Today, my Incredibly Healthy But So Darned Nice You Can’t Hate Her coworker and I engaged in a little food pornography.
We read recipes to each other. Dessert recipes.
It started when I had a craving for an obscure little dessert bar which is only served at banquets at a little banquet hall in East De Pere, WI. They’re called East End Bars. I don’t know why. Maybe the Pet Shop Boys had something to do with it. I dunno.
So we commenced searching the internet for a recipe. She has forsaken sweets for the last decade but apparently gets osmosis benefit by smelling things and reading their recipes.
I, on the other hand, am in complete and utter sugar withdrawal, exacerbated by the fact that our company threw a cookout today, where our managers grill our food and cater to us, following some kind of corporate initiative to make us feel appreciated or something. I did not fare too poorly nutritional wise. They had disgusting canned fruit salad that I passed on and for dessert I grabbed the low fat lemon thingy.
Bad move. Once that sugar hit my system, it was like the bell had run at the last day of school. My blood cells went “YIPPEEE!!!!” and ran around in a hyper daze. And I liked it. That’s the worst part. I start walking tall and my thought patterns are on the Autobahn. You’ve just gotta talk real fast when your thoughts are zipping by at 140 KPH, in sweet little German-engineered cars that cost more than my yearly income.
And then came the inevitable. After about fifteen minutes, we started slowing down. Senior citizens were passing us in Nixon-era cars with “Honk if You Love Bingo” bumper stickers on them. They were flipping us off in their rearview mirrors.
So like any junkie, I started thinking about my next fix. And that’s when the insidious East End Bars popped into my brain. So IHBSDNYCHH Coworker (how’s THAT for an Acronym? Huh? Weetabix: More Acronyms than you can shake a stick at.) started searching for the recipe on various sites.
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know!”
“Are you sure that’s the name?”
“I don’t know!”
“Does it have coconut in it?”
“I don’t know! I don’t like coconut and I like those, so I’m thinking not.”
“What about nuts?”
“I don’t like nuts either. There’s chocolate on the top…. I think. Something dark, something light… it’s very ying and yang. It’s a ying yang kind of bar.”
“How do you spell that?”
“No! The name is East End Bar. I’m just talking here.”
There is no evidence of “East End Bar” on the internet. By now, my brain had devolved into comatose state. It was rapidly filling out Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes ads because we may already have won $10,000,000,000! but it keeps getting those little magazine stamps stuck to its tongue.
I sent out two emails in rapid succession to various sources, asking if they possibly had a recipe.
“Maybe it’s called something else? Are you sure it’s East End Bar? Here’s one with brown sugar.”
“No… the inside is white.”
“But it’s not coconut?”
“No.”
“But you don’t remember”
Another coworker piped up.
“Maybe it’s a Mounds bar? I had a recipe for homemade Mounds bars once.”
“It doesn’t have coconut in it.”
“What does it have in it?”
“I. Don’t. Know! It’s just good. It’s got goodness in it. That’s all. And if I know me, it’s salty and sweet and maybe it tastes a bit like Russell Crowe with possibly Diet Coke.”
After fifteen minutes of that, IHBSDNYCHH Coworker gave up and just started looking at interesting recipes.
“Oooh, how’s this one sound… peanut butter and chocolate filling with crumbled chocolate chip cookie crust, covered in milk chocolate and then drizzled with caramel?”
The other coworker prairie-dogged over the wall. “Are you sure that the white part doesn’t have coconut in it?”
Finally, I called the damn banquet hall.
“Um, hi, I’ve got some questions about your East End Bars?” They patched me through to the chef, who turned out to be an 80-year-old former church supper coordinated named Mavis.
“What do you want to know?”
“Is that their name? East End Bars? Are they called anything else?”
“Yup, that’s their name. That’s the only thing I know them by.”
“What’s in them?”
Here’s the poop: graham cracker crust, white part in the middle is a mixture of butter (When you say Wisconsin, you’ve said it all!) and powdered sugar, and the top is a combination of melted chocolate chips and peanut butter. Doesn’t sound as good in writing, but trust me, you’d be selling your son’s birthright for those mofos. She wouldn’t give me the specific recipe though. She did tell me that the recipe originated in a hundred year old church cookbook, but she wasn’t sure which church.
At that point, I went outside and got another low fat lemon bar. This was too much work already. GD cravings.
Then IHBSDNYCHH Coworker found the Anti-East End Bar… the bar to end all bar cravings. It’s here . You’ve just got to know that recipe was developed in the kitchen of a mobile home during halftime of the Nascar races.
I mean… bacon and Tang. It’s like the food of astronauts with hypertension and clogged arteries.
Fruit’s looking really good after that.
Interesting bit of trivia… two years ago, on the day of the manager’s cook out, someone at work had a heartattack and died.
I had been in a training room about five minutes before the cookout was to begin and stepped out of the room to find a bunch of people lined up along the windows facing the picnic. Now, whenever there is free food to be had at our company, the people come out in droves. It’s a bit funny, actually. So when I saw everyone lined up at the door, looking like they were just waiting for the strike of 11 o’clock. So I made some sarcastic comment about people dying to get outside.
And that’s when someone said “They’ve got Whoever It Was out in an ambulance.” And that’s when I saw the ambulance sitting in the parking lot, just beyond the tents and picnic tables.
And then we found out that he had died.
And then we went outside and had a picnic. Yeah. I know. But that’s how things get done in the Midwest, I guess. No sense in milling about when there’s grillings to be had. Our Dead Coworker would have wanted it that way.
Not me, by the way. I want wailing. I want stomping of feet. I want people to look up into the heavens and say “Why, God, why? Why didn’t you take me instead of Weetabix? She has so much to live for! And she is so very cute and has excellent fashion sense, not to mention incredible abs from her nightly ab crunches! You are a cruel and unfair deity!” And if my coworkers go out to enjoy a tasty bratwurst while I’m walking to the light, I’m going to turn tail and haunt their asses. Damn that would piss me off.
In my version of heaven, the roads will be paved with East End Bars and we’ll be able to taste with our feet.
Going to the beach, however, wouldn’t be fun. Ok, scratch that. I suppose I could bend over to pick up an East End Bar and then eat it the normal way.
