Hi, my name is Scott, and I'm a brownie addict

It's true, and I can't deny it.

Some quick background - I believe that at some point in my Thai reflections I mentioned Silk, a Thai believer who will be joining the long term team in Ubon. In order to do that, the BIC missions office decided she had to come to have some education in the States, and she'll be studying and living in Mechanicsburg during that time. She arrived here two weeks ago this coming Wednesday, and those of who were on the teams from McBIC the last 2 years greeted her at the airport. The Sunday after her arrival (just one week ago yesterday), we had a big "Welcome to America" picnic for her at the home of her host "parents".

I signed up to bring some dessert. When I originally agreed to do this, I had designs on actually baking a cake from scratch. (Yes, I can do that and have done so on a number of occasions.) However, it became patently obvious to me that Saturday that my kitchen (along with a few other parts of the house) could wait no longer for a cleaning. So, I went after it and cleaned the kitchen up real good on Saturday morning right after I finished painting my shelves. Well, with a sparkling kitchen in place, a full fledged baking effort was out of the question for the near future (I'm getting better, but I still make a massive mess most times when I bake), so I headed off to Giant to grab sort some of mix. I settled on some brownies (Duncan Hines Chewy Fudge, if anyone is interested) and whipped them up on Sunday morning prior to the picnic.

These brownies were ridiculously good, and that wasn't only my opinion. I really wished that I could have taken credit for actually really baking them, but alas, I could not. Anyhow, needless to say, I took only an empty pan home that Sunday (I did have a few myself at the picnic, so don't worry), which was somewhat disappointing. Then, I had this epiphany - I usually buy a bag of cookies every week (bear in mind, I generally only have maybe 3-4 different kinds of snack foods in the house, if I buy a bunch of different things, most of them go bad before I finish them). Even factoring in the eggs and the vegetable oil, brownies were cheaper, much better, they only take about 5 minutes of my time to make, and there's much more food there than in a bag of cookies. (though I'm not sure that they last any longer, strange...) So, that night on my weekly grocery run, I bought another box of mix and whipped them up Monday evening. And they actually survived to the weekend (just barely).

Well, I thought that was a one and done thing, but then when I went to Giant last night, I heard them calling to me from the baking aisle. This week's batch is in the oven as we speak. If you live in the area and want a brownie, feel free to stop by, although I would advise you not to wait too long ;-)