Tag: cheetos

Bad idea: cower in place 32

Trentin Quarantino’s
 ALMANACK 
Inside my vault of abandoned and should-be-abandoned blog ideas

I. Norwegian Plague Jokes.
After the success of my posts on Norwegian Pig Jokes1, 2, 3, and learning from a frequent commenter about the whole genre of Plague fiction, I had the idea to do something up on Norwegian Plague Jokes. I wasn’t sure I’d find any starting material, but figured if I could find some generic plague jokes, I could just Norskii them up a bit.

I didn’t have any trouble finding plague jokes on the internet; in fact, there were (in my opinion) far too many sites dedicated to them. The problem was that they were uniformly awful—racist allusions to “black” plague or “yellow” fever, juvenile tortured puns on body parts à la boob-onic plague, and even worse. Who knew the concept of the plague would be so unfunny? In all that morass, I only found one joke that I’m even willing to repeat, and that one’s not even funny:

Q. Why were the Egyptians optimistic after the Nile turned to blood?
A. Because it was "B-Positive"

(During my brief research, I discovered that the Bubonic Plague had largely spared the Norwegians in the 14th century, until a trader ship carrying wool out of England came down with the plague, killing everyone on board. The “Ghost Ship” eventually ran aground near Bergen, some of the rats escaped to the mainland, and brought the plague with them. Creepy stuff!) (Source)

II. Discomfort Food
Upon noticing my own diet’s tendency to drift towards certain kinds of “comfort foods” during this forced isolation, I tried performing some gastronomic calculus to discover the perfect comfort food. I researched the four basic comfort food groups: (1) fats, (2) carbs, (3) sugar, (4) salt, and the comfort-enhancing additives (or “comfort vitamins”, if you will):

   COMFORT VITAMINS

Vitamin            As found in
C1 = cocoa         chocolate
C2 = caffeine      coffee
C3 = capsaicin     chili peppers
C4 = creosote      anything charcoal-broiled

I thought a complete comfort food might be: macaroni and cheese made with home-made Cheetos pasta, cooked into waffles, then made into an ice cream sandwich with chocolate covered salted-caramel coffee ice cream inside.

I was going to try making this to test my hypothesis, but I was unsuccessful—I just couldn’t make Cheetos pasta. Every time I bought a bag of Cheetos (which took several days because of curbside pickup), I would eat them before I got around to making spaghetti.

(Cheetos pasta is makable, by stouter hearts than me. See here.) Any report on my own further experiments will have to wait until I get faster ingredient delivery, or stronger will power.

III. T.G.I.C.
I thought there might be some mileage in a “Thank God It’s Covid” post, playing off my old “Glad Game“ skills to expound on the up side of a global pandemic that especially preys on old people and the poor. Maybe new technologies developed, or new insights into the human condition, or new heights of human compassion and cooperation, could compensate for the huge suffering and loss.

Nope, in the light of day, this idea seemed pretty much dead on arrival. The benefits of intro­ducing the possi­bility of eating bats to the world (outside of Palau, who already knew) wasn’t even close to, say, the invest­ment of $288 billion by the NASA moon program that ultimately led to the development of Tang.

Many people have shown heroism on the front lines, but that heroism has been in a battle that could have been so much less dangerous if our political leaders had stepped up, instead of reacting in a way that displayed their moral cowardice, political avarice, and abdication of critical reasoning skills.

Huh. I don’t think I’m currently in the proper place to play the Glad Game.

Thanks for letting me