Ration Rage (with Gingerbread Recipe!)

(Published at Xcursus.com)

It's been rough going for me lately. The kind of vicissitudinal "rough going" that results from cumulative disappointment and frustration, and manifests itself in many ways that are not terribly conducive to writing, such as:

1) inspirational malaise,
2) almost complete humourlessness, and
3) two sprained arms, resulting from the massive strain of trying to pull my flattened self-esteem out from under a 4000-ton peninsula and its matching set of islands.

However, the funk that has caused a few of the most whiny and boring weeks in the history of my work recently had enough compassion to manifest itself in a fourth and completely unexpected way. That manifestation being:

4) the desire to bake a gingerbread.

Now as I'm sure you've all guessed by now, while I have trouble with life's big determinations like finding and keeping a job or remaining mentally stable for longer than a few months at a time - the little ones, I'm actually pretty good at. Which is why I thought nothing of taking this small task...to task, so I marched right out to my car, where I promptly discovered that I had gotten my eighth parking ticket in the last two months because as an overworked freelancer, I have no concept of what day it is until I hear the fucking street zamboni rolling by at 1:00 and realize I've forgotten to move my car again, and I'm pretty sure that bitching about this wasn't the reason I'd started this sentence, so I'm going to try it again.

As I was saying, I marched right out to my car, got in, and drove to my local supermarket in order to procure the ingredients for the aforementioned gingerbread. I already had the flour, eggs, baking powder, butter, cinnamon, ground cloves and nutmeg - which left only the brown sugar and molasses.* Piece of cake, right?

Well, no.

See, I had to shop for a whole bunch of other things too, AND I hadn't eaten lunch yet. And when Aaron goes to the supermarket when Aaron is hungry, there's always trouble. Not in the usual "don't go to the supermarket when you're hungry" way, in which Aaron purchases just about every conceivable item of foodstuffs that his religion does not prevent him from ingesting, up to and including shit from the "Asian Paradise" aisle that has no discernable description aside from a picture of a cat on the front which makes him a little unsure whether or not it's actually meant for Pokey. I actually thoroughly enjoy that kind of trouble, as it results in weeks of wondering what on earth posessed me to buy Hot Dog-flavored Potato Chips.

No, that only occurs when I am shopping with another. When I am hungry and shopping alone, and I do not have another person to say "OHMYGODSHUTTHEFUCKUPANDJUSTGETTHEGODDAMNEDHOTDOGCHIPS" when I am on my seventh lap around the entire store, on my way to taking three hours to buy a box of macaroni and cheese and a bag of lemons, I tend to...well, take three hours to buy a box of macaroni and cheese and a bag of lemons. This is all due to my fear of failure - I'm so worried that I'll make a bad decision and regret not having tossed in the extra 85 cents for the "broccoli n'cheez" Pasta-Roni, or gotten stuff to make sandwiches or whatever, that I am completely unable to make decisions.

So there I was, at the supermarket, frustrated as all hell by my inability to decide on what to get myself for lunch, and listening to what was by my count, the eighth consecutive Neil Young song being played over the supermarket's loudspeakers. Of course in reality, Neil Young hadn't even gotten to the chorus of the first Neil Young song being played over the supermarket's loudspeakers, but Neil Young is a lot like Wind Chill. If it's a bad day, a minute and a half of Neil Young feels like thirty five.

I eventually decide to get that box of macaroni and cheese (which I won't be able to eat by the time I get home anyway because by then I'll be late for a meeting) and I head off to the "baking needs" aisle to get myself some brown sugar and molasses. The brown sugar proves to be a relatively easy target, as I have scooped up a box within a few seconds, but the molasses...well kick my leg up and call me Fernando Valenzuela but that shit was nowhere to be found.

