When I was growing up, my mother—like many others who manage the household food budget—was careful not to let food spoil. Certainly not produce, but of course not dishes that had been prepared. There is good luck in leftovers, as they say, so we had a lot of meals where we pulled out all the nearly-dead-but-still-living things in the fridge and made stir-fry or soup or whathaveyou with them for dinner.
The "not throwing food away" mentality extended to "food" we got when we went out as well—you know, ketchup and soy sauce packets from fast food places, little pots of wasabi if we bought California rolls at the grocery store. I mean, we can't very well throw them away, can we?! This of course explains why I think that mold can just be "cut away" and the salvaged item eaten in a jiffy on the day it's discovered—and also the reason why I had the toughest time throwing away packets of colored sugar pellets that came in boxes of gluten-free baking mixes I'd been using since last February.
What do you even call those? (OK, the box says they're called "sanding sugar".) I mean...I think they're sweet? Maybe they're made of "sugar"? I'm not sure. But the important point was that it was "food", not unlike sugar, so of course I should be able to find a way to use them, no? Like maybe use them to top off a cup of Greek yogurt in order to turn a perfectly healthy snack into some artificial grossness, or use them to sweeten herbal tea, so that something that was supposed to help me unwind would now end up giving me some grave illness. I don't know.
But I've been watching all these food documentaries lately, and I've noticed the weather warming up—so I thought to myself: Self, you need to stop eating crap; you need to get that Summer Body that all the online listicles keep talking about! (Because apparently a Summer Body is supposed to appear around Summer Solstice and then gradually dissolve into ugly holiday sweaters.)
So I finally went and threw away all the packets of "sanding sugar" I'd collected over time and welcomed the warming weather with open arms. (I'm pretty certain my mother would wonder why the hell I didn't throw those packets away months ago.) But that of course meant baking another batch of gluten-free cookies, to celebrate! And if you know anything about me, you know that I am so cooking/baking-challenged that I need a mix even to bake cookies. But the adjustments I made to the required ingredients were so genius that I have to record them here:
What Was Formerly Known as "Snowman Buttons" (but this product was discontinued a while ago and it's kind of a mystery why I still have it)
1 box of Glutino cookie baking mix
7–8 tbsp of olive oil
1 overripe banana
1–2 tbsp soy milk
Lots of nutmeg
Mix and bake at 350ºF for 10 minutes and then take out of the oven 2 minutes later. This will solve all the problems of crumbly dryness that I had been bringing upon these poor guys for the last, well, year.
Apparently I'd purchased 48 boxes of these damn mixes at a deep discount of about $2.25 per box—when the retail price is $5.50. Hooray! Now if only I'd found a way to use those sanding sugars... Well, at least now I'm a step closer to getting that Summer Body in time for Thanksgiving.
