Category Archives: Two minute read

Jun 18 2012
30 Comments
Food, Humorous, Miracles of Midwestern Cooking, Two minute read

Dear Lord, Thank You for Casserole

And the people of the Lord gave thanks.

What is like the casserole?

Could any other dish transform tins of canned goods into a steaming meal for prairie mouths, hungry from a hard day of television viewing? Does anything match the poetry of the phrase, “Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. Recipe is easily doubled.” Is there another main course as picturesque or heartwarming?

Entire generations have attained greatness by feeding solely off of casserole nectar. Worlds of cream of chicken soup have bubbled and boiled over whole chicken breasts sitting atop beds of rice or sliced roast beef as the casserole’s alchemy creates dinner and a better planet.

As I browse through my cookbook, the endless casserole variation is like a never ending music.

Oh Zucchini Casserole, oh Country Corn Bake, oh Cheese Corn Bake, oh Broccoli Corn Casserole! And the tuna! Dear, sweet, God! The Tuna Casserole, with its 3 cans of Chinese noodles, 2 cans mushroom soup, 1 package of blanched almonds, 2 cans white tuna, and 1 cup of milk. Dry yourselves, my taste buds, for the dinner hour is not nigh.

The casserole gathers canned goods to its glassy bosom, accepting them for what they are as they are combined and layered and sprinkled with corn flakes. A masterpiece of non-cooking, an exercise in the art of assembly, this is Midwestern cuisine at its finest.

Would any church potluck be complete without a steaming pan of Creamy Chicken and Rice Casserole? Could the world continue to function on Monday night without a dinner of chicken enchiladas (1 cooked chicken, 1 c. shredded Taco Blend Cheese, 1 packet of Taco seasoning, Sour cream, salsa.) with its instructions to “Shred the chicken. Mix all ingredients together?”

And after being assembled into the tortillas, these proto-enchiladas will lie down on a sweet bed of glass and be smothered with equal parts enchilada sauce and cream of mushroom soup, topped with cheddar cheese in an eternal embrace that will continue deep within the digestive tract of the consumer.

In the kitchens of the Midwest, the cook’s most fearsome weapon is the 9×13 baking dish. The ammunition of choice: canned soup, cream of mushroom or chicken. With these tools, the chef is ready to face a ravenous family, to fight the devil with cheesy potatoes at a church gathering, and entertain the in-laws on the night of the big game.

When almost every ingredient is birthed from a can or a jar, when the objective of the dish is to combine it so thoroughly that one only tastes hot chicken-y, tuna-y, or beefy mush, when an complete meal can be eaten out of a mug, is there any way to go wrong?

Let the casserole state of mind cheese its way between your neurons. Let the open-and-pour mentality soothe your nerves and line your arteries. Life should be a steaming dish full of something that bubbles. It matters not what it is.

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Jun 15 2012
17 Comments
Food, Humorous, Miracles of Midwestern Cooking, Two minute read

Miracles of Midwestern Cooking

Dinner’s ready! Bring your Lipitor.

People on the coasts often have no idea how to categorize 60% of the states between New York and California, so they do what they can with the terms West, Midwest, and Southern.

As a result, Oklahoma is often incorrectly lumped in with Midwestern states, a classification that makes sense geographically but not culturally. When I hear Midwest, I think of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, etc., places that don’t have the hard-working prairie ethic instilled in them from their mothers’ breast milk as we do in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

I prefer to call my region the Central Plains, but for the purposes of this blog series, I will accommodate the ignorance of outsiders and call these great states part of the Midwest.

Imagine a people sprawled under a sky that scorches them in the summer and dumps snow and ice on them during the winter. In the spring, tornadoes and hail demolish homes and crops. There is no mercy: you will farm or become food for the farm.

Because fresh vegetables wither in all seasons (to be explained later), and dairy and carbs must pull up the slack. Bacon grease is a health supplement. People die at the age of 60, but they die having eaten egg yolks and butter their entire life. Healthy eating is a foreign imposition by people on the coasts, and God bless America.*

What kind of food do these people eat? What flavors, textures, and cooking methods typify their everyday noshes? How can they survive the blazing summers and bone-cracking winters?

