Nobody Ever Asks Me

Have you ever noticed how sneaky food manufacturers are? Instead of raising the price of an item, they make the packages slightly smaller. I'll bet they think we don't notice. And they're right. As with so much in life, I don't notice until something else brings it to my attention. The first time I noticed it personally was with our favorite popcorn kernels. In the early years of our marriage our one splurge at the grocery store was buying the more expensive brand. Back then there were only two or three choices and we went for the top. We remained faithful to that brand down through the years, even after I came home from the store one day and found that the bottom of the plastic jar was pushed in. The jar now contained a few ounces less than it had. I still find it odd that someone , or many someones, decided it made sense to camouflage the change this way. Even if you didn't see it when you grabbed the it at the store, as the jar emptied, it was obvious. The can of pumpkin innards I use to make really delicious pumpkin bread has 1-1/2 ounces less than it did when I got the recipe. I can't tell if the bread really tastes a little less pumpkiny, or if it's just my vivid, and mildly annoyed, imagination. I don't know what I'll do if it changes again. I have no way to alter the recipe--I'm not a food chemist. I have a recipe for Peanut Butter Blossoms that pre-dates the Hershey Kiss version. It's actually called Easy Peanut Butter Blossoms, which means it's right up my cooking alley. It uses a box of cake mix and a 12 ounce jar of peanut butter. (The chocolate was Brach's Stars, which disappeared years ago.) A few years ago I was making a batch and the dough was so sticky that I couldn't roll it into little balls. I had to scrap it off my hands. I did find that putting the batter in the fridge for an hour helped. Why did this happen? Did the peanut butter change? The cake mix? Or was there less mix in the box? I'm okay as long as the fridge-fix works, but if something else changes, I'm in serious trouble. You don't come between my family and their Peanut Butter Blossoms. I'm sure most people would rather pay a little more than have one recipe after another go sideways. I could have told the food manufacturers this. But no one ever asks me.