Krackelin' Pronky Get On Board

My Mother In Law was in town last week. She was watching the kid while we were at work for a few days while the regular help (my Dad) sits poolside in sunny Florida. As a thank you my wife stopped at Malley's Chocolate to get her something called Billy Bobs. Don't ask me, I don't know.

Much to my wife's chagrin, the Cashew Billy Bobs had been discontinued a few months before. Even more to her extreme chagrin (my wife was terribly chagrined here. We're talking pulling Sean Henn as your auto level chagrin) the inventory had been sold at half off. My wife, in addition to not being able to buy her mother her favorite treat (this is apparently my Mother In Law's Turkish Delight), she was unable to get what could have been a lifetime supply at half off. She settled for some other cashew/chocolate concoction with a similarly ridiculous name that, frankly, looked exactly the same to me anyway.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that chocolate and nuts should be taken separately, as God intended it. The best way to ruin chocolate is to dump a bunch of nuts in it. And Lord have mercy on your eternal soul if you are one of those people who puts peanuts in brownies. There's nothing worse than going to some function and finding a plate of brownies that look pristine ate first glance. Then you take a bite and find it chock full of nuts. And then you can't put the damn thing down. You have to eat it all. OK, there are probably worse things, but it does suck.

This isn't to say that nuts are bad. And there are worse things than peanut M&Ms if there are no plain ones left for some reason. I just wish that the M&M people would take all of their peanuts and put them in a separate jar and make ALL plain M&Ms. If you want to put out peanut M&Ms at your party, just put a bowl of plain and a bowl of peanuts next to each other. Then all of the weirdo's who like chocolate covered nuts better than plain chocolate can eat them at the same time. Everybody's happy.

And this brings me to the point, or as close to any kind of point as I'm likely to get. Sitting on the counter of Malley's was a box of Pronk Bars. I'd heard about them before, and living in Cleveland you would think that I'd have run across one before now. But I haven't. So I got one.

For those unfamiliar, former Tribe slugger Travis Hafner (he's not a former Indian, he's a former slugger) got the nickname Pronk in the minors. The story is that it's a combination of the words "project" and "donkey". There is never any elaboration on this story. I guess it's just supposed to make sense. OK then.

Here is the cover of the bar.



It's got a nice little picture of Hafner in a plain uni that vaguely looks like it might be an Indian's uniform if...you know...it had any kind of insignia anywhere. But, I get why it doesn't. At the bottom it explains the contents as "milk chocolate with crisped rice". So they went way out there in order to give the demanding public something truly unique.



The back has the nutritional info. It's pretty much exactly what you would expect from a candy bar. You should not eat them exclusively, in other words, lest you turn into Bartolo Colon.



And there it is. It tastes exactly like one of those Krackel bars that you can never find in a store but somehow 18 manage to make their way into your Halloween bag. And that's OK. I like those bars. It's no better or worse than your average crunch bar. I'm glad I had one.

Sorry it took so long for me to get there. I just feel very strongly about my chocolate. My nuts too.