The people of the Central Plains are ingenious. They have invented a cuisine that not only allowed them to deal with their harsh surroundings, but took the cooking out of cooking altogether. From the Midwest come an astonishing variety of casseroles, truly unique takes on the salad, and all different kinds of ways to prepare, texture, and name a meatloaf. For this reason, the Midwest is known for its incredible cuisine. When people from other countries and the coasts imagine the great gap between D.C. and L.A., they inevitably think of the mouth-watering food that has made itself known across the world for its creativity, flavor, and health-benefits.

Cities like New York, Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, and Portland are overrun with restaurants serving up hot casserole dishes and dinner rolls to eager clientele, and top chefs hail cream of chicken soup as a miracle liquid revealed by the Almighty.

For the next couple of posts, I will be talking about this wonderful cuisine, aided by two cookbooks that my mother recently gave me. Stay tuned next week to learn about the Midwestern casserole, the salad experience in the Midwest, and culinary highlights of Midwestern cookery. It’s sure to be an enlightening journey.

*Do I have “science” to back up these claims. No. But I have been to family reunions.

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Jun 14 2012
25 Comments
Humorous, Job hunting, Two minute read

“I Will Believe in My Glittery Screen.”

Compy goes with me everywhere.

Today I was using the ‘ol computer, typing away at my reinvented hamster wheel and rollerskating through the nets like tomorrow hadn’t been invented yet and I had the life span of an Old Testament patriarch.

I felt magic coursing through my veins as the web opened its doors and welcomed me with the minty breath of an over-eager date. Opportunities pushed me over and grabbed me by the shirt collar, saying, “I’m for you!” Yes, today was different.

It was not like yesterday, when the internet’s waters were grey like grandfather’s liver and my eyes grew weary as they sifted through the words like picking over dance prospects at a honkey tonk after only one drink. Nothing was exciting.

But today, zoom! Bang! Whip! Smash! Crunch! It felt like things were happening.

And then I noticed that my computer screen looked different. It was shining, no, glittering as I sped across the web’s pages. I didn’t think anything of it except for how much of an improvement it was on the dust blanket that eternally covered my monitor in Cairo. And I thought the glitter looked really pretty. It reminded me of when I liked glittery things and the solution to any artistic or decorative dilemma was to rain glitter on that mother effer.

I thought of a conversation I had with my neighbor, a member of a “charismatic” strand of Protestant Christianity, when she told me about a revival at their church. Apparently at the height of the service, some members’ faces and hands started shining with what later turned out to be 24 carat gold.

Maybe I was experiencing something similar, except for it was my computer that was blessed by the Lord and had become a sign to the believers in this household that the Lord does exist and that my computer was an instrument of holy work and had been sanctified for its efforts, that it would now live forever, slowly becoming more and more covered in these glitter specks until it turned into a Mac Wafer, a kind of computer that doesn’t yet exist.

Then I saw a speck towards the right-most edge of the screen that was slightly larger. It looked like a water droplet or something of that nature, but that was impossible, because water evaporates and I hadn’t had any on my computer that day. Oil, however, does not evaporate, and I had been using my computer dangerously close to pots and pans filled with various things sautéing.

My computer screen was not dazzling with flecks of spiritual 24 carat gold. It was cooking oil, either olive or canola, that had splattered onto the screen. My miracle was nothing more than the result of haphazard placement of electronics.

I could choose to be disappointed to think that I merely have a dirty, oily screen that’s no better than the glasses of a fry cook. Instead, I will believe in my glittery screen, will appreciate it for the fact it looks pretty, and will believe that this was still a miracle in its own way, both the fact that I still have a working computer, and the fact the screen looks better now than it ever has.

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Jun 13 2012
11 Comments
Humorous, Job hunting, Two minute read

We’re Modern Now. We Don’t Have to Sweat.

It’s functional. Don’t worry about it.

Saturday afternoon, 1:30 pm. College graduate exits bedroom and runs into father, also a college graduate, for first time of the day. Pleasantries are exchanged. Father, pleased to see the college graduate, lists the yard work he has done that day. He has trimmed the hedges, cleaned out the pool, fixed something, moved something else, and used a loud machine for about two hours. He didn’t mention the last one, but the college graduate knows because she was sitting inside and had to listen to the racket for about two hours.

