When I greeted my eight-year-old this morning, Big-O grimly announced that he’d vomited in his bed. “AAAAGH!” I screamed. “This is a rental house, and we’re leaving today!”
He smiled. “April Fool’s!”
I cracked up. I love that my kids have inherited my love of pranks and tricks.
Unlike my son, I’d neglected to plan an April Fool’s prank today. But as I made breakfast in our rental house in Austin, I realized that the previous occupants had left a bunch of exquisitely un-Paleo items in the pantry, including peanut butter, generic cola…
…and a humongous tub of sugar.
Hmm…I thought. Maybe I can fool some readers into thinking that – in desperation – I had to make breakfast for my family out of the stuff on the pantry shelves. Perhaps I could even post a “new recipe” that looked nothing like my usual Paleo fare…
My bright idea: Spicy Thai Peanut Butter & Jelly Cola Sauce
So I got to work.
I poured soda into a pot…
…dumped in a ton of peanut butter…
…and reduced it on the stove…
…with some blackberry jam…
…and sriracha.
Oooh, I thought. Once the sauce is done, we can drizzle it over a bowl of mini-pretzels!
But then, as the kids started helping out with the mock recipe, we quickly realized that:
- Our two kids – who turn their noses up at some of my real food offerings – were begging to eat the pretzels and the sugary Franken-sauce for breakfast;
- This joke isn’t particularly funny to people who might be struggling to break away from the types of ingredients we were playfully (but also kind of smugly) mocking; and
- When we tried some of the finished sauce, it was actually really, really good. Really. This is seriously dangerous stuff, hitting all the notes that industrial flavor scientists target when making products engineered to hook their unsuspecting customers. We didn’t want even one reader thinking this recipe’s at all genuine ‘cause it’s terrible for you.
So despite the kids’ protests, we dumped the finished sauce (and the pretzels), and made this instead:
Ever since I was little, I’ve been leaping out from behind corners to scare people (I last did this to my husband less than a week ago) and conning them into believing my tall tales. But frankly, after the success of my April Fool’s prank last year (you know, the one about cooking eggs soaked in the Double-O’s virgin boy pee), I don’t know if I can ever top that one.
Oh, well. Time to get back to developing our new Nom Nom Paleo video game for Atari 2600 emulators.
