September 19th, 2007

Good stuff

So the Ambivalence launch at This is Not a Reading Series was pretty groovy, though rather warm and crowded (there are worse things) but what I really want to tell you about is the Pleasure bar I bought and ate on the way home.

These are a favourite of mine since I moved to Toronto and discovered them, and they are joyfully getting more and more common. I bought this one from a newsstand after the ice-cream place was closed and I was despondently hungry. It was 11ish and I’d had breakfast cereal and broccoli for supper, in my hurry to get to the non-reading reading, so you can imagine how happy I was to find something open.

If you’ve never had a Pleasure bar, don’t worry, it’s nothing obscene. Just a big wad of sugar, basically. The first two ingredients are sugar and glucose, and the third is jujubes, of which the first two sub-ingredients are sugar and corn syrup. Basically, a Pleasure is thick sticky white bar of noughat (all that sugar plus some egg whites and stabilizers) with mini-jujubes stuck in it. There are other versions that have pistachio nuts and the like in them, but those might contain some actual nutrients and we can’t have that.

The hilarious label advertises “Fat free!” and sure enough, 0g fat. Of course, the 35g bar has 34g sugar! So delicious you could die. For some reason, popular in Asian groceries, though the labels are in English only.

Did I mention I got yet more wires installed inside my mouth this week? And yet I am happily ingesting things the consistency of roofing tar as I sit on the subway. Problem? Well, perhaps.

All in all, a delightful evening. Go, Jonathan! Go, terrible confectionary! Hurrah!

(er, the downside of all this is that I got very little sleep hier soir, so I may be a tad punchy now!)

You are my sweetest downfall
RR