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The man who invented the pre-cooked chicken strip is singlehandedly responsible for doubling the happiness index of those who’ve ever found themselves with 20 minutes, a toaster oven and  a hankerin’ for chicken.  Not just any chicken and certainly no kind you’ve ever seen before.  It’s uniform, possibly spherical, dipped in spices that never existed in any traditional spice cabinet and completely recookable with little loss of flavor from what was probably once a GM chicken.  It’s been chopped, diced, defatted, reconstituted and extruded to little balls of flavor.

Today, I tried a new brand of the above chicken-type and was met with the unfamiliar.  It was crunchy in some places and not in others, it was stringly and didn’t have the texture of tofu and an Arby’s Roast Beef.  I think into the delicious fake chicken I was expecting someone may have snuck real chicken .  What were they thinking?

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I love salsa and cheese dip or the aptly named salsa con queso and decimate several loaves of Velveeta annually creating this magnus opus of chip toppings.  But the one failing of this East-meets-West culinary paragon is that it doesn’t store well, turning into a form of cheesy cement that doesn’t reheat well.  But magically, the store-bought stuff can happily sit on either countertop or refrigerator shelf maintaining its always dippable texture due to some dark deal a food-scientist made with Satan to defy food physics.  I must make my own.

Reading the ingredients list, the storebought dip large consisted of cheese parts (whey, lecithin, squirrel) and a few chemical stabilizers, oils, fats, actual cheese (holy crap) and the always present maltodextrin.  Knowing I could create dextrin from baking corn starch and isolate the requisite sodium salts from other household goods I set to work.  I melted the Velveeta and set about adding the various meth-lab reductions to prevent the Velveeta from hardening at room temperature while reducing the salsa after a bath in some decade-old molecular sieves.  Final step: Create an solute of oil and Velveeta to reduce the melting point.  So, I melted and mixed.  And mixed, and mixed and mixed.  So looks like, despite the fact that Velveeta is 62.5% fat, it won’t dissolve into oil.  So, I have what looks like amazing nacho dip, with this puddle of greasy spittle floating on top of it like tard-drool on a math test.  I went so far as to add a small amount of rendered lard as an emulsifier and put it in a blender and once again the non-emulsion laughed at me wearing a hat of corn oil.  I tried some, and it tasted like it looked, really good nacho dip that had just gotten into a baby-oil soaked girl-on-girl cat fight.  Our dog Max loves the stuff.

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The brownie as a tool of office diplomacy has long been in my arsenal.  I missed two days of work without appropriately notifying my bosses and the last hints of angst were dismissed over a week-old brownie created during the Great Guest Exodus of New Years Eve.  But the brownie can be used for a more sinister purpose, intimidation.

Me: Would you like a piece?
Coworker: Sure, I’ll take a piece.
Me: Oh, that’s it.  I thought you’d said you’d take a piece. Not a crumb.
Coworker: Hey, I just had lunch.
Me: And you need a quality confection to top it off.  The portion you took is like a shot of beer, insulting to the drinker and the bartender.
Coworker:  Ok…. I’ll be back later to get the rest.
Me: No! You’ll be back now to get the rest.  Get in there, and take a slice.

Me: Would you like a piece?
Coworker: Yes, I’d love some, thank you.  I really like brownies.
Me: Oh, so that’s how you show your love?  With what appears to be a portion the size of mice leavings?
Coworker: I just started a new diet.
Me:  The first three letters tell you all you need to know “DIE”.  Are you trying to kill your tastebuds?
Coworker: I’ll try more.
Me:  Try?  Do or do not.  There is no try.
Coworker: Ok…. *cuts larger slice*
Me: I’m going to check back with you later to see if you finished it.

Who new baked goods could be such precise tools of demasculation?  Next week: Decimating self image with coffee crumb lemon bars.

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The brownie as a tool of office diplomacy has long been in my arsenal.  I missed two days of work without appropriately notifying my bosses and the last hints of angst were dismissed over a week-old brownie created during the Great Guest Exodus of New Years Eve.  But the brownie can be used for a more sinister purpose, intimidation.

Me: Would you like a piece?
Coworker: Sure, I’ll take a piece.
Me: Oh, that’s it.  I thought you’d said you’d take a piece. Not a crumb.
Coworker: Hey, I just had lunch.
Me: And you need a quality confection to top it off.  The portion you took is like a shot of beer, insulting to the drinker and the bartender.
Coworker:  Ok…. I’ll be back later to get the rest.
Me: No! You’ll be back now to get the rest.  Get in there, and take a slice.

