Most of the gang at Stoned Soup struggle with addiction. Cook has missed dinner while he plays with his Hummel figurines. Frank is a sucker for unusual musical instruments. I am never far from the internet. Leslie plays Scrabble during every free moment. But the worst is Jennifer’s obsession with Breaking Bad. If you think that an obsession does not rise to the level of addiction, just try and pry the remote from her hand or tell her that Gus is just a fictional character. Frank tried it once, hoping to get the monkey off her back before the crash she was sure to suffer when the final season comes to an end. Jennifer shoved the remote into her pocket and prepare to give Frank a drug dealer smack down. Frank displayed remarkable agility when he jumped over the couch and out the door to avoid the attack.

We considered an intervention, but no one was completely sure we could catch her unarmed. Cook came up with the idea that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar and retreated to the kitchen to work some culinary magic. He came back with a tray of blue crystals that looked just like the Meth that is featured on the show. Jennifer was delighted when he presented the tray and snapped up a handful of the shards. No – cook didn’t make meth, he made candies – another of Jennifer’s weaknesses. What she didn’t know was that there was a secret ingredient in the candy that calmed her down.

Cook put half a cup of water, 3/4 cup of corn syrup and 2 cups of sugar in a sauce pan over a medium high heat and stirred until all the sugar dissolved. Cook is the most patient man I have ever met – an attribute that came in handy while he kept stirring gently until the mixture started to boil. At that point, he took a wet pastry brush and brushed the inside of the pan. When I do this, I often rush the process and leave little crystals that spread through the candy making it all turn cloudy. Cook turned he heat down a bit, put a candy thermometer in the pan and stepped back.

Sugar is amazing stuff. When in a saturated solution like cook made, it goes through a series of phases from syrup to caramel to burnt goo. Candy makers have learned to stop the process at different points to make different kinds of candy. Old school candy makers dip a spoon in the pan and rolled a bit of the mixture into cold water. The stages the candy maker is looking for are soft balls, hard balls, soft crack and hard crack. These terms describe the texture of the cooled candy. Cook uses a candy thermometer because it is easier and more precise for the non-expert. Since he wanted hard candies, he waited for the thermometer to get to 285 degrees Fahrenheit. He looked like a statue of Buddha as he calmly watched the temperature rise.

The instant that the mercury kissed the target mark, Cook turned off the heat. He moved quickly because the difference between clear hard candy and brown, scorched candy is a matter of seconds. He left the pan on the stove until it stopped bubbling. At this point he began to move very carefully. The candy is hot enough to burn skin and sticky enough to make sure the burn will be deep. There was a little bowl beside the stove that Cook had prepared with 2 tablespoons of cannaoil, a teaspoon of lemon extract and a drop of blue gel food coloring. He dumped the bowl into the pan and stirred carefully until everything was well mixed.

On the other side of the stove there was a non-stick sheet pan that Cook had sprayed with non-stick spray. Cook poured the candy into the pan letting it spread out into a thin layer. He left the tray alone until the candy cooled into a hard sheet. The last step was to turn the pan over and whack it until all the candy came out and shattered on the counter.

Jennifer gobbled up the candy and soon got that look in her eye that she gets after she and Leslie have gotten into the cookies. Her bliss gave us a chance to get the remote away from her and disable the TV. It took a few days and several more batches of candy for Jennifer to be ready to talk about her problem, but eventually we got her to agree to limit her viewing to one episode a day. Now we are looking for a way to silence Frank’s didgeridoo.