The Little Professor

Department of random thoughts in airport food courts

I refuse to believe that people actually go to Mrs. Fields in order to purchase...bananas.  Surely the only point of spending your hard-earned dollars in a Mrs. Fields is to acquire warm, gooey semi-sweet chocolate chip cookies (with or without walnuts).  Who goes there to be healthy?

(This thought brought to you by the large basket of bananas at the Mrs. Fields in the Charlotte, NC airport.)

You'll never have to count academic calories again

I'm working on scenes of Bible reading in Victorian historical fiction, an endeavor which occasionally leads me to seek much-needed recreation...elsewhere.  (Very elsewhere.  Far elsewhere.)  In a spirit of complete non-intellectual activity, here is Cake Wrecks, devoted to professional cake-decorating gone not only haywire, but positively superkerflooey.  I now feel a sudden urge to avoid anything that looks like cake, for some reason.  (With any luck, this will be a temporary side-effect.  After all, once I get this monograph fully drafted, I plan on celebrating with a slice of "Death by Chocolate," or something similarly decadent.  Because if you're celebrating a book manuscript, your slice of chocolate cake has zero calories.  Right? Riiight.)  Via.

Calorie magic

A slice of cheesecake, under normal circumstances: c. 600 calories.
A slice of cheesecake, when handed to you (unsolicited) by your department chair: 0 calories.

Amazing how this works. 

(Remember that, by virtue of its location, any food left in the department office automatically drops to zero calories.  Context is everything.) 

Food fight

One of Jason Jones' colleagues has been confronted with the notorious shallot, prompting Jason to offer other encounters between Victorian literature and food. Some more suggestions:

• Henry James, The Churn of the Stew
• Charles Dickens, Steak House, A Taste of Two Cities, Martin Guzzlewit
• George Eliot, Middleparch, Silas Marinade
• W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Eclair
• John Ruskin, The Scones of Venice

Don't tell my parents

Tonight's dinner, courtesy of Bibliography's class party:

• 1 piece of baklava
• 1 peanut butter & fudge cookie
• 1 chocolate-chocolate chip cookie
• 1 small chocolate streusel bar
• 2 crunch mini-donuts

Craving

I admit to suffering profound and, I thought, unappeasable cravings for Chicago-style stuffed pizza. Apparently, there's hope for the desperate.

Chocolate

• Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Early Colonial America (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

• All About Chocolate (Field Museum)

• Latin America: The Lore and History of Chocolate (Mything Links)

• The Sweet Allure of Chocolate (Exploratorium)

• Chocolate: The Exhibition (Academy of Natural Sciences)

• Chocolate: Melting the Myths (Chembytes)

• Some chocolate art.