Fold Gently

To my knowledge I have never had a problem making fudge.  It has always been relatively easy, you measure, pour, heat, stir, remove from heat, stir some more, and pour again....voila!  Fudge! 

For some reason this year it is not going quite how I remember it and my inability to be able to produce anything even remotely resembling tasty, creamy, delicious fudge is causing me to have a mid-cooking crisis. 

Maybe I'm not a very good cook at all.  Maybe everyone around me that has ever eaten a morsel of anything I have ever cooked has secretly been humoring me while in their heads they contemplate all the excuses they will use in future to avoid hanging out with me.  Maybe I've just been kidding myself.  Oh NO...maybe I am the woman that cannot knit even though she loves to do it and so every year her friends are forced to smile over "hand made" scarves that are too short, or gloves that would fit Edward Scissorhands, or sweaters that are supposed to be for a friend's new baby but have enough arm holes for the family pet!!!!

This is how my mind works, people.  As I stood at my counter staring at the solid chocolate cinder block that I had created in my kitchen my entire love and adoration of all things culinary hung in the balance.  If a stranger had broken into my house and held me at gunpoint at that moment I could have beaten him to death with that five pound cocoa flagstone...then to spite myself and in a fit of self loathing I could have eaten the evidence before the cops arrived (al la Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter ). 

Just as my total panic at having discovered that I actually don't know how to cook reached it's boiling point The Man had the misfortune of coming home from work. 

"Hi honey, what's for dinner something smells excellent!" is what he swears he said....but what I heard  was actually more like:

"I'm home, what disgusting concoction have you brewed in that tainted cauldron you wicked old hag?"

Without ever taking my eyes off of the brown block of Fudged up fudge I blurted in a high pitched wail:

"Order Chinese!! I don't know how to cook anything!!!  My life is a sham!!!!"

I then turned tail and ran into the bedroom to fold laundry...because surely I must still be capable of doing that.

To his credit, The Man did not acknowledge my outburst, nor did he ask why I was making new free weights out of Tollhouse chocolate chips, he simply chiseled a piece of the brown brick off with a butcher's knife and ate it. 

"The flavor is really good!!" he declares enthusiastically "It's just a little hard...maybe it cooked too long...someone with as much as you have going on is bound to make a mistake sometimes!  This just makes me love you more because now I know you are human!"

Back off, ladies, he is mine.

Reluctantly, I finally managed to reenter my kitchen later that evening after we ordered absolutely inedible pizza from the pizza parlor down the street.  Not only one inedible pizza, but two since I called and told them the pizza they sent was inedible and they decided to fix it by sending me another of the same caliber so I would have a matching set. 

If they can get away with being that bad and people still pay them for their food, one day of being incapable of making fudge is surely not insurmountable....

And if the few people that I do call my friends have secretly been lying to me all these years when claiming to enjoy something I have prepared for them....well, then I must say they are pretty darn good liars and I am happy to have them on my side!  Ha!  This is what passes for looking on the bright side in my book. 

You should have heard the sound that slab of concrete confection made when it hit the bottom of the trash can....I think there was an Earthquake in Japan on that day.  Or, in the least, the birds outside took hasty flight and the groundhogs that live under the house looked up in terror. 

Sheesh...