Category Archives: Food

Oct 09 2012
13 Comments
Food, Humorous, Two minute read

Drinking a Cup of Ralph

Don’t be fooled. It’s not as good as it looks.

True or False: instant coffee is disgusting. It is as bitter as the Devil’s eyebrows and as foul as his horn trimmings. It is more profane than an episode of Jersey Shore and more loathsome than a can of Tecate full of slugs.

If you answered true, I’m sorry, but you are incorrect. If you answered false. I’m sorry, but you are also incorrect. This was a trick question designed to make everyone fail.

The correct answer is that some instant coffee is indeed a rank substance unfit for consumption by all things that breathe. Some, however, is just fine. For example, Nescafe, Nescafe Gold, and Starbucks Via are all brands of instant coffee that I would gladly give to my friends, family, and sundry.

I am an instant coffee believer. Some people who term themselves true coffee lovers may scoff at the fact I dare drink the black dregs of coffee crystal solution as they believe it all to be equally unbearable, but this is simply not the case. I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, by drinking a brand called Ralphs Instant Crystals Coffee.

It was purchased in what was later recognized as severe error by a person who thought, at the time, that all instant coffee would taste the same and that if instant must be purchased, it mattered not which brand he chose.

Despite its low sticker price, Ralphs Instant Crystals Coffee has extracted a terrible toll on my life as I’ve drank it day after day, waiting for it to run out like the freaking lamp from the Hanukah story because then new coffee will finally be purchased with rejoicing.

Its very name, “Ralphs Instant Crystals Coffee,” does not inspire any level of confidence, nor do the crystals themselves as they glitter in the jar like a pile of dead ants. And upon the first sip of an overly strong cup, one will immediately notice the desire to upchuck, or Ralph, welling up at the back of the throat. At that moment, the unfortunate coffee drinker will realize they are, in fact, drinking a cup of Ralph.

Yes indeed. For the past month I have been drinking cups of Ralph every morning, knowing that even Folgers would be sweet relief. The day of reprieve cannot come soon enough.

One day I will drink Ralph no longer. One day. But until then, the best part of waking up is finishing the Ralph in my cup.

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Sep 13 2012
16 Comments
Food, Humorous

Top Chef Michael Mina Describes My Daily Diet

Teddie Peanut Butter only served on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Breakfast

Today we have a par-boiled oatmeal made with Trader Joe’s Organic Old Fashioned Rolled Oats, seasoned with Organic Pumpkin Spice and Morton’s Kosher Salt, both stolen from a roommate personally by Emily Drevets.

The oats are prepared by pouring tap water heated to exactly 212 degrees Fahrenheit over them and letting them sit for as long as you can stand. As a garnish, we sprinkle just a touch of raw oats over the finished dish. Served with tap water and our signature Nescafe Instant Coffee.

These oats remain mostly raw because they are not Quick Cooking, so you get some of that tough oaty texture that reminds you of the earth and eating wheat off the stalk. I feel this is a very honest dish that reconnects you with how eating must have felt for our ancestors.

Lunch

For this dish, I was inspired by childhood and children in general. I’m fascinated by the way they approach life, absorbing everything as if it were completely new, captivated by what has become ordinary to us. They are the very embodiment of “fresh eyes” and that’s where I got the idea for a Toasted Whole Wheat Peanut Butter and Raspberry Jam Sandwich.

To prepare this re-invented childhood classic, we open the bag of Trader Joe’s Organic Whole Wheat Bread and gently set two slices in a preheated toaster oven. As the bread toasts and becomes progressively drier, we ready the peanut butter and raspberry jam by taking the respective jars out of the fridge and opening them.

The peanut butter we’re using today is an Organic Crunchy, Natural Trader Joe’s Peanut Butter, made from local peanuts and harvested with the help of a man who is, by coincidence, my second cousin Bill. Bill and I don’t talk much, and our jam of the month is Safeway Brand Raspberry jam, with real cane sugar and artificial colorings.

