Friday, May 30, 2008

Volumes

One of the things about food that I've never understood -- and my knowledge has not been helped by finding people who calmly and decisively argue the point in either direction -- is whether, when you eat a pound of cookies, you gain more than a pound.  My gut (ho, ho) feeling is of course you do; but I have seen people say, with a hint of surprise, that where could the more-than-a-pound have come from, then?  Damned if I know.  The god of the gut, for all I care.  This happens.

I haven't eaten a pound of cookies (lately), but I kind of had something like that happen this morning.  Its the last day of the cycle to make Amish Friendship Bread, and I was happily apportioning it.  There should have been four cups of output; I put one cup in a bag for a neighbor, two cups in a bag to put in the refrigerator, and where the hell did the rest of it go?   Because I was out.  I looked at the recipe three or four times, counting the number of cups-o-stuff that went in -- like, three cups of flour, three cups of sugar, three cups of milk -- how could I possibly end up with only three cups of output? Huh?

Then I noticed that, oops, I had not yet put in the 3 total cups-o-stuff for today. My bad.  I added it and -- the volume went up to five cups.  But I added three cups of stuff! How could it only go up by two cups?

Magic, is what I think.

2 comments:

Lone Chatelaine said...

Thank god. I thought I was the only one who thought of such things. This sort of thing drives me crazy. I always wonder why a simple half-pint of ice cream seems to add five pounds to my waistline.

Cerulean Bill said...

Nope, you are unique in many ways, L, but this isn't one of them. Sorry.