And of course, I spend close to a half hour looking, too. It was one of those things where you KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY that something is somewhere, yet for some reason you just can't see it. Perhaps I've become molassesblind since Christmas, the last time I had cause to break out my goo jar. I think I'm going to write that again. Goo jar. (tee hee hee!) Or perhaps every company that makes molasses has changed their packaging, so that molasses no longer comes in a jar marked "molasses" but rather in a bag cleverly painted to resemble confectioner's sugar, labeled "confectioner's sugar." But alas my pacing and confused expressions were all to no avail, as contained nowhere within the baking needs aisle was my much-needed molasses. Surely it couldn't be somewhere else, could it? Do people actually use this shit for anything besides baking? Is there someone somewhere putting molasses in his tea? Or on his mashed potatoes?

So now I'm really frustrated. I've just sat through six consecutive days of Neil Young music, I'm hungy as all hell now, and I can't find one of the two items I actually went to the store for, not because I'm missing it (or surely the fifteenth time walking up and down the aisle I'd have seen it) but because it simply doesn't exist where I have strong cause to believe it should. And it was this frustration that caused me to give up the search and move along with my shopping trip, but not before expressing my frustration by giving a relatively strong shove to my shopping cart.

And it was the fifteen laps between the collanders and the corriander that caused me to lose any sense of where I had been when I began "MolassesQuest."

And it was presumably the hunger that caused me to temporarily decide to rely solely on my peripheral vision to determine where my shopping cart was, rather than actually turn my fucking head.

And it was a combination of these three that led to me giving a strong shove to what would turn out to NOT be my shopping cart, but rather a standing display of Skippy Peanut Butter.

So while I'm thinking "oh shit, I've just accidentally knocked over fifty some-odd plastic (thank GOD!) jars of peanutty goodness..." the five other people in the aisle with me are thinking "Oh my god, that dude just went apeshit on the peanut butter. I am fleeing this aisle immediately." Which of course, they all did.

So there's a moral here. And it's not about doing the right thing and picking up all the peanut butter before the staff even gets to the aisle (which I did not, but fuck you, that's a LOT of peanut butter) or about not letting your emotions get the better of you. No, the moral is that the molasses was with the Maple Syrup, and that when I got home I realized that I had missed an ingredient for my gingerbread.

* And kudos to you, reader "EV," because you read my ingredients list and realized that yes, one needs FUCKING GINGER to make a goddamned gingerbread.

So yeah, lousy moral....but really good gingerbread. (eventually.)

AARON'S "APESHIT AT THE SUPERMARKET" GINGERBREAD

1) Figure out how to make that stupid little degree symbol thingy
2) Preheat oven to 350°
2) In a small bowl mix the following:
------- 1 3/4 cups flour
------- 1 tsp Baking Soda
------- 1 1/2 tbsp Ground Ginger
------- 2 tsp Cinnamon
------- 2 tsp Nutmeg
------- 1 1/2 tsp Ground Cloves
------- 1 tsp Allspice
------- 1/4 tsp salt

3) In a large bowl, beat one stick of butter until softish, as though that ever works beyond just getting the butter stuck in the beaters, but whatever, that's what I always do and it works fine.
4) Add one large egg and 3/4 cup (tightly packed) brown sugar and beat until the butter isn't stuck in the beaters anymore, and the whole thing's relatively smooth.
5) Add 1 cup Robust Molasses and beat until well-blended. Regular molasses works fine here too, I just really like the Robust kind. (And if it isn't in the baking needs aisle at the supermarket, which is where it most definitely SHOULD be, check near the maple syrup.)
6) Gradually beat in the flour/spice mixture until everything's in there and it's all nice and smooth.
7) Add 1/2 cup boiling water and beat the brains out of the stuff. I have no idea what purpose the water serves or why it has to be boiling, but every gingerbread recipe I've ever seen has told me to do this, so I figured "screw it, I'm putting it in my recipe too."
8) Grab an 8 or 9 inch pan (square, round, trapezoidenal, whatever) and grease it or line it with wax paper, or both.
9) Pour the stuff into the pan and bake for 40-45 minutes. Of course, oven temperature and climate and sea level and bla bla bla, just poke something into the middle after 40 minutes.
10) Top with vanilla ice cream and a sprinkle of nutmeg and it'll almost be worth having scared the crap out of an elderly hispanic woman with your bizarre and inexplicable seemingly peanut-butter-display induced rage.

ENJOY!!