Oreos

Okay ... one more. Another post about a diet staple from my early years ...

My mother loved chocolate--in just about every form. The only exception I can think of? The chocolate-covered insects "someone" once gave to her.  Something about a chocolate-covered grasshopper just put her taste buds in sleep mode. (Not mine--I kind of liked the chocolate mixed with the crunch.)

Her other favorite food was salmon. My older brother once found (online?) a huge piece of chocolate in the shape of a salmon. She loved it. I think it strengthened her already firm belief in heaven.

When we were growing up, we always had some Hershey's chocolate syrup in the house--mixed with the vanilla ice cream for dessert (not Dad--he wasn't all that fond of chocolate--not sure why--but it was his only failing as a human being). In our day it came in a can.

And, now and then, Mom would bring home a package of Oreos and dole them out (to us--not to herself) as if they were pieces of eight.

But it turns out she was bringing home the Oreos more regularly that we'd suspected. My younger brother, ever the food explorer, found that she was hiding bags of them in the pressure cooker, which she stored in a low cabinet behind a bunch of other stuff. (We rarely used the pressure cooker; thus ...)

My brother eventually revealed the secret to me (After how long? I've often wondered), and we quickly realized we had a Golden Goose. Mom could not complain that her stash of Oreos had diminished because then she would have to admit that she'd had a stash!

On the Dark Side: We couldn't eat too many of them because if (say) we ate an entire package, then Mom's anger would trump her caution, and our treasure trove would disappear. So ... a delicate balance.

I ate Oreos in pretty conventional style, separating the two chocolate halves, scraping the icing against the edge of my lower teeth until the white sweetness was (mostly) gone, then eating the halves. Rapidly.

Mom always ate them slowly, judiciously--as if speed of eating somehow affected the caloric intake. (Dad did the same thing with dry roasted peanuts--one of his favorites. He would eat one, two, at a time--so ... prudent. Of course, he would consume the entire jar in a single sitting.)

Anyway, I liked Oreos--though I was not an addict like my mother. I pretty much liked every kind of cookie, though, as I think about it, I believe peanut-butter cookies were my favorite. (Oh, no! This means yet another post on this topic!)