just for fun

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Ants on a Log

Once in a while, my kid goes through an “ants on a log” kick. In our house, “ants on a log” refers to a banana slathered with peanut butter and liberally sprinkled with chocolate chips.

I am willing to overlook the sugar in the chocolate chips in favor the protein and fat in the peanut butter and whatever nutrients a banana has; all I’m coming up with is potassium. (A deficiency in potassium, so I’ve heard all my life from potentially questionable sources, is the reason I sometimes get leg cramps. Let me tell you, I would rather wake up screaming in pain than eat a banana. My husband may feel differently, but so far he’s never smashed a banana into my shriek hole, so I think we’re okay.)

The hardest part of making my version of ants on a log is getting the peanut butter to adhere to the banana. That’s the main reason I switched from cutting the banana lengthwise down the center (which is also difficult; bananas tend to snap around their waistline) to cutting them into disks. Much easier to dollop peanut butter than to spread it, when you’re dealing with a sticky paste and a slippery fruit surface.

It’s also difficult to determine how many chocolate chips is The Right Amount. My daughter and I have wildly differing views on chocolate chip quantity. I would like to say that one chip per disk is enough; Carla would disagree. Did you know that there are approximately 2.5 million ants per human on the earth? That fact makes it sound like a couple million ants are born every time a human appears in a delivery room, but you get the idea. Anyway, my daughter would appreciate that kind of ant-to-human ratio for her ants on a log. Whether we’re talking about insects or chocolate chips, that’s way too many ants.

When I was a kid, “ants on a log” was a horrific combination of celery, peanut butter, and raisins. I do like celery, but I don’t like peanut butter and I abhor raisins, nearly as much as I abhor bananas. Also, if I stop to think about it for more than two seconds, it’s pretty gross to offer children “ants on a log” as a snack. Who wants to eat a log, whether or not it has delicious ants crawling all over it? I mean, xylophages, but as far as I know humans are not xylophagous.

Other important ants-on-a-log questions: What in nature is the peanut butter supposed to represent in this scenario? Who decided this would be a great name for a snack? Whether or not it’s appealing or depicts nature in an accurate way, it’s sure managed to insert itself into American culture.

Now I’m curious about my non-American friends, and whether ants on a log is a thing in your neck of the woods. If not, is there a similar snack food? And, if so, what is it called?

If I’m eating celery – and I do enjoy a celery snack – I’m eating it with ranch dressing or cottage cheese. NOT peanut butter. My mom likes to make “rabbit food” every afternoon around three, which is some combination of celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber, and bell peppers with a little ranch on the side. I don’t know that rabbits eat celery in the wild, but I do delight in envisioning myself as a little bunny nibbling my way through a garden, rather than as a middle-aged human using sliced veggies as a conveyance for absurd quantities of ranch dressing.

While I enjoy the rabbit food, and have tried with middling success to incorporate it into my own home routine, I have fond memories of an altogether different pre-dinner snack when I was growing up. My mother would melt cubes of Velveeta together with some salsa until it was a creamy, spicy puddle, and then we’d use tortilla chips to scrape up every last molten morsel. She called this “chips and dip.” Occasionally since reaching adulthood, I have tried to recreate this snack. I have found that Velveeta is its creamy, delicious best in my memory.

Some snacks are so delicious that they transcend time. Some even appear, fully formed, in the mind of a child without her mother ever mentioning them to her. Specifically, my teenage obsession with microwaved pepperoni. There was nothing like crispy pepperoni, still sizzling in a sheen of its own fat, dipped into yellow mustard. My own child discovered this delicacy on her own – sans mustard – and only my husband’s dismay at a microwave and kitchen smelling like fried pepperoni keeps her from eating this snack on the regular.

She does, once in a while, crisp up some pepperoni and add it to her scrambled eggs. In which case, I overlook all the concerning aspects of delicious, delicious pepperoni and focus only on the high protein goodness of scrambled eggs and the joy of a child who can make herself food.

If ants are going to make a log more delicious, let’s add some ants.