Me: Would you like a piece?
Coworker: Yes, I’d love some, thank you.  I really like brownies.
Me: Oh, so that’s how you show your love?  With what appears to be a portion the size of mice leavings?
Coworker: I just started a new diet.
Me:  The first three letters tell you all you need to know “DIE”.  Are you trying to kill your tastebuds?
Coworker: I’ll try more.
Me:  Try?  Do or do not.  There is no try.
Coworker: Ok…. *cuts larger slice*
Me: I’m going to check back with you later to see if you finished it.

Who new baked goods could be such precise tools of demasculation?  Next week: Decimating self image with coffee crumb lemon bars.

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On the drive into work, I sneezed so hard I had a nose bleed and while I was pretty quick with the paper towel cork some of sanguine nasal fire hose got on my shirt.  I fully zipped up my winter coat despite it being a balmy 42°F and wore a lab coat for no reason until I’d have a chance to tackle it at lunch.

Through the whole morning no one said anything about the red trail down my shirt even through two rather lengthy conversations.  At lunch, I unbuttoned my shirt and began applying and wiping off hydrogen peroxide to lift the stains and over the course of 30 minutes or so with people walking in and out no one said a thing except for “hello” or “thanks for the brownies” (which I had brought in).

I always assumed blood on clothing was rather identifiable as it keeps a distinct red until it turns rusty brown. Had I traded brownies for my coworkers ignoring ominous blood stains?  Did they think that imposing would have stemmed the tide of pastries?  If I accidentally kill someone it’s good to know I could cover for it by hosting an omlette bar or a really nice cake.

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There was a safety training and safety training means food, usually.  I skipped lunch in anticipation of pizza, brownies and the obligatory salad.  The meeting was moved from the normal meeting room to the executive conference room (which should have raised a flag).  I arrived, and there was no food.  We stared daggers at the meeting coordinator who waved her arms to the recessed overhead lights, the hi-definition projectors, the hardwood tables and the high-back leather chairs.

You can’t eat a leather chair.

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A while back, I thought about making bacon chip cookies, and tonight I did.  They were quite nice, and I think I’d prepare them when I have curious company or need to fulfill a stereotype.  The more interesting part was acquiring the bacon at the Genuardi’s Checkout Line.

Me: Please don’t waste a bag to wrap the bacon separately.
Cashier: You don’t want the bacon touching the other food, do you?
Me: Why not?
Cashier: It’s bacon, it has juices.
Me: So you’re telling me that your store sells leaky bacon?
Cashier: No, but some of the bacon might go through the packaging.
Me: Please, don’t wrap it.
Cashier: Ok, but make sure you cook it just in case something gets in.

I’m confident that the shrink wrapped packaging inspected by the FDA for a meat that’s probably irradiated that I’m going to prepare over a 350° griddle and then crumble up and put into a cookie to be baked at 375° should be sufficiently safe.  Should the bacon magically exit the packaging through an aggregate quantum super-position tunneling effect in a process that would normally require millions of times the age of the universe to happen, I’d gladly suffer any intestinal disease to have witnessed a macroscopic manifestation of such quantum wierdness.

If the baconness were to spread, it’s more likely to be stopped by the glass containers of the other ingredients that shared a back with it than by the seran wrap-like condom of a wasted grocery bag.  Besides, what what if bacon-ness spread?  I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.  If bacon held its consistency better I’d use it as a coffee stirrer and in its thicker form a kind of edible fork for things that are scooped like rice or oatmeal.

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I go through bursts of hating to eat out.  It’s a poor value in that I’m essentially paying for a table and for someone to periodically interrupt the conversation.  Joe and I changed tack and for $12.00 we enjoyed about two pounds of chicken strips and a pound of tater tots washed down with some swell apple cider.

Driving home with my arm out the car window holding the champagne-like bottle and drinking it at red lights and modifying my route to drive by as many police stations as possible was my attempt at evening entertainment.  There just aren’t enough cops out at 10 PM on Tuesdays.

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Me: Ma’am, do you know where I can find canned blueberries or a berry compote?
Genuardi’s Attendant: Hm… I think they’re in party supplies, they go in birthday pies.  If they’re not their, I’m pretty sure it’s in with the pastas in the Ethnic Food Aisle.  If that doesn’t work, try condiments with other crushed vegetables.
(20 minutes of searching her stupid red herrings)
Me: Ma’am, I found them.  In the canned food aisle.
Genuardi’s Attendant: Where?
Me: In the canned fruit section.  Specifically, canned berries.

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I went food shopping the other day and came home to a bag of chocolate morsels on the counter top.

Ryan: We found the chocolate you were hiding.
Me: I wasn’t hiding anything.  I used those the last time I made cookies.
Ryan: You mean the ones for my birthday?
Me: Yeah (his birthday’s in May), they’ve probably been in there open ever since.
Ryan: Hm… That would explain the texture.  And why I have to go so bad.
Me: 6 months of a heavily sugared food left open in a dank cabinet frequented by fearless mice, I bet you do.

caveat eater