For many, many years, I’ve visited my friend Dale at least once a week, mostly to play with his kids. And I always bring dessert for the evening. One night, the kids griped a bit when dessert wasn’t up to their standards. So I went into a long tale of how, when I was a kid, I used to get dirt for dessert. My mother would go in the backyard and dig some up and put it in bowls for my sisters and me. The kids scoffed at me until Dale joined in and added, “Yeah, I remember those days,” which made them wonder if I was really putting them on or not.
Withing the next few years, my sister tried a bake-less brownie recipe. The recipe called for whole dates, but she bought cut dates. Turns out that you needed the moisture in whole dates to hold the brownies together, so the result was something that tasted like brownies, but looked like dirt.
Not wanting to let such an opportunity go to waste, I cleaned out a food container and made a label.
I showed up Friday evening and raved that I brought something really special for dessert. When I brought it out, I excitedly praised modern technology that can sift the rocks out of the dirt so you don’t get that unpleasant surprise of biting into one. I scooped the dirt into bowls and dug into mine. The kids were a little leery at first, probably not because they thought it might be real dirt, but because they were afraid what it might taste like.
Most of the graphics I took from the web and I printed it out on a large label to make it look as authentic as possible. Feel free to print out the label and serve your own dirt.