He’s tired and asks the college graduate if she was planning on making lunch for everyone, a laughable prospect. She chuckles and thinks of this question later when she sees the family has cracked wheat in the pantry. Why didn’t he just make this? She wonders.

In the meantime, college graduate has also been busy. She applied for 3.5 jobs and wrote 2.5 blog posts and made herself an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly on it for lunch. Her mind is tired but she’s hasn’t left the house, hasn’t made any money, and is wearing an old pair of sweatpants and a shirt from two days ago.

She was reflecting on her outfit earlier that day and how she felt surprisingly accomplished despite the fact sweatpants are viewed as the garb of the defeated. At least, she had accomplished until she met father, who had exited the house, made money by virtue of the fact he is a salaried employee of a real company, and burned over 20x as many calories as the college graduate.

She wonders how to explain to father that despite the sweatpants and the fact she was emerging from the bedroom, she had also done work that day, work that was laying the ground for her future and paving the way for his entry into a comfortable nursing home. In the digital age, she thought, we don’t have to sweat while we work. We don’t have to do anything besides stare at a computer screen and think really hard and sometimes type/write stuff down. This is the technological era. We don’t need to go outside anymore.

But instead of saying any of this, she lets the conversation fall into silence and quickly hides the tab with the YouTube music video of “Call Me, Maybe,” the music video that the college graduate had danced to only seconds earlier, maybe, when trying to recall some moves from her hip-hop class last spring.

Maybe father will read blog post later on and want to dance to the music video as well, she thinks, and then we will both burn calories.

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Jun 12 2012
24 Comments
Humorous, Two minute read

I Demand More Puppies on Television, and Everywhere Else

Don’t even read this blog post. Just google puppies. You’ll be glad you did.

Lately I’ve been having a lot of killer ideas involving puppies. Those furry wee machines are just on my mind all the time and I decided some of these eureka moments were just too good to keep to myself, so I’m going to grace the interspheres with them.

If you have any good ideas for puppies you should share them with the world too, maybe on Twitter. Have you heard of it? It’s a micro-blogging platform…oh never mind.

Cute Furry Time-Sensitive Ideas:

1. A medical television show that has puppies instead doctors, nurses, and technicians: It would be so cute if someone came in, literally spineless from an almost deadly car accident and the puppies had to perform surgery, their tiny paws holding scalpels and administering anesthesia. The highlight of the show will be when one of the puppies yawns and magically cures the patient because of overwhelming cuteness.

2. Puppy petting stations, featuring a baby: I don’t know if puppy petting stations are a thing, but Courtney Cox had one at a birthday party (according to a reliable source), and there was one used at my alma mater during finals to relieve stress. Obviously the puppy petting station idea is great, but what if there were a baby too? People love seeing the baby size of things play with one another, so it would be dangerously cute if there were an infant in there, wearing a hat or a bow or a rubber chicken, nuzzling itself (sorry for the neuter pronoun) against the soft puppy fur. And then the young ones will get tired and the guests of the party would gather ’round to watch the baby and puppy nap session. Precious!

3. Presidential debates with puppies: I think this idea pretty much speaks for itself. If there were some golden retriever pups on stage, or Obama and Romney were both petting one, then I think people might actually tune in and this country would realize the change that we’ve all chanted about or against. Of course, Romney would have to learn how to simulate pet empathy. I believe there’s a program he could get installed for that though.

4. Cooking show featuring puppies: the puppies wouldn’t actually make any food, they would just be playing with each other while someone made cookies in the background. There would be a final screenshot of a timid puppy gingerly biting a chocolate chip cookie and then the recipe would flash on screen. Ratings out the roof. This would also be great for when smell-o-vision finally comes into existence, minus the dog-urine. Puppies and chocolate chip cookies: is there anything better or more generic?

5. Economics courses featuring live puppies as the go-to example for everything: the professor would introduce the puppies, saying that Porkchop is better at fetching sticks, while Crumpet is better at digging holes. In the most efficient economic system, Porkchop would just fetch sticks and Crumpet would just dig holes. Then there would be a demonstration, clapping, laughter, and happiness.

I believe the solution to many of our world’s problems is to get the puppies involved. They already exist, so let’s put their cuteness to work.

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