Nowadays people are messing with food too much. Have you noticed that? Take breakfast cereal. I don’t know what brand you prefer, but whatever it is you can now buy it with chocolate in it. Special K even has chocolate in it. What is happening to us?
I hesitate to tell the crazies on this planet what they should be targeting in the Western World, but it’s sure not airplanes or buildings or chemical plants. If you want to bring us to our knees, you need to attack our supply of sugar, chocolate and coffee.
Without coffee and ice cream, I just don’t know if life would be worth living. Coffee is the most revolutionized drink around. When I was growing up, everyone drank instant. Nobody liked it. I don’t think you were supposed to like it. Just drink it and shut-up.
Today’s brewed coffee actually tastes good, and it’s about as easy to prepare as instant coffee. The only drawback being the fact that it cost as much as a round of golf. Some movie theatres even offer coffee. They have yet to determine how much the market will bear.
Coffee is a good example of improving the flavor of stuff. A stupid example is apple pie. Do you remember when someone invented the Saltine apple pie? It was apple pie with crackers instead of apples. It was one of those ideas in search of a “good” in front of it.
If you put enough sugar and cinnamon on rotted wood you can make it taste like apple pie. The texture will be horrible, but the flavor quite pleasing. My point is, there some things we just need to leave alone. Let crackers stay crackers, and let pie be pie. You can quote me.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but one thing my brother Dennis brought back from Vietnam was a taste for grits. He didn’t care that much for the Agent Orange, but he liked the grits. I thought I knew my brother. Before the war, we hated grits. An indescribable flavor, horrible texture and the attractiveness of a slippery mound of crème of wheat.
I do not blame the inventor of grits. What else can you do with inedible, dried, hard corn? You turn it into bad-tasting, but edible hominy. How can you get people to eat hominy? Grind it up and call it grits.
Today, you can order gravy and grits, syrup and grits, shrimp and grits and blueberries and grits. If you put enough gravy on one of those items, I’ll eat it. But, I’ll eat it in spite of the fact it’s got grits in it.
Same thing with carrot cake. How fascinating is that? Wow, a cake made with carrots. I gotta tell you, carrots are not the selling factor of the cake. Same with zucchini cake. You don’t buy zucchini cake because you long for a dessert that tastes like a green squash. The taste of zucchini must be extracted from the cake. Considering all the technological advances, I’m fairly certain that okra pie is somewhere in our future.
Last week, Kay yelled for me to come see a segment of one of her cooking shows. Three people were vying for Best, Toughest, and Meanest Chef. Something like that. Everything’s a contest on the cooking channel. Can’t we all just learn to get along? Anyway, the contestants were given three or so foods to use in a meal. One was steak, one was chocolate and another was anchovies. Let that thought sit there for a minute.
Kay called me in so I could see a steak that one person had spread an anchovy glaze over before grilling. The thing was charred and looked delish. The judges loved it.
They said it gave the steak a hint of salt and fish. If it hadn’t had a burnt crust, it would’ve tasted like a messed up smelly steak. You could burn the daylights out of a cow’s udder and I’d tell you it tasted somewhat like okra.
What I’ve mentioned here does nothing to explain carrot and raisin salad. My mom used to get it every time we went to Wyatt’s or Luby’s. (Remember Wyatt’s? They had the best egg plant casserole. -- By the way, I liked eggplant casserole not because it tasted like eggplant, but because they camouflaged it to taste like Mom’s Thanksgiving dressing, only with cheese.)
Where was I? Oh, carrots and raisins. I like carrots, raisins and mayonnaise. I like carrots cooked or eaten raw. I like raisins mixed with bran flakes. Mayonnaise is necessary for most sandwiches. However, if you put those three together and call it a salad, you’ve created a fracture in one of our parallel universes. There’s a bunch of people living in a weird dimension who are suffering because of what we’re doing over here.
Einstein was so close to proving the parallel universe thing right before he gagged on a popcorn jellybean. Oh, the wicked web we weave when first we practice on food we eat. You can quote me on that.
End
Mark@rooftopwriter.com
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