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08 March 2008
What's your "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!" food? The food that, every time you open the box, it's a foregone conclusion that the whole thing is done for?→[More:]Mine's Trader Joe's Croutons.
Mine is Tiramisu from the Publix supermarket bakery. It is delicious and just about better or as good as any fancy restaurant tiramisu. It is intended to serve four. All four servings combined are over 900 calories. I used to buy this Tiramisu when I was pregnant with my second child and eat the entire thing. I only buy it twice or year nowadays. I still eat the entire thing.
Mine is Tiramisu from the Publix supermarket bakery. It is delicious and just about better or as good as any fancy restaurant tiramisu. It is intended to serve four. All four servings combined are over 900 calories. I used to buy this Tiramisu about once a month when I was pregnant with my second child and eat the entire thing. I only buy it twice a year nowadays. I still eat the entire thing. I'll throw a few bites to the kiddies.
M & M's. Plain. Whether it's the tiny optimistically named "fun size" bag or the big one, I plow through it. I really think it's the perfect candy - that crunchy shell and chocolate within. Yum.
Trifle. I love tiramisu too, but can't eat it any more because of the Marsala wine that's in it. Likewise with trifle, I don't eat it if I'm out because it usually contains sherry. But, oh, I can make a pig of myself on home-made trifle.
Then it was a pint of Ben & Jerry's. (Oddly enough, none of the other premium ice cream pints triggered that effect.)
Now it's a loaf of homemade bread fresh from the oven, though I can only eat a few slices before it cools below must-eat-it temperature. I've started making a teeny tiny loaf in addition to the standard size, so I can happily glut myself on steaming hot bread without feeling ill.
OK. I'll give you the version I make when I visit Ohio, because the English one has ingredients you can't get in the US, like Swiss roll and Bird's custard.
Line the bottom of a big glass bowl (a punchbowl or something) with slices of plain vanilla/white cake (what we'd call Madeira cake in England) or ladyfingers. Pour over enough canned or defrosted frozen raspberries to cover it. Make up a packed of raspberry Jello with slightly less water than the directions say (as there is liquid in the raspberries) and pour it over the cake and fruit. Leave it to set.
Then make up two packs of French Vanilla pudding, again using about 25% less milk than normal, as it needs to be fairly firm. (Vanilla pudding is the greatest invention ever in the world of trifle making, removing the nuisance of having to make boiling hot Bird's custard and leaving it to cool).
Pour the pudding over the set first layer. Refrigerate to set.
Whip up enough cream to cover the trifle in a nice half-inch thick layer. Decorate with grated chocolate, or crumbled up Cadbury's Flake if you can get it) or dot it with strawberries/raspberries. Or M&Ms.
Finally - and this is most important - do not let me anywhere near it!
I realized my lack of control with any chocolate-based candy or cookie last year and cold turkeyed them as a late New Year's resolution. I also included ice cream and similar frozen treats although my 'problem' with them wasn't nearly as severe, but broke that part of the resolution with the McDonalds Shamrock Shake last week. I'm still Chocolate Free in '08 (as of Jan. 13th), but the Girl Scout cookieteers haven't come around yet... shudder. I don't know what to do, short of voluntarily registering myself a sex offender so their parents won't let them near me...
Oh god, yes, ice cream. I deliberately didn't get a big freezer in my kitchen to avoid ice cream. But I can still fit it in my tiny freezer compartment. I just make sure I don't buy it.
But Carte d'Or Greek Yoghurt, Honey & Almond ice cream is one of the most delicious things ever invented. If I buy it, I end up going back and having just one more spoonful until it's all gone.
Pretty much most food. If it wasn't for the exercise, I'd (still) be a right porker. My solution to uber-tempting food is to not have it in the house. No loaves of bread, no pizza, nothing I can easily pick at. If I want bread, I'll buy an empty baguette because once it's gone it's gone, unlike a loaf which I can take more slices from.
But: pizza, pringles, crisps, bread, bottle of wine, tub of ben+jerries, any kind of chocolate (apart from the hideously sweet American stuff), double pack of Scotch eggs (mmm!), any large portion of stuff that fits in the massive bowls I have at home that would normally be two portions of food.
Potato chips, preferably Cape Cod chips, but any chips are fair game. Fritos. A pint of Haagen-Daz butter pecan or coffee ice cream, or most any quality ice cream.
I don't really like hard-boiled eggs, but damn, that Scotch egg photo may be the most gorgeous food photo I have ever seen.
My eat-it-all foods definitely vary depending on mood. Lately it's been sesame rice crackers. Pepperidge Farm cookies sometimes, Ben & Jerry's sometimes, all sorts of other things sometimes. Almost always sugar or carbs, though.
I can easily get through a packet of Tim Tams, variety irrelevant, if slamming with a cappuccino or mocha. Yuuuummmm.
And Haribo strawbs. The whole packet in a matter of minutes (I'm a bad vegetarian sometimes).
I've devoured whole packets of dried apricots a couple of times before (the hard ones), but.... not good. Not good at all. Quite possibly the worst farts, ever, anywhere.
Well, rainbaby, I've never made Scotch eggs, so I'm relying on instinct/guesswork, but:
Yeah, I think the breadcrumbs need something to glom onto. It doesn't need to be sausage (or soy-sage), though. It's probably possible to adhere some crumbs to an egg by dredging the egg in flour or cornstarch, sluicing it through an eggwash, then dredging in crumbs, but I suspect that they wouldn't stick well.
Even if they did stick, though, you'd just have a deep-fried egg. For me, it's the thick spicy layer of whatever that makes this snack so appealing.
When Barrett at Too Many Chefs tried out a vegetarian Scotch egg with soy crumbles, he found they were too, uh, crumbly to adhere well, so he added beaten egg to the mixture.
In the comments of Barrett's entry, someone described an egg wrapped in stuffing. Mmmm. That sounds pretty fantastic to me. I'm in the comments there, too! Hi! Obviously, my interest in Scotch eggs is long-standing... alarming, even.
I think one could make a very nice faux-Scotch egg by wrapping the egg with spicy smashed potato. Here are tiny quail eggs tucked into leftover purple-potato salad, then breaded in panko and deep-fried. Sounds great.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
