Chocolate-Pudding Days

Today is awash in shades of gray and rain and huge wind gusts. Like a November day-- bleak, stark and unyielding in its relentless pursuit of winter. Some people chirp, "It could be worse...it could be snow out there." I'm like Lou Grant (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) who hates "spunk."

I hate chirp. Not the real chirpy people -- the fake ones.

Anyhow, I don't need to be cheered up because I have the perfect remedy -- chocolate pudding. Warm, creamy, rich -- homemade...one of my favourite comfort foods. It's easy to make and deceptively indulgent because I use a secret ingredient -- Carnation Evaporated Milk -- Non-Fat.

All that velvety smoothness without the extra calories. And, besides, the recipe calls for a nub of butter. Heh.

I wish I could properly categorize my food moods. Today, for example, could be perfect for tapioca pudding with a dollop of jam, or a warm spice molasses cake, or bread pudding made with croissants and cream. Today could be matched with butter-rich cinammon chocolate cake or old-fashioned rice pudding or even brownies. But for some reason, it's got to be chocolate pudding, the darker the better. I need to see bubbling and I need to be able to dive into a pool of warm chocolate when no one is looking and slurp it from the pot.

That's what I like to do. So, sue me, or join me. It's Friday all day long.

Bring on the rain.

 Carol's Chocolate Pudding

• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder -- or chop and melt about 6 ounces of your favourite semi-sweet chocolate
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 2 3/4 cups Carnation Evaporated Milk (I use Non-Fat)
• 2 tablespoons margarine or butter (Please, butter only!)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Combine sugar, cocoa, salt and cornstarch in a pot.

Over medium heat, add the Carnation milk, stirring as you go. Bring the pudding to a boil, stirring constantly, and allow it to thicken. It will look like you are staring into a Willie Wonka-designed volcano. In about 2 minutes, the pudding should be able to coat the back of a spoon.

Remove from the heat and add your butter and your vanilla. If you are moi, you'll be head first in the pot, making savage, pleasurable noises. If you are more restrained, allow this to cool a little, pour into ramekins or dessert bowls and serve either warm or from the fridge.

People talk about pudding skins like animal pelts or muffin tops. Some people like them, some people don't. If you don't want that skin on your pudding, place some plastic wrap directly on the surface.

Nietzsche said the abdomen is the reason we don't take ourselves to be a god. I think he must have had his fair share of chocolate puddings.

Why I'm Not Nietzsche

Philosophy as a formal study is not something I have ever tried to do. Probably because I cannot even spell Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard without help, and then, too, pronunciation of the latter's name leaves my tongue feeling extremely pretentious. Same is true for Nietzsche. He was friends -- on and off -- with Schopenhauer and Kapellmeister Hans Von Bulow and all kinds of fascinating people. Imagine having the whole lot over for dinner. If there were a mass suicide after port and cigars, you'd know at the very least, your cooking hadn't provoked it. I take small comforts where I can.

I have often wondered why Nietzsche is so popular. Probably because much of his life and philosophies are easily misunderstood and so cleverly applied out of context.

Whenever I want to understand metaphysics and existentialism and other pompous-sounding nods to bleak abstracts, hopelessness and the anguish of the human condition, I go to my main point man, Woody Allen.

Woody knows how to cut to the chase. Woody is a genius, just like Nietzsche. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody, who is wallowing in a search for the meaning of life, contemplates the infinite. He observes that Nietzsche's Theory of Eternal Recurrence means we are doomed to repeat our lives over and over: "Oh, God," he laments, "I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again." Woody makes it so easy to absorb. Woody makes me laugh.

I 'll bet Friedrich Nietzsche never laughed, poor man. That's why I am not him at all. I admire his immense kopf, I am in awe of his intellect -- and I am pleased to know he severed all former relations with friends, publishers -- anyone -- who had succumbed to the dark lure of antisemitism. Nietzsche ended up a lone wolf, a voice of truth and rebellion in a "godless" world defined most narrowly by the strictest codes of moral turpitude.

I gotta hand it to him. He was brave and I'd like to be brave. He wrote relentlessly and I need to write relentlessly. He spoke the truth as he saw it. I try to do likewise. So, there is a kinship between us. For one thing, we both come at the world like outside observers; for another, we spell our names with a Z. Try as I might to have loosened up the old guy just a little, I would have been smacked down for being petty bourgeois and not one of the "exemplary" people whom he believed should live outside the "moral code" -- just like Jean Brody!

Most of all -- and I think this is important -- Nietzsche and I greatly differ in that he had a very unruly and unattractive moustache. I try to keep mine under control.