Like a few million other guys on Valentine’s Day, I gave my wife a box of candy: nothing extraordinary, just the nicest thing I could pick up at the local supermarket the day before, which turned out to be a one-pound box of Russell Stover chocolates (filled candies).
Now, I have a strategy when it comes to this kind of thing. I love coconut-filled chocolates (like Mounds bars) and anything that has that generic marshmallow-like filling. To my way of thinking, those are the only two things that should ever be inside a piece of chocolate candy. I can’t stand “coffee” flavored chocolate, and I don’t really like chocolate cream (pardon me, “creme”) of any kind, nor do I go for the toffee or caramel filled ones. They’re okay, but what I really like is anything with “white stuff” in it. Naturally, I’ve learned to spot these in the midst of an assortment — they’re always round, as many of you already know, and those are the ones I pick out first.
This works out well between my wife and myself, because she hates coconut. I know, I know… and she doesn’t particularly like white stuff. She prefers, as she put it a few minutes ago, “dark chocolate and not much sugar.” (She’s from Iowa, what can you do?) I’m just the opposite and think she’s very, very weird. In fact, I just told her so. She also puts things like tofu, artichoke hearts, and olives into salads, and those are three things that never pass my lips. The way we get around that is that she makes a partial salad with the few things I’ll tolerate besides lettuce and adds the evil stuff to her own portion. I don’t even like salad dressing, preferring all my salads naked.
By now you’re probably wondering why you read this far or why I bothered to write about it, and I really have no answer, except that by now all the candies with “white stuff” in them are gone, and that sucks.
“I don’t understand,” she said to me after I explained all this.
“I’m sure you don’t,” I replied, albeit neutrally. But I do: growing up sensibly like she did, she learned to abjure sugar. When her parents were still alive, we’d visit a lot, and late at night I’d go into the kitchen for a bowl of Cheerios to get my sugar fix. Her mother’s sugar bowl was a pathetic little thing that wouldn’t hold a tablespoon of the stuff, and the contents probably dated from the Civil War. I’d reach all the way up to the top shelf of the cupboard, where there was, unaccountably, a reasonably large stash in one of those cannisters mothers used to have in their kitchens back when people actually cooked, and then I’d ladle it on.
One of us has much better teeth than the other, as you might expect, but I know what I like.
(Bring it on, and keep your mitts off the round ones…)
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I like liqueur cherries in my chocolates
Ginger is good too.
This year my husband and I agreed (the day before) to ‘forget’ to buy each other presents for Valentine’s Day, and instead go to a divine Italian cafe where they have the most delectable goodies, mostly based on almonds, or other nuts … some chocolate-coated, some with fruit added ………… mmmm
Agree 100% on the white stuff in chocolates. I dig the coconut/marshmallow filled chocolates as well.
To me there’s nothing worse (well, almost) than biting into a deceptively designed candy (usually round and either dark or milk chocolate) and tasting some tart cherry goop or pasty pink “creme”. Ugh…
I always loved Russell Stover’s but I am with your wife on the dark stuff, and so yummy the mocha and the coffee filled. But then I like olives and artichoke hearts, too. Tofu, I’m neutral about because it doesn’t taste like much.
It is true, that after a lifetime of study, one can usually pick out the chcocolates that one dotes on. My aunt always said, “it takes all kinds of people to make a world,” and isn’t it useful and good that we don’t all like the same chocolates. Think of the fights! The sneakiness! The vituperation. Ah, Valentine’s Day!