November 23rd, 2020

Above you see two jars of molasses.  Just ordinary everyday run of the mill molasses.  It's something I always have in my pantry but I am fully aware that most people do not.  It's kind of an old fashioned ingredient, used primarily in equally old fashioned recipes.  And since most people are more contemporary minded than I am (apparently) they do not feel the need to keep such a fuddyduddy sort of product hanging around taking up space on their shelves.

Totally get it.

But that very thing, that fact that most people do not keep a jar of molasses in their pantries at all times, is why I was astonished to find my local grocery store out of molasses while I was shopping recently.  What?  How can there be no molasses?  There was a space for it on the shelf at the store.  A gap between Karo Syrup and some unusual brand of maple (or quasi-maple) syrup.  A big old empty gap.  Our local grocery store, Publix, carries only one brand of molasses, Grandma's, and that's just fine with me. It works for all my molasses oriented recipes.  But it's one of those ingredients for which there is no substitute.  There is molasses and there is molasses.  That's it.

Other ingredients can be subbed out without a huge problem.  I can use pecans instead of walnuts, for instance, without it being a huge issue.  But molasses is the only thing remotely like molasses.  Without it there would be no baked beans, no gingerbread cake, no gingersnap cookies, no gingerbread man cookies, no molasses cookies (rather obviously) and there is even a wheat bread recipe that I am especially fond of that requires molasses.  In my world, it is essential.

And yet there was none.  Dang.

So when I had to run into the store quickly on Thursday afternoon for just one thing, I checked the shelves for molasses and.....nope. Still none.  Dang!  We checked several other stores over that weekend.  Still no molasses.  Suddenly molasses is a "hot' ingredient?  Unexpectedly out of the blue everyone and their Uncle Fred has discovered molasses and is using it on everything from their pancakes to their potatoes?  (ewwww that sounds gross).  Or maybe it's one of those bizarre COVID related shortages.  Something that's hard to come by. I seriously doubt that molasses is  hoarding item like toilet paper.

So there I was, trying to begin making my list of cookies for the annual cookie baking marathon and sadly scratching off both gingersnaps and gingerbreadmen.  (insert booboo face here)

Then Taadaa!  Like a knight on his white horse, Tim rides up to save the day.  He found and ordered it for me through Amazon.  Holy Cats. Those guys really do have everything!

The two bottles arrived yesterday, whole and unbroken (which impresses the socks off of me because they come in glass bottles) and now I can adjust my grocery list to include everything else I need for those cookies because they are BACK on the list baby!  Huraah!!

And Tim is the hero of the Cookie Baking Season!