A disorderly stomach

My guts went guts-up in a bad way this week. After a few days in bed, contemplating whether to visit the bathroom to either sit on the toilet or stick my head in it, I have now recovered to the point where I can walk around and eat. Odd thing is, I am eating like a pregnant woman.

To start with, I wanted Thai. I had some of that. Then I wanted White Christmas (the stuff made with Rice Bubbles), so I looked up the recipe on the Kelloggs web site and then did a spot of shopping. When I went to make it, I discovered that I was short a cup of powdered milk. We have baby formula, but I am buggered if I am making a sweet out of baby milk. Bleah.

My fallback position was chocolate crackles. I have inserted a photo here of my half made crackles. The big bowl contains all the dry ingredients - the 4 cups of rice bubbles, the dried coconut and the cup and a half of icing sugar. (Is icing sugar explosive when released into the atmosphere? If so, it is a good thing I didn't light the stove after making this).

The big white block on the chopping board is copha. 250gms of it. I knew I needed some, so I bought a block thinking I'd need about half for the recipe. Uh uh. I read the recipe and find that I need the lot. I was so dumbfounded, I had to take a photo to show you what goes into 24 chocolate crackles. A big block of vegetable shortening. Is this stuff palm oil? Whatever. A total artery hardener. I was just looking at it, thinking about all the chocolate crackles that I ate as a kid. I must have consumed a wheelbarrow full of this stuff by the time I was 10. If that was the case, why was I a whippet-thin kid when todays youngsters appear to be walking beachballs?

I then found that we didn't have the little paper cups that you put crackles into - only big paper ones that you use for muffins. So we now have 10 muffin sized chocolate crackles in the fridge rather than 24 little bite sized ones.

I am going to try them out on some friends this week. I reckon they will last in the fridge for about a year if no one likes them. I have also packed them fairly tightly, so they are going to be solid little suckers. No light and fluffy Aero-bar style chocolate crackles for this family.

The other really wierd thing that I craved was sausages and beans. Don't ask me why. So tonight I had a couple of big kransky sausages and half a can of beans. My stomach has gone very strange this week. What on earth can there be in kransky's that one might crave, apart from half a pound of nitrates?