Halloween Candy Sorting Memory

Turn trick or treat bag upside down and waterfall all contents out on the floor. Create Majestic Candy Mountain mountain by raking in and carefully mounding up candy that has fallen on sleeping cat, into heater, or close to sister's pile. Get in vicious slappy fight with sister due to disagreement over whether that Snickers bar is yours. Sit back and quietly take in the splendor.

Grandmother swoops down and grabs all Rice Krispie Treats, apples, and anything that might contain "Razor blades and that awful drug that made the girl jump off the building." Put on giant show of sorrow, but if she steers clear of the chocolate it's no biggie. Apples? Feh. Homemade treats--nice, but they'll only slow down The Sort.

Get to work. Look for mini Mr. Goodbars, mini Krackel bars, Snickers bars, Almond Joys, Mounds, Hershey kisses, Pixie-Stix, Tootsie Rolls, Tootsie Pops, M&Ms, butterscotch hard candies, tropical lifesavers, butter rum lifesavers, Goobers, and Chunky bars. All go in the "Best Candy" Heap.

Take a breath. Survey Majestic "Best Candy" Heap. Survey sister's candy mountain. Note, with quiet satisfaction, that you got more candy this year.

Grandmother swoops down and says, "Share a little bit of that with your sister." This is grim. She better not be looking at the Majestic "Best Candy" Heap, and she's watching to see if you only share the kind of candy she knows that you and your sister don't like. Grudgingly, push over a small pile of refugee items you have already classified--by your own personal taste standards--as "Okay Candy." This includes Reese's peanut butter cups, Kit-Kat bars, Raisinets, Whoppers, Junior Mints, York Peppermint Patties, some salt water taffy, and Hershey's mini milk chocolate bars and special dark chocolate bars. Sister pushes special dark chocolate bars back over with a look of disgust.

Grandmother takes ALL special dark chocolate bars and disappears, claiming that she is going "to make dinner." The sound of rustling candy wrappers accompanied by the beginning music of "The Edge of Night" makes you doubt this.

Continue to form the final two piles, the "Okay Candy" pile--which now also includes Good 'n Fruity, red licorice whips, Smarties, SweeTarts, Sugar Daddys, non-pareils, stunt candy (candy cigarettes, wax lips), root beer barrels, wint-o-green lifesavers, and regular-flavor lifesavors--and the "Who Cares" candy pile.

Go into bathroom with sister and turn light out to see if sparks appear when you bite down on a wint-o-green lifesaver.

Return to find that one Chunky candy bar is missing from your "Best Candy" pile. Go and look mournfully at Grandmother.

The "Who Cares" candy pile is a hell of a bad scene. Raisins. Tiny toothbrushes packaged with toothpaste (yeah, yeah Mr. Larsen--we know you're a dentist, give it a rest). Some kind of stale chocolate chewing gum. Yards of dull lollipops. Black licorice. Necco wafers. Horehound drops from the elderly lady next door. Shudder. The devil's candy.

Trade "Okay" candy with sister to get more "Best Candy." Stuff mouth with mini Mr. Goodbars.

Grandmother swoops down and grabs 3/4 of Majestic "Best Candy" Heap to dole out in school lunches.

For next month, every member of household's breath smells like chocolate--including the cats, strangely.

Beat the Egg Whites into WHAT?

THE LANGUAGE OF RECIPES
I read a lot of recipes this weekend--in magazines and in My Ancient Family Recipe Boxes. While My Ancient Family Recipe Box recipes have some problems, I think I prefer them to the ones I read in magazines:

1) From a magazine: "Beat the egg whites into voluptuousness." Huh? You used to "Beat egg whites until stiff" or "Beat egg whites until they form stiff peaks." I do not think I have ever met a voluptuous egg white. I beat them until they loll about bosomily in a negligee eating bonbons?
2) The directions for some recipes are eight paragraphs long. This is seven paragraphs too many.
3) In contrast, the recipes in My Ancient Family Recipe Boxes assume the cook already knows how to make the dish--key ingredients are often left out, many give NO directions, sometimes the oven temperature is not specified. Sometimes this works, sometimes not so much.

SOME RECIPES OF NOTE
Take a gander at these recipes from My Ancient Family Recipe Boxes. You will detect a strong flavor of Depression-era cooking (i.e., eggless, butterless, milkless--possibly features grasses and bark). Please note: "Rubber donuts" do not include rubber; they are called this because they flip themselves over (BOUNCE!) when they're frying (I'd stand far back during this process, holding a fire extinguisher, if I were you). The apple crisp recipe on the bottom meets my gold standard for directions. Short, simple, to the point. WHAT I MADE THIS WEEKEND
1) Far Left: "Chow Mein Chewies." Easiest cookie ever. Yes, it DOES look kind of gross (if you closed your eyes, you'd like it right away). I assure you, it's a wee symphony of salty cashews and sweet, sweet chocolate.
2) In the Middle: George Washington Hats. The George Washington Hat on the top turned out pretty well. I put too much jam into the one on the bottom, so we'll just call it a Jam Stripey. What the hell.
3) Far Right: A basic tollhouse cookie on the top; a freakish tollhouse cookie on the bottom. The last batch all turned out like the ones on the bottom. They're very good, but I think I inadvertently flattened them out by adding too much baking soda. So, we'll just call them: "Tollhouse Lacies." See how that works?

This is Step One of many steps in the George Washington Hat Experience (a recipe that leaves out flour amounts, measurements, and oven temperature--fortunately, I was a ninja at making these when I was nine and I remember):
BASEMENT BUREAU DRAWER FINDS
I loved hearing about what other people found in places they moved into. Here are photos of the stuff I found. The elderly woman made rugs. I think I'll resist the impulse to make a rug, too. That just smacks of the plot of a bad Lifetime movie called "The Haunting of Sparkle Plenty" in which a frazzled heroine (who formerly played a role on Beverly Hills 90210) starts making rugs, gets visited by the restless spirit of the old lady who has a secret beyond the grave, and starts spooking around wearing the old lady's clothes and trying to solve the mystery. Not a good idea.

BUREAU!
GRANDMA STUFF!
PRETTY FAN!
DAINTY AS YOU WANNA BE!
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION!
STITCH BLUEPRINTS AND THREAD!WILDFLOWER SAMPLER PROVIDES A NEW NICKNAME FOR LILY--ZEPHYR LILY! IF I TRY TO MAKE THIS RUG, I'LL BECOME A LIFETIME MOVIE!
(Anyone left? Anyone still here? Who's snoring? Who just threw that spitball?)