Avril Lavigne-Goodbye Lullaby

I don’t typically review music albums because while I enjoy them I’m not typically so inspired to tell the world about it. This time I’ll make an exception.

I will confess that I am a sucker for cheesy-bad music. I love music that panders to my inner teenage drama-queen. Usually this means I’ll listen to the likes of the Spice Girls, Kelly Clarkson, and the topic of this post, Avril Lavigne.

Up until this point, I’ve loved Avril for being such a high school brat. She produces cheesy music that has no real feeling but tells it like it is when you’re feeling immature and just want to let loose. After hearing the hit “What the Hell” off of her recent album, Goodbye Lullaby, I was sure I was in for another album to add to my collection of guilty pleasures.

After somewhat eagerly downloading her album off of Itunes (which, by the way, I was impressed that Apple didn’t charge me for “What the Hell” since I already purchased it and just downloaded all of the other songs that I didn’t have on a separate album list—which is important), I started it up. My jaw dropped. For the next hour or so, I was speechless, sometimes tearful. I was amazed.

Avril emits a talent in this album that I’ve never heard before coming from her. She demonstrates an incredible amount of growth and maturity. Her sound is different, and in a large sense a lot more pure than it ever was before. Her lyrics are heartfelt. Most importantly, though, she exudes and articulates perfectly her emotions into the songs she sings making the listener feel what she is feeling. In other words, she has finally stepped into the realm of music for the adult.

I’m particularly in love with 3 of the songs on this album- “Push”, “Wishing you were Here”, and “It’s not Enough”. I love each of them because of how I can tell that she experienced every ounce of feeling that her ballads talk about. She’s also so upfront in a mature way. She tosses aside the teenage spitefulness, and hangs onto her inner independence.

I do have to say that in some of her songs she comes off as screaming, but in my opinion I think it adds, positively, to her music because it enhances the point she is making. Additionally there is a lot of repetition in her songs, but again, I think it adds to the quality of the message she is trying to get across.

When I think about her hit “What the Hell” I have to seriously ask “What the hell?!”. The song is such a horrible misrepresentation of the album and her sound. I’m actually really happy that the song is not on the album list when I downloaded it because I would probably be just skipping over it.

In the end I highly recommend this album. I can honestly say that I was more than pleasantly surprised and am more than happy to say that this exciting find will not be going into my collection of high school drama music.

Recipe: Quick Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Bars

I’ve been trying to find recipes lately that would start utilizing some of the left over ingredients that I had purchased before for other recipes. When I saw this recipe I thought this would be great since it seemed that it would turn out to be delicious, easy, and as I panned through the contents, I noticed I had most of what it called for.

On a separate note, I will warn you that this isn’t a recipe that is for people who are dieting or are conscious about corn syrups and sugars since it does call for dark corn syrup and a lot of other sweet things (sugar, sweetened flaked coconut, chocolate, etc.).

Now that the background story and the precautions are out of the way, here’s what I thought.

Baking

The preparation for this dessert was extremely easy. Because it uses Bisquick, which is practically instant cookie dough, putting everything together was a snap. It took about 10-15 minutes. The “most difficult” part was melting the butter (or, in this case, margarine) with the dark corn syrup on the stovetop.

There was little clean-up (a saucepan, a bowl, a measuring cup, and 2 spoons).

It took 40 minutes in the oven. I set the timer to 35 and I probably could’ve taken them out then, but I left them in for a couple more minutes for extra measure.

Finally, I liked that the bars didn’t have to be removed from the pan that I used. I simply cut the bars, left them in the glass dish, and put a cover on it.

I definitely give this an A+.

Taste

I was very eager to try these seeing as how I love the combination of oats and chocolate. I wasn’t disappointed. They were very chewy, and a little on the tough side. I attribute this to leaving it in the oven a couple of minutes longer than it should have. I also felt the taste was really oat-y, which I enjoy, but I probably could’ve cut back just a little. The coconut flavor wasn’t overpowering. In fact, it added a nice background flavor to it. The peanuts were the strangest dynamic to this. In retrospect I probably should have chopped the peanuts a little bit since it was weird and a little bit much on my palette when I encountered a cluster of peanuts in my bar.

Over all, I give the taste an A. I loved how chewy they were and I loved how all of the tastes blended together.

Recipe

Quick Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Bars (taken from Creative Recipes with Bisquick vol. II, 1986)

1/3 cup margarine or butter

¼ cup dark corn syrup

1 ½ cups Bisquick baking mix

1 ½ cups quick-cooking oats

½ cup sugar

½ cup flaked coconut

½ cup salted peanuts

1 package (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

1 egg

Heat oven to 300.

Mix margarine and corn syrup in 1 quart saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until margarine is melted; reserve. Mix remaining ingredients except egg in large bowl; stir in corn syrup mixture and egg until moistened. Pat in ungreased rectangular pan, 13x9x2 inches.

Bake until light golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes. Immediately cut into bars, about 3 x 1 ½ inches; cool in pan 20 minutes. Remove from pan; cool completely.

Makes 40 bars.