Butter Fried S’mores

I still hate s’mores. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. If you want to read the original rant, you can either go back in the archive to the very first month of the blog in May 2009, or you could just simply click here.

This hatred isn’t new. It’s been around for a long, long time.

Perhaps, in some ways my ire has softened over the years. Perhaps you’ll recall my relatively recent admiration for the s’mores cocktail served at the Cookies & Cocktails fundraiser for Girl Scouts of Northeastern New York.

But it’s summer. Actually, now that it’s August, people are starting to talk about summer coming to a close. Stop it. This is peak summer. Enjoy the hell out of it. Thinking about the end will only diminish the joy the next few weeks can bring.

Invariably, someone will want to make s’mores. So I thought, despite my aversion to this beloved summer treat, that I would share another story from the lake house.

Little Miss Fussy never met a marshmallow she didn’t like.

Except the thing is right now she’s in orthodonture and marshmallows are on the forbidden list. But there are two things you should know about my daughter. She’s never one to skip out on the fun, and she has a very generous soul.

I’m not entirely sure where she gets it from, but it’s really sweet.

So when the rest of the kids were toasting marshmallows for s’mores, even though she wouldn’t be joining them for the eating, she wasn’t going to miss out on the toasting. And once the toasting was done, she assembled the marshmallow between two pieces of graham crackers, and slid a piece of Hershey’s in there too.

Can you see where this is going? Well, she proudly brings the s’more she made into the kitchen. For me. To eat.

Crap.

Fortunately, I was in the kitchen. I had just finished cleaning up from dinner. There was still a little butter out on the counter. And there was a frying pan in the drying rack. Which is when I decided that the only way that I would attempt to eat that sandy sandwich of not quite melted chocolate and not quite molten marshmallow, was if I fried it in butter first.

Which, I have to admit, improved the thing dramatically. Although as the marshmallow melted, it overflowed into the butter filled pan. Which, of course, is fine. But it resulted in a product that unsurprisingly tasted a lot like a rice crispy treat.

And that makes a lot of sense, since those are just marshmallows and butter mixed with puffed rice. This was different because it also had some butter toasted graham crackers and a nice layer of melted chocolate.

But even butter-fried, there’s no getting around the sandiness of the graham crackers. Although, I would be hard pressed to tell you that I actually hated this decadent variation on the s’more.

I didn’t hate it. Well, I might have hated myself after eating it. That lake house put a few pounds on me. And one of these days, dammit, I’m going to find a way to get back down to eating weight.

Not tonight though. Tonight is the Fire Feast. And if you haven’t seen the menu, you’ve got to check it out. It’s an incredibly exciting event. I’ll try to take pictures in between bites. Surely there will be some inspiring stories to tell in the days to come.

Now, it’s time to work up an appetite.