake,” especially for my dad, who could live off chocolate bars, fudge, hot chocolate, chocolate ice cream, chocolate croissants, and chocolate-covered cherries.

RECIPE:

Put two squares of butter (REAL butter is always best) into a saucepan on medium heat.  Stir in 5 generous (ie. overflowing) Tbs cocoa and turn off the heat when the butter is melted.  Then add 2 cups of sugar, followed by 4 eggs.*  Stir in 3/4 cup flour, 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp vanilla.  Bake in a greased pan at 350 for 25-ish minutes.  Voila!

With or without frosting, you will never taste better brownies.

 

This is exactly how they look, although I found this picture online. Yum!

* IMPORTANT – it helps to mix these separately and then stir them in quickly.  Once, in my teens I made these with a friend and we added them in slowly to the still hot sugar/butter mixture and ended up with cooked egg pieces before the brownies entered the oven. gross. Haha, we still cooked the brownies, hoping that somehow the cooked eggs would go away!  They didn’t.  Sorry to gross you out.  Just wanted to protect you from making the same mistake.

Chocolate Legos?!

I saw today that a Japanese Designer named Akihiro Mizuuchi came up with chocolate legos.  I think this is pretty ingenius, of course, and lots of fun – but why hasn’t it been done before?  Maybe people thought they would just get mushy and fingerprinted from being handled and played with.  Which of course, they would, and as the article addresses, this is not so much a problem if you like to eat chocolate.  And lick your fingers.  Wash your hands before you get going!

So, how much do these cost? Are they like monogrammed M&M’s, or perhaps more expensive? I would guess they are about 5x more expensive than the M&M’s.  But I can’t find them for sale anywhere.  Did LEGO Corp pay Mr. Mizuuchi to design these? If so, how much did they pay him?  I think that would be my dream job, coming up with mold ideas and designing different shapes of chocolates.  How awesome.

Airplane Food

Last month I flew to Oregon.  I was on Southwest, who, despite the fact that I was late and they gave our seats away (!?!?!), still serves snacks.  They were pretty good – crackers, nuts, ginger cookies.  I remember back when ALL airlines served MEALS if you were flying during a mealtime.  Fortunately, they don’t do that anymore.  I say that because airplane food was seriously nasty.  It made hospital food look like a gourmet meal.  It was like eating a pitiful microwave dinner that had been stored way past its expiration date but they heated it up anyway.  Also, their pungent aroma, released by the airline microwaves, could travel fast. Before your meal even reached you in your seat, you could smell the very first one they had pulled out at the front of the plane.  It was like the sudden smell of the garlic veggie chips that guy sitting behind you in that crowded place pulled out and ate noisily that one time. (or many.)

By the time you forced your olfactory senses to accept the permeating smell, it was your turn to get your meal.  “Not so bad,” you thought as you looked at the meal in front of you.  Maybe some turkey and mashed potatoes or a hoagie sandwich.  An apple.  A cookie.  You tasted a small bite.  Sure, the bread was stale, and getting a bit harder each minute.  “Gee, I’m hungry,” you thought, your psyche urging you to consume it, reluctantly accepting it as digestible.  The lady next to you was eating it, as well as her kid.

So you started eating it along with most other patrons, and it certainly tasted like food, albeit odd food.  Then you looked over to see that the kid had rejected everything but the cookie.  Bad sign.  You then took a bit of the apple and the inside was green.  Insides of apples should be white, you thought to yourself, putting the apple down.  You opened the top bun of your hoagie and notice that the cheese had become part of the bread in a soggy glop, and the meat had greenish round swirls in it.  Why didn’t you notice this before eating half of it??   Who knows. Desperation.  Boredom.  Both, probably, along with a good dose of curiosity.  You then chose to follow the kid’s example and go for the cookie.  He was right – why are kids so smart sometimes?  – it was the only safe item on the tray. Sugar and preservatives make anything taste good.

I should mention that I have experienced some good-quality airplane meals on overseas flights to Asia and Europe over the past 8 years.  They shouldn’t do away with those, for sure.  The U.S. should stick to snacks and beverages.

Maybe I could have asked for the dollar value of the meal instead of the meal itself?  Or would that have been 35 cents?  Regardless, I suppose I won out whenever I had this experience, since I wouldn’t want to eat the rest of the day and consequently didn’t put on any extra calories.