You know you live in a hippie town and only go to hippie grocery stores when you have to go to FOUR grocery stores until you finally find: a bag of marshmallows* and a bottle of light corn syrup**.
Happy Thanksgiving!
*My husband requires marshmallows on his yams, no substitutes! Marshmallows. So I went on the hunt. I asked for marshmallows at Trader Joe’s, and the kind salesperson looked at me as if I’d asked for edible arsenic before she quickly shook her head.
**I know, the corn syrup is BAD. But I am trying to make this candy for the first time and am not up for substitutions until I successfully execute the original recipe, which includes corn syrup.
5 Comments
November 20, 2007 at 6:34 pm
We have to have the corn syrup, too, for the pecan pie. How else do you make pecan pie??? (it’s the only thing we ever do with corn syrup)
My mother always made the sweet potatoes with marshmallows. I would always scrape the marshmallows off the top and only eat those. I’ve never made the marshmallow kind for our own family; we like ours similarly confectionary, though: with a topping made from brown sugar, butter, flour, pecans and bourbon.
I understand the deep connection to childhood foods though. I always make my husband’s mother’s oyster-pecan stuffing, and he and his cousin are the only ones who eat it (their mothers were sisters). I make chicken-apple-sausage stuffing for the rest of us.
November 20, 2007 at 6:47 pm
PS. There are TONS of marshmallow-selling places all around: all you have to do is go to a chain like Lucky or Safeway. Marshmallows, galore.
November 20, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Yep. I finally (after Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, etc.,) went to Safeway, which is where I found the corn syrup (only 3 bottles of it in stock) and marshmallows. I kind of walked around, when I realized those were the ONLY things I’d buy at Safeway–I am such a granola/food snob.
November 20, 2007 at 10:10 pm
I don’t know if I’d call myself a food snob (probably am), but the last time I had to go to Safeway, to buy Kerr canning jars, I felt the cold draft down the aisles and neon overhead lights, and I felt like I had stepped into a freaky dream about freaky experiments in a secret science lab. Even waiting at the checkout line was almost a surreal experience as I was surrounded by stereotyped Midwestern folks and a zit-faced bag boy who used doubled plastic bags for one or two items of groceries.
November 26, 2007 at 4:16 pm
My local Whole Foods actually has marshmallows… but they’re kosher marshmallows made with fish gelatin, instead of regular (cow) gelatin.
They smell like fish.
So far I haven’t managed to go any further than to smell the bag and put it back on the shelf.
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