On Sweets - #25 - 3/5/2020
On Sweets
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Today's essay was either going to be about sweets or my recent Tinder/Hinge addiction. I'll save that for another day.
This past Saturday, I went to Peets coffee in Larchmont village and got a white chocolate hot cocoa with whole milk and whipped cream. Drank that, guzzled it, down in my belly. Went home, got invited to go to Portos in Burbank. Drove to Portos and thought, "Well hey, how many times in the next year will I ever be in the area for Portos?" So I got in the dessert line and you bet I ordered two guava turnovers, two coconut turnovers, one Mexican flan, and a mango mousse with a passion fruit center on a nice caramel base. And a mango empanada to top it all. Friends arrived. "Hey, let's order some food." Sure, it wasn't like I thought we were making a dessert run or anything. Actual food? Okay then. "Let's get the chicken milanesa." Savory, tasty, a nice mouthful of sweet chicken in a gourmet sauce between two pieces of fresh sweet bread. And I thought, "Man, that mango mousse sure does look good." Got a spoon and started going ham on that mousse. Boy, was it good. Alright, I guess it's time to leave - "Hey, since we're all here, let's get something sweet, right?" "Sure - no problemo with me-o." Smoothies? Yeah; horchata. "Can I get the flavors mixed? Yes? Great - I'll go with a horchata-mango mix smoothie... yes, large." And who knew, caramel at the bottom? Perfect. "Now let's all go to the Griffith Observatory and check out LA's landscape at night." At the top, can it be, yes, yes it is - cold. I was wearing shorts. Sugar got to my skin. Got back home. Went to bed in a sugar rush. Woke up late, got a superfruit nutrition drink packed with sugar. "Got to mix it with something," I said to myself." Juices, juices, juices. Guava nectar juice mixed with Tropicana antioxidant fruit juice? Mix it! And maybe just one turnover. No, no, no, you can't do that. Okay, one can't hurt. A guava turnover, deeelicious. Lunch, now? Wow, that was fast - ah, got to use this clam chowder before it goes bad. A nice heaping of clam chowder, just one bowl. On a sunny 78 degree day. Shorts weather. That was good clam chowder, still hungry though - meh, finish the clam chowder. And a piece of that flan, why not?
This is the biggest 12 hour sugar rush I've had in awhile. So. Much. Sugar. A lot of sugar. One of my friends posed me a question: "Do you prefer the taste of sweet? Or of savory? Like a sweet-tasting umami flavor versus straight sweet from a cupcake-thing?" My honest answer: sweet. Savory doesn't give my brain thrusters a zing. Or make me crave more and more until my stomach hurts. I can eat ribs, but eventually ribs get's thrown in the corner while chocolate takes a seat at the table.
God, I love chocolate. Chocolate should actually be thrown in to a high reaching cabinet that I can't reach. Kind of like that story with Toad and Frog where Toad kept eating all the cookies and had no will power to stop so Frog put them in a box, tied a string around it, and put it in a high area. Eventually Toad said, "Well can't I just get a ladder, a piece of scissors, and open the box with my hands?" "You're right," said Frog. So he threw the box of cookies into the lake. Now that's what I call "story."
Any way, 12 hour sugar rush? Let's talk about my 1 month rush. My sweet tooth wished it had someone like Frog last year in May. I was addicted to chocolate. I ate so much chocolate. Imagine me grabbing a full Hershey's bar, like 7 of them, and eating a full bar almost every day. Sometimes missing a day here or there, but every day, I consumed a chocolate bar like my weight was just a number. Hershey's Symphony chocolate bars, tropical Ghirardelli chocolate bars, Ghirardelli sweet squares of various flavors, raisin-infused Canterbury British chocolate bars, Hershey's kisses, Lindt chocolate with Mango, Lindt's 90% dark chocolate, Ghirardelli 75%. And the guy I was living with at the time, as some of you may recall, was a CBD-oil chocolate bar salesman, like straight out of Spongebob. This guy made CBD chocolate bars in his kitchen and sold them through his website and attends the annual High Times convention in San Bernardino (digression: he wanted me to sell his CBD chocolate at his stand since it was around the time I was there; never did it though because I had other, higher-paying work to attend to). Ate his CBD chocolate bars and all in all, I ate a sizable chocolate mass throughout the month of May. A concrete brick made of chocolate. All month, 5 or 6 days a week, I ate chocolate right after dinner. Wrappers in my bed, peanut crumbs in my sheets. It eventually got bad when I realized the stack of wrappers on my nightstand was turning into a pile. I was too self-conscious to cross the living room and go to the kitchen and take a two-hand pile of chocolate wrappers to the bin. "That would look bad," I thought - "Oh... it is bad." Couldn't believe I got to that point. It must've done something to my body. Gained 7 pounds, thinned out my hair, produced erratic behaviour. At that time, I was eating so much chocolate.
Nowadays, I have chocolate in the house. However, if it's there, I put it in the fridge and tell myself that I have to "earn" this chocolate. Because if I don't earn it, then it's not worth it. And recently I've upped my price tag on chocolate. I now buy expensive, exquisite chocolate. The type of chocolate you'll find on the internet for $9 that's the size of four credit cards. The flavors though! Rum-coconut-pineapple dark chocolate from an Irish chocolate company. America's Chocolate Champions of 2018 and 2017 making Ginger-infused chocolate in Scottsdale, Arizona sourcing cocoa from the remotest regions of the Uyilah river in Africa. So if you have any super nice chocolate to recommend... or to give away, hand it to me. I'll be glad to have a little bit.
My sweets addiction goes haywire every once in a while. Yet it wasn't until I listened to that song from the Beatles called "Savoy Truffles" that I really thought about the damage of sweets on not only my body, but also my teeth. Mind you, I was AirBnB hopping, so my dental hygiene wasn't up to par at the time. It was kind of "eww". But "Savoy Truffles" saved my mouth, I'll tell you that.
Sweets. They're amazing.
Savoy Truffle by the Beatles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9EaBjFvQpc
News.Video.Poem
1. 'The Last of Us' Series in the Works at HBO From 'Chernobyl' Creator Craig Mazin, Neil Druckmann
2. Daniel Tosh, in my opinion, is an underrated comic. Still doing Tosh.O though.
3. Modern Man - a stand-up poem performed by George Carlin, my favorite comedian.