Late Night Cravings

Conventional wisdom says that if you’d like to avoid extra pounds, keep tempting food out of sight, and certainly don’t bake brownies after 10 p.m. as I did this Tuesday. If your cravings come and go quickly, you probably weren’t all that hungry in the first place. As someone whose counter might be home to just-cooled maple granola or a dessert recipe I plan to share on Thirsty Radish, that just would not be possible, nor would I want it to be.

January is a time when we often make health resolutions or bring ourselves back to the basics. You’ll note that I shared a salsa verde recipe last week as I seemed to be dreaming of green, thinking ahead to spring herbs, and otherwise wanting something to wake up my taste buds from the roasts and toasty dishes of the holidays. The one thing I haven’t wanted to do is clear my kitchen of tempting foods, since just about any food can be tempting.

When teaching children how to eat healthy, it’s important to think about what exactly they might be craving. My mother believed in having vegetables, cookies, and other food readily available so that I could learn how to make healthy choices when faced with abundance. Yes, the cookies were always homemade or a packaged variety with natural ingredients (she read labels before label-reading was a thing), but they were cookies nonetheless. I learned the sweetness of carrots and the bitterness of chocolate. In doing so, I understood my hunger, a quality that has benefitted me beyond the kitchen as I think about fulfillment in love and life and certainly about why I found myself craving brownies late Tuesday evening.

In middle school, our teacher asked us how many cookies we thought was the proper amount for dessert. One of my classmates jumped to attention.
Two.
Did I eat two cookies for dessert? I had never really counted, but the packages didn’t seem to disappear at an alarming rate in our household. It seemed like such an arbitrary number, one so devoid of context, particularly what else she had been eating during the course of the day.

On Tuesday I determined that I wasn’t really craving brownies for their sweetness, but out of my desire to produce something whose outcome was slightly unpredictable, as all baking is, yet leaning toward fine. I found satisfaction in the slow mixing of melted butter and chocolate, the emergence of that thin, delicate top layer, and the wait. Butter and chocolate leaning toward fine in the coziness of my kitchen. I understood what I was craving.