Day G: Goodness Gracious! (Blogging from A to Z Challenge)

Goodness gracious, great gleeful gobs of gastronomic gut-guzzling gladness.

Grok this:

Reese’s, the same company that makes the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, has a new product out called “Reese’s Spreads”. First of all, do you like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? If you don’t then quit reading, but if you do, sit down and strap in because I am about to rock your world.

So Reese’s makes this spread and the flavor is peanut butter chocolate and it’s the same stuff – a little smoother but basically the same stuff – that’s inside the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that we both love so darn much that some might look at us with our chocolate and peanut butter smeared lips and call us peculiar. But we’re Friends of the Cup here and we know what’s peculiar and what’s not peculiar so I’ll continue.

Now if you’re like me, when you eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup you might gnibble (today is “G” day so I’m using the alternate spelling for ‘nibble’ that has the silent ‘g’) around that outer top ridge, maybe first allowing your tongue to graze across the bumpy top to experience and enjoy the texture, and then when you finished that you gnaw you off the top layer where the thicker chocolate is spread. Once that’s done then you might chomp around the outside outer wall of the Cup until you’re left with just the peanut butter filling sitting on a thin layer of chocolate which, if your fingers are as warm as mine, is pretty soft and melted at this point. Maybe you tolerate the anticipatory slobber dribbling down your chin as you admire your work, I do that from time to time, and maybe you don’t because you don’t want to wait any longer than necessary to eat that peanut butter filling.

So like I said, this peanut butter chocolate flavored Reese’s Spreads thing is pretty much just like the filling on the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup but what makes it so great is that it’s an entire jar of the stuff. You just don’t have to gnibble or gnaw anything to get to the middle, you just stick a spoon in there and gouge out a mouthful. And I’ll tell you right now: it’s good. It’s capital “G” good. It’s so good that the temptation is to eat the entire jar at one time.

Of course no one in their right mind would eat the entire jar at one time but I sometimes spend considerable amounts of time outside my right mind and I was thinking that maybe eating the entire jar might not be as bad as one might think. A serving is 190 calories and there are 10 servings in the jar so that’s only 1,900 calories. Forget about the sugar and sodium because… well, just forget about them. They spoil the fun and this Peanut Butter Chocolate flavored Reese’s Spreads is all about making eating fun and nothing else.

So we’ve got 1,900 calories. Sounds like a lot, I know, for 370 grams, or 13 ounces, of food. But maybe it’s not so bad if you look at it closely. I know there are a bunch of different factors that determine how many calories we should eat every day: age, height, lifestyle, bone density, do you want to maintain or lose, blah, blah, blah. Let’s just assume that we’re average and regardless of gender (this isn’t a science article here!) you can eat 2,400 calories a day. So I figure you go to the gym first thing in the morning so you can raise your metabolism for a longer period of time than if you go later in the day and you hop on the elliptical for around 30 minutes and you burn about 400-500 calories. Figure maybe the afterburn throughout the day adds another 200 calories. Then you take a walk later in the day, or walk a flight of stairs, and maybe burn off another 100-200. Now you’ve got 700-900 calories tucked away into the bank for your late night snack adventure in chocolate peanut butter nirvana. Subtract 1,900 from 2,400 and we’re left with 500 calories. Add that to our 900 banked calories and we have 1,400 calories of regular food we can eat throughout the day, which isn’t so bad, and still eat the entire jar of peanut butter chocolate flavored Reese’s Spreads without going over our 2,400 calorie limit for the day. Remember I said earlier that this wasn’t a science article? Well, it’s not a math article either, and while the brainy sorts out there might find some minor faults with my calorie counting and mathematical analysis, it makes perfect sense to me (it makes as much sense as Yogi Berra saying, “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”) and it’ll continue to make perfect sense to me until I’ve convinced myself that I can finish that entire jar of peanut butter chocolate flavored Reese’s Spreads without feeling guilty.