Once the bread is done toasting, we remove it from the oven and slather it in peanut butter. The warmth of the toast causes the peanut butter to melt slightly, adding to the gooiness of the sandwich. Then, we smear raspberry jam on the toast, making sure to swirl the mixture.

Much like checking for the appropriate swirls of fat in high-quality meat, a healthy swirl in a peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich is an equally important indicator of quality. Then we press the two slices together, seeing to it that some of the filling drips down the sides.

The drink of choice with this finished product: tap water. You’re going to need a lot in order to keep this viscous mixture moving down.

Dinner

Dinner today is a handful of Trader Joe’s Cats Cookies for People, kind of the big sister of Teddy Grahams with a similar, cinammony taste and innocent crunch, along with some spoonfuls of peanut butter straight out of the jar, served with Twinning’s English Breakfast Tea and tap water from a nickel-plated sink faucet in the bathroom.

I’ve found that eating eating peanut butter right from the jar works on both the experiential and gustatory levels, and the proximity to such a primary ingredient in its natural and abundant state is a real crowd pleaser.

Bon Appétit!

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Sep 12 2012
9 Comments
Food, Humorous, One minute read

How to Defeat Salad Anxiety

There’s nothing more terrifying.

Lately I’ve been eating salads. Don’t ask me why or how that’s happened, just accept the fact that it has, that sometimes the salads are salty, and that I eat them along with a slice of buttered bread. I think the roughage has cleared out the macaroni and cheese residue in my brain, which is why this blog post is hilarious.

Salads as a food item have always stressed me out. Something about a plate full of leafy greens puts me on edge and all of the sudden I feel like there’s no way in spades that I’ll be able to eat all of it, because it takes so freaking long. The leaves are so big, and the dressing is spread unevenly and the toppings are always the tastiest but they’re hidden in a forest of vitamin K and if I want to chop up the salad in order to make it physically edible that’s going to take at least 2 minutes but the problem is I’m hungry NOW. Anxiety and resentment result. Lunch takes a vicious left turn for the worst.

That’s why recently I developed a new way of viewing salad-eating. No longer do I think about chopping it up or eating it with anything close to the pace of a normal meal, because salads are not a normal meal. They are a challenge. Even though I’ve never quit eating a salad because it took too long, I always feel like that’s a possisibility and I, alone in the world, hate losing.

I’m going to beat you, you dumb leafy monster.

So now, when I see those hand-like organic gems piled high on my plate, instead of even pretending to behave like a normal human being, I take my fork and pound that mother narker down, literally shoving the leaves into my mouth in order to forgo the waste of time it would be to cut them, chomping them like my bovine cousins (cows, not my actual cousins).

As a result, I’ve beaten every salad recently in ever shorter amounts of time, but I’m now also afraid to eat salads around other people, for fear they will judge me for my salad-pounding prowess. But that’s another struggle for another blog post.

Today I defeat the salad. Tomorrow the world. And on Friday, I take a break and go to the park. It’s me time.

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Sep 11 2012
8 Comments
Food, Humorous

The Pros and Cons of these Trader Joe’s Cats Cookies I Bought Last Week

Destructive and beautiful.

Pro: They’re delicious.

I’m more than satisfied with the cookies’ taste, which has a good amount of cinnamon and is sweet but not too sweet. The crunchiness is quite appealing, yet I never feel I have to work too hard for them to give up their tasty inner-workings.

Con: They’re delicious.

Damn these cookies! They are so small that it feels to me each one merely introduces the depths of their tantalizing flavor! It never satisfies the cinnamon hunger that it awakes. But I can never move past the initial “hello, I taste great.” One cookie is just enough to pique my taste buds and get them wanting more. Always more! Madness!

Pro: They’re small.

I think “oooo! I’ll just have about three with my coffee and that’s the perfect snack size for 5 o’clock coffee. Just three small, crunchy, cinnamon cookies from the huge container I keep right on my desk, right within reach. No more, no less. This is great!”

Con: They’re small.

