2024, Food, holidays, Kids, Seasons, Uncategorized

To Corn or Not to Corn

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It’s another time of year for polarization.  Candy corn or no candy corn!  Hamlet said it best:

To corn, or not to corn, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of autumn candy treasure,

Or to take arms against a sea of sugar

And by opposing end them. To gorge—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand sugar shocks

That taste buds are heir to: ’tis a corn consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d.

I’ve always loved candy corn.  I know that many folks do not – in fact really really do not.  It took me a few years after I became a vegetarian to realize that my fall favorite is not a vegetarian product; the Brachs autumn staple is made with gelatin.  So sadly at about the age of 22 I gave up candy corn.  

About 15 years ago I discovered a few smaller companies who make candy corn (and also the little pumpkins) with no gelatin.  You kinda had to hunt for it.  For the last five years I’ve been able to find it at Hy-Vee but this is dangerous.  I drive all the way to Hy-Vee and then can’t seem to just get the candy and go; I always spend way to much at Hy-Vee.

This year Target is carrying a non-gelatin brand of both the plain candy corn as well as the pumpkin mix.  Woo-hoo.  I got a container of each (and didn’t end up spending a small fortune on other items).

When I got home YA gave me grief about buying candy corn and disparaged candy corn in general.  But I’ve seen her dip her hand into the candy bowl more than once since then.  Guess she’s on team candy corn whether she admits it or not!

Do you have something you just can’t stand? (Besides VS hi-jacking Shakespeare to validate her yearning for candy.)

26 thoughts on “To Corn or Not to Corn”

  1. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I kind of like the Shakespeare hi-jack. As we find ourselves trapped in the final 2 weeks of the insane election season, I myself am going for any available distraction, including VS Hijacking.

    I do not care for many of the candy fruit flavors such as blueberry, strawberry or banana. To be clear, I mean the chemically based flavors, not the fruit itself. There is a particular chemical strawberry flavor and odor that just makes me cringe. Ick. It is so fake and does not really taste like the fruit.

    Then there is my oft-repeated dislike of curry flavors. They turn to metal in my mouth. Plus I find that some cooks use curry to punish those eating. I like chili flavors and some heat, but the addition of cumin and coriander to the heat is an unbearable flavor.

    Candy Corn: A few kernels are ok, but really, MEH.

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        1. I don’t like cilantro either–tastes like pencil shavings to me. I’ve taught myself to tolerate it cooked, because it’s in everything, but I remove any raw cilantro. OTOH, I adore curry and cumin (but not coriander, which is cilantro seed, after all).

          –Crow Girl

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  3. “How can’t I stand thee? Let me count the ways. . . .”

    I fear I’m turning into a grumpy old curmudgeon. It seems that my “can’t stand” list grows every day. It might be due to the accumulated annoyance of a lifetime of dealing with things that haven’t changed and probably won’t change.

    Bad/ignorant/distracted drivers have inched up my list to one of the top spots. I can’t drive more than 15 minutes without encountering a rude, reckless, distracted, or uneducated (in driver etiquette and rules of the road) driver.

    I admit I’m not a perfect driver but I’m a safe and attentive driver 99.999% of the time. Every time I get into my car, I remind myself that some idiot driver might kill me to day because of their mistakes. So I’m always vigilant, even driving to the grocery store or coffee shop.

    I also can’t stand US politics (especially he who shall remain nameless!), the warlike nature of humans, songs with lyrics I can’t understand, going through TSA security at airports, flying in general, waiting in long lines for anything, escargot, overly salted food in restaurants, the military-industrial complex, big pharma, our tax code (subsidies for anyone who lobbies hard enough and rich folks paying to have the laws written to ensure they keep and increase their wealth as easily as possible), et al.

    Yet, I remain eternally optimistic about humanity, even though we will probably extinct ourselves in a few centuries.

    Chris in Owatonna

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      1. I’ve always said I became a vegetarian just in time. I quit eating meat the very end of my sophomore year in high school then my junior year I had a foreign exchange, brother, Pierre, from France. One of the things that he did within the first month was to cook a nice meal for my family which included escargot. So I managed to slip under the wire to avoid that!!

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  4. Well, a certain someone’s voice has become like nails on a chalkboard to me. I used to enjoy watching politics, but it has become a torment, and I have been turning it off more and more often. It isn’t even politics anymore. It’s more like an awful, horrible, noisy game show that will end with really bad things for most of us.

    I neither love nor hate candy corn. I don’t buy it, but I will taste one or two of them. They’re awfully sweet. I just wish there wasn’t so much marketing for foods that can be really harmful to our health. I feel like our system is rigged against us, and most people don’t understand that.

    OT: this is the earworm that popped, unbidden, into my head this morning. I haven’t heard it in years. I don’t know why these songs pop into my head and stay there. It’s a mystery.

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  5. No candy corn for me.

    I dropped off my mom’s absentee ballot this morning. The place was full, 6 windows open and a few people waiting and lots of people filling out ballots and related paperwork. IIRC, four years ago, of the 1150 registered voters in our township, 300 had voted early. Meaning it was a busy day, but no lines as in previous years.

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    1. I’m hoping people are voting early this year – it’s going to be busy on the final day. For the promary, we had to hand count the ballots at the end of the day. which didn’t take too long since there were only a little over two hundred of them. I’m not looking forward to doing that in November if we have 1500 ballots, or maybe more.

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  6. I cannot stand the “unmuzzled, fool-born canker-blossom” known as 45.
    I selected those three descriptive words from a list of Shakespeare Insults. There are three columns with 50 words used in Shakespeare’s works.
    On the political sites to which I post, I am frequently called names by Trumpists. I use these to respond. It’s fun.

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  7. Candy corn is one of those things I can take or leave. There’s not much flavor to it. I like those Hershey’s miniatures wrapped in Halloween-themed wrappers. Mr. Goodbar, Krackel, Special Dark, and trusty old milk chocolate.

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  10. I spent a lot of time as a kid biting off the corn in sections first, the white then the orange then the yellow to compare the flavor, even though the flavor was exactly the same. I continued for years. It’s good to know that the regular candy corn has gelatin in it so I can stop eating it. It’s too so sweet that it is much less fun than it was back in the day but I keep doing it because of nostalgia now I can have a reason to move on unless I find those other gelatin free candy corns I may have to buy a bag just for that reason

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