It’s that time of year when nothing in my closet is appropriate for the weather. It’s too cool for my short-sleeved cotton blouses and too hot for a sweater over them. It’s too cool for shorts, too hot for corduroys. It’s too warm for a hat, too cool to go hatless, too chilly in the mornings for sandals, too warm at noon for shoes. It’s also that time in my life when clothing that fit just fine when I packed it away last spring no longer fits my ever changing shape. Things are “settling” as the doctor so gracefully put it.
I was griping about this to J who declared, “I know! Even things that fit don’t fit.” Not only do we have nothing comfortable to wear, we’ve both discovered a newfound inability to cook. (The fact that we both had our first failure with brownies may have a direct link to our clothes not fitting properly, but we’re ignoring that on the basis that life is currently more uncertain than ever so we’ve opted to eat dessert first.) Anyhow, giving in to an urge for chocolate in the form of brownies, I opened a box of mix, followed the directions, and produced a pan of something akin to brownies but, well, crumbier. It was impossible to cut the baked result without having the bars disintegrate into a mass of sticky crumbs. They were delicious crumbs, mind you, but they were impossible to pick up without a fork. I took some over to J’s.
“I can’t cook anymore,” I told her, offering a pile of brownie crumbs to her on a plate.
Her husband snorted. “We still have our teeth,” he said.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said after he stopped laughing. “Who can screw up a boxed mix?”
“You?” he ventured.
J took the brownies, forked a few mashed crumbs into her mouth and pronounced them delicious. “We’ll just eat them with silverware,” she said.
A few weeks later she called me on the phone. “Remember those brownies you made that came out all wrong?”
I hooted. “Have you topped that?”
“Well,” she said, “I made the mix according to the directions but when I poured the batter into the pan, it seemed awful thin. So I checked the box and realized I’d put in a cup of water instead of a ¼ cup. I thought, ‘I can fix that,’ so I grabbed the container of flour and added some. Only it wasn’t flour. It was pancake mix.”
I could hear her husband hoo hoo-ing and ha ha-ing in the background. “I’ll bring you one,” she said. (You know what they say about paybacks…)
The brownie was surprisingly good, especially with a scoop of ice cream to ease it down. Still, if these two examples are anything to go by, we may both be changing our shapes once again. I understand raw foods are really healthy. Why just last week a headline exclaimed that a woman who went raw lost half herself. I hope if I lose half of myself, it’s the half that can’t fit into my current clothes.
photo credit: seriouslygood.kdweeks.co
