Peep! The Fine Art of Marshmallow-Flinging

Wandering a grocery store over the weekend, looking for candy for my sweet-toothed coworkers, I spotted the pre-Easter sick goodie: the almighty peep. This is a thick, fluffy, just-about-all-sugar, chick-shaped marshmallow treat; lately they come in a whole array of pastel colors, and not just the original pale yellow.

Seeing these teeth-rotters, I grinned in memory of a few springs and summers ago, with Daughter Two.

In my childhood, back in elementary school, our class (and/or pack of cub scouts) went camping up in mountainous central Pennsylvania more than once. There I quickly got the hang of marshmallow-roasting, where if you patiently turn your stick (with impaled marshmallow(s) on the end) just the right way, at just the right distance from the flames, you get something beautifully light caramel-brown on the outside, and hot and gooey on the inside. However, too far from the fire, and you could wait most of the night to roast your 'mallow; too close, and the thing would catch fire and incinerate.

But a couple of us impatient boys found another method: let the thing catch fire and burn all the way around, then blow it out once the entire outside was a thick, black, scorched skin. Then, stepping back, and with just the right flick of shoulder and wrist, you could cast off that skin into the woods, and be left with nothing but ooey-gooey, tasty melted white marshmallow on the end of your stick. Eat and enjoy!

Over the years since, the image of hot, hard-flung marshmallow-skins flying off into the forest to strike a distant trunk with a loud splat… has kept me giggling. Some of our flings would catch an unwary scout or classmate (or teacher) doing nature-study outside the campfire-ring; sometimes this wasn't always accidental, I think. Or the entire marshmallow would depart the stick and be lost in the woods, leaving little or no remnant on the bare stick.

So one summer afternoon several years ago, having feasted on hot dogs and chicken and cobbed corn and burgers roasted up carcinogenically on our tiny grill, I showed this neat trick to my younger daughter. In no time, we were having a great time flinging black-crisped skins out into the back yard and over the fence, though some landed on our fence (and the neighbors'), draped over the wood like an embarrassingly sick BM left by a large, ill bird.

Sometimes she wanted to do this when the grill wasn't fired up, and I'd have to turn her down (to both our disappointment). But then I considered… how would this work in the microwave? So we took a dinner plate and laid a large marshmallow in the middle, and set the microwave at high power for maybe thirty seconds.

The thing swelled up as large as an apple.

It was very hot and soft outside, maybe a little crisp on the outside, with a nice, thick, crunchy layer on the bottom. And tasty! So many days afterward when she was visiting, she would line a large dinner plate with several concentric rings of large (and occasionally small) marshmallows, and fire 'em up, and munch away while we watched a movie, or she commandeered my computer.

It was inevitable that she'd try this out on a peep one Spring day, and she did. So the bird would swell up, too, to four or five times its original size – maybe topple if stood up straight, but still wonderful (to her) to eat. And so beautifully bizarre that I think it may be one of the last of my memories to evaporate, in a few more years... long after I can verbalize why I'm grinning and giggling.