s'more s'nouts

when i was a young chockchippy, i loved marshmallows. i loved toasted marshmallows and i loved the smell of them burning as we cooked them over the firepit. we used a kind of fondue skewer that had a wooden handle and a metal fork sticking out of it. it was long and skinny and ended up with a little two-tined thing that looked like a snake's tongue, but two of them, and barbed. it reminded me of a pitchfork too, but a snakey pitchfork, or neptune's scepter. what is that called? a trident. well, this was like a du-dent. anyway, i do remember one time toasting the marshmallow and then when it was perfectly charred, as i loved a marshmallow to be, i blew on it for a while, to cool it off and pulled the charred skin off of the skewer. of course, the remaining orb-y globule of molten corn syrup had to cool off too, otherwise, layers of your mouth would slither down your gullet along with the marshmallow core. anyway, finally, when it was cooled, i pulled it off of the skewer, WITH MY LIPS ON THE FORK, which was still approximately 487 degrees. i had 2 blistered barbecued strips on my lips for days.

well, marshmallows were popular for a while in our household. and then finally my sister became a vegetarian for reasons i won't discuss here. i don't actually know. there are so many legends, i'm not sure anyone knows which holds true. and then 3 years later, i joined her in vegetarianism. i will tell you that i had always wanted to do what my sister did, but what pushed me over the edge was when i was eating some love's spareribs with my dad, an experience that might have been, at the age of 7, my favorite thing on earth. we sat at the kitchen table and ate rib after rib, with the the crispy singey parts and tons of barbecue sauce. it was heaven. anyway, i said, "it's funny that they call them ribs, you know? like RIBS," and i patted my own ribs, showing him. and my dad said, "they ARE ribs." and i remember throwing a rib down in disgust and screaming, "whose ribs are they?!" he told me they were a cow's ribs and suddenly it all made sense. my sister was right, as usual. how could anyone have let me sit there at the table and suck on a rib? i would innocently rip that (delicious) barbecued flesh off the bone! it seemed barbaric! i was not alone though, our next door neighbors used to play in the front yard, gnawing on something called "pickelpigsfeet," which, you guessed it, turned out to be PICKLED PIGS' FEET. they didn't know what it was they were eating. sure, 'ribs' sounds like 'ribs' and "pickelpigsfeet" sounds just like "pickled pigs' feet," but when you're a kid, it's just a thing, and it's salty and it tastes good, so even if some barbecue sauce-slathered reptilian brain in your child head was screaming out: THIS IS A FOOT! your barbecue sauce-slathered denial would have just swept right in to take care of the matter.

well, what happened after the rib débacle, was that i wrote a note to my mom and taped it on the oven. it said, simply, "i am a vegetarian." and that was that. well, for 29 years, anyway. oh now i am giving away my age, but i will tell you all about my current meat consumption, or rather fish & poultry consumption later. but for now i will continue on about marshmallows.

back in the salad days of marshmallow roasting, before we knew what we were doing, we ate a lot of marshmallows. what i have failed to tell you at this point, if you don't know already, is that marshmallows are made with gelatin. beef gelatin. that means that when you have a s'more, it's graham cracker, then chocolate, then pig snout cartilage, melting all together. we didn't care as kids. come to think of it, i might not care right now if handed a melty one, done just right. but anyway, we ate marshmallows and one day, i cut one with a scissors and stuck the two pieces onto a sort of goldish-brassy trim panel that separated our sliding glass door from our kitchen window. i smooshed the two halves onto the metal and incredibly, my parents didn't make me take them off. they ended up staying there for a long time. i think they yellowed a little, but weeks later, they were still soft. then, months later, or years, maybe. (yes, years) someone drew little faces on them. then at some point, someone colored them in with a green felt tip pen, but you could still see the faces. at this point, they were pretty yellowy too. but they were STILL soft, if you poked them with your finger.

eventually, my parents renovated the house. it was a big overhaul, the kind that happen post-natural disaster. they pushed out the wall of the house and put in a big gourmet kitchen. they updated the whole thing, but they kept the weird brassy gold panel with the marshmallows on it. nobody can say they weren't sentimental. the marshmallows are still there today. i think they have now been up there for 32 years. and they are still soft. yes, i said 32 years. i think it is such an incredible fact that i am telling it to you, even though it reveals my age bracket. it's that fascinating to me, and i hope to you as well. when i go over there, i usually smoosh them a little with my finger just to make sure they are still soft. and they are. they dent in when you push on them. they have shrunken a little bit in the last 3 decades, but they are pretty much the same green-faced marshmallows they ever were.

now, in a nutshell, i will tell you that against all odds, i started eating chicken and fish 2 years ago, following a weird decline in my health. i had never imagined i would ever eat meat again, in my entire life. and the idea of it was so incredibly disgusting and ethically horrible, but i was quite ill and anemic and couldn't get enough protein. so i started eating the stuff. i did not go near red meat or pork though. i still haven't. but one day i found marshmallows made with fish gelatin. FISH GELATIN, instead of beef gelatin. that meant i could have a marshmallow. i mean, the first marshmallow i would have in 30 years! it was good. better than good. it was so incredibly wonderful that i ate practically the whole bag. tonight i had 2 of them in a cup of cocoa. i hadn't tried that yet. it was so good i nearly cried, except when they got syrupy and goopy in my cocoa, i kind of freaked out because i was thinking that weird fish particles were melted into my cocoa. but i finished it all anyway. it was very great. well, so that is the story of marshmallows and gelatin and beef and meat and ribs and my dad and the kitchen table and my sister and my mom who put up with 2 insane kids with weird dietary restrictions and these fantastic kosher marshmallows.

i know. this isn't very funny. I KNOW THAT. it was just something i remembered tonight as i had my cocoa. gee willikers, can't i just have a little memory?