It is a hard time when you find yourself without an ingredient in a recipe that you’ve already begun. It is an even harder time if you are in the mood for a certain recipe, and you cannot find that recipe at all.

 Can you guess at the hard time I faced today?

It really wasn’t so bad. Thanks to THE INTERNET, I found my recipe in under five minutes. Lemonberry muffins are extremely delicious. They are not so much lemony as filled with berries, which make them extra delicious. Originally, the recipe, from which I make these marvelous muffins, was 100% vegan. However, because I do not generally stock vegan commodities in my non-vegan household, I wandered off on a few permutations.

That’s really one reason why I love cooking vegetarian recipes. They’re so easy to tweak. Sometimes, I feel like a tinker as if there is a whole mechanism in my mixing bowl and I just need to tinker with the right ingredient. However, unlike a tinker, my tools are much more delicious, like lemonberry muffins.

It was a hard time though in finding a substitute for a key ingredient. I found a useful list at allrecipes.com.

But I can tie this all into the next part of this entry: I had a harder time baking because I could not find the usual ingredients, and I found it hard to watch Charles Dicken’s Hard Times because it deviated away from formula.

Literati know that most Dicken’s novels follow a formula like this:

There is an orphan of unknown origin.

There is a large, motley, topsy turvy cast of characters that somehow end up interconnected.

Bad characters do bad things to the good characters, especially the orphan.

Good characters withstand their trials by remaining good, especially the orphan.

Bad characters get their comeuppance. Good characters get married, have babies and live happily ever after!

Imagine my surprise when Hard Times ended badly for everyone. Good, bad, so-so and the kitchen sink. No one is happy, except maybe Sissy, but who can say for sure? Not even the narrator.

When the miniseries I was watching ended, I immediately ran to THE INTERNET. How could a miniseries drop the ball so badly on a Dickens novel? I thought. Something must be wrong! Our heroine marries the wrong man, gets seduced by the lothario, divorces, is used badly by her brother and dies alone. Am I reading a Hardy novel here?!

But THE INTERNET only spake of what the miniseries had shown. It WAS true. Much like A Tale of Two Cities, the only Dickens novel that I know of not written in the protagonist’s POV, I was in shock by this deviation from the status quo. How cruel of Dickens! How harsh of him! What a bleak house to build for the reader!

But, a new taste to an old favorite is sometimes not as bad as it first seems, so I’ll probably still read the book anyway.

-SD