They’re too small! They’re so small I can always have another one, or at least think that I can always have another one. What difference does one more tiny cookie make? What about five more? Twenty more! INSANITY!

Pro: They’re numerous.

For so many cookies, they were certainly a steal. 15 cookies is one serving, and there are 15 servings in a container which means 225 cookies, which would last me over two weeks if I just ate one serving a day. Wowzers! So cheap!

Con: They’re numerous.

There’re so many of them I can always convince myself that just one more cookie won’t hurt, that the actual level of cookies in the container will never go down, that the supply will never be depleted, even though I know, beyond a shadow of a glimmer of a doubt, that these cookies are numbered and they surely will end, and just as the earth itself is counting down its days to the final destruction when the sun blows up in billions of years, so will these cookies end, because there are at maximum 230 cookies in there, depending on weight discrepancies.

But my dumb psychology tells me that one more cookie has no real effect on the sum total of the cookies, even when there is mathematical, scientific, arithmetic proof that it does, but this is the Cats Cookie madness, and it is inescapable. My only hope now is that the cookies are gone in less than two weeks, which they surely will be, and that I don’t have enough motivation to drive all the way to Trader Joe’s again in order to purchase them, which I would likely do in a moment of weakness because I lay in their thrall. Help me.

Cookie anyone?

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Sep 06 2012
16 Comments
Food, Humorous, Writing

The Horrifying True Story of How My Sister Ate My Fingernail

I already threw these away. I promise.

Dearly beloved, I have gathered you here to tell the terrifyingly, heart-wrenchingly, skin-crawlingly true story of the day my sweet, sweet sister ate a fingernail, my fingernail. Come with me, if you will, all the way back to that that fateful, surprise-filled day in July.

It is Monday and I am in San Francisco. I flew on the big steel bird all the way to fogtown, a place I still unknowingly call Sunny San Francisco. It is not sunny here, but oh it is to be even more cloudy and dreary in Suburb, Oklahoma.

Backstory: For years I’ve had the charming habit of forgetting to throw my fingernails away immediately after clipping them. This simple action tends to slip my mind, along with the middle names of significant others. The pile of clippings sits quietly on the coffee table, or desk corner, or languishes in the crease of a newspaper until I spot it a couple of days/weeks later and think to myself, “the socially appropriate thing to do here is to throw it away” and then throw it away. There are rumors that friends invited to social functions at my home have been forced to stare at piles of fingernail and/or toe trimmings, piles that are within broad view of God, myself, and the guests, while they interact with me. I deny these rumors.

But woe to my dear sister, my poor, sweet, innocent sister as she eats a sandwich on that Monday. She is famished and eats with gusto. Growing up in a family with four sturdy children, we learned to not let food linger on our plates lest it be snatched by another sibling. Wasted food is unheard of. As she wreaks the final justice on her sandwich, the moment of despair approaches silently, for a fingernail clipping lies on the very table where she eats, a keratin sliver I had charmingly and endearingly forgotten to remove before my departure to the West Coast.

The sandwich gone, my sister’s hunger not quite sated, she pokes about for remnants of her quickly-eaten lunch, checking for substantially sized crumbs and perhaps a scrap of ham that has fallen to the wayside.

But beware dear sister! Not everything is as it seems upon this lunch table! Danger prowls outside your door!

Alas, my warning goes unheard, typed months later in a blog post on the internet.

She picks up a crumb of notable size and unusual shape and eats it.

This, dear friends, is my fingernail.

Less than a second passes before she realizes her critical error, her tongue discerning the grossness and general inedibility of the fingernail, which used to be part of my very being. She spits it out, stunned, the now moist fingernail lying on the table as innocuous as a polka-dot.

How had it come to this? Who is to blame here? The absent-minded but generally lovable sister for leaving fingernail clippings out past their due? Or the blind hunger and gastro-greed that led her to clean the table of crumbs?

She asserts it is the former. I also assert it is the former, but I believe we have all learned a lesson here.

Be more careful of the crumbs you eat. You know not which body parts you might be ingesting.

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