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Measure with Your Heart

I read something recently (a tweet? a recipe blog post? an Instagram post?) that talked about measuring vanilla with your heart. 

I don’t think is the tweet I saw, but it captures the essence of the issue.

It’s so true, I think. Rarely does the listed teaspoon of vanilla do what it needs to do.

But I’ve heard my inner life coach urging me a lot recently to measure other things with my heart. Here’s a partial list:

  • Vanilla – The O.G.
  • Garlic – No recipe recommendation has ever come close.
  • Hot sauce – If your heart says less hot sauce, you do you; my heart almost always says MORE.
  • Chocolate chips – That “1 cup of chocolate chips” line in the ingredients lists? It’s just a suggestion.
  • Mushrooms – More mushrooms will only help.
  • Parsley – My heart says no.
  • Lime juice – I made my mother-in-law a cocktail the other night and she said, “Oh! That’s nice and lime-y!” That’s because I ignore the recipe and follow my heart.
  • Pepper – The pepper grinder at restaurants hates to see me order a salad.
  • Cheese – I’ve never said “that was too cheesy” about anything other than a rom-com. 
  • Wine – As an ingredient, you can often use a bit more than requested; in a glass, let’s all be optimists, shall we?
  • Exclamation points – They add pizzazz! I don’t care that they make me seem slightly unhinged!
  • (Likewise, parentheses – and dashes, of course.)
  • Shampoo & conditioner – I have long hair, and sometimes it needs a little extra.
  • Glitter – It’s going to get everywhere anyway, might as well go all out.
  • Cleaning spray – Let’s get things REALLY clean.
  • Laundry detergent – No way am I filling that cup up to the line for a normal load of laundry. Much better to do it by feel.
  • Library books – Do we have but one reusable bag to fill? Indeed. And yet we fill our arms as well.
  • Blog posts – Could I say something with (far) fewer words? Perhaps. But the heart wants what it wants.
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I’m Not a Nice Person

My mom was visiting over Christmas and I was getting the table ready for dinner, filling water glasses, swooping bread into the bread basket, moving salt and pepper shakers from the counter to the table. You know. 

As I was filling up my mother’s glass with water from the fridge, she said, “I’m not a nice person.”

I was SHOCKED. Shocked. That she would say such a thing, of course. But that she would announce it like this, while we were all milling about in the kitchen before sitting down to eat. 

“What?!” I said. “That’s not true!”

She looked at me with confusion. Then realization dawned.

“I just meant I don’t want ice in my water,” she clarified. “I’m not an ICE person.”

Oh. 

This has since become family code for little misunderstandings. My husband out of nowhere says Carla is not allowed in the basement… but really he said she’s being loud in the basement. Once we clear up that confusion, one of us will say, “I’m not a nice person.” 

Or maybe my husband offers to bring me a snack, but I tell him I’m not in the mood for popcorn… when he brings me popcorn anyway, I will say, “I’m not a nice person.”

That kind of thing.

We have several little code words and phrases,  none of which would make sense to anyone beyond the two of us. Even Carla, I think, is a little perplexed by some of the little inside jokes. 

We were reading a book to her the other night, for instance, and my husband mispronounced the word “candelabra.” 

This is something he and I do automatically, any time it comes up, after watching an episode of The Amazing Race many many years ago in which a contestant mispronounced the word. (Can-DELL-uh-brah.) I don’t know why it struck us as so notable then (it’s not an intuitive word!), or why it’s something that’s had such staying power. 

The other thing we say all the time is, “Just switching things up.” This is something we say in response to someone – including one of us – doing something baffling. Like, why did you Venmo the old babysitter instead of the swim instructor? Just switching things up. Why did that person choose to turn left at a red light? They’re obviously just switching things up. That kind of thing. 

This derives from a road trip we went on with friends a million years ago. Our friend was driving the other car in our group, and he kept passing us on the freeway… and then slowing down so drastically that we had to pass him. When we reached our destination, my husband asked him why he didn’t maintain a constant speed and he shrugged and said, “I just like to switch things up.” It has stuck with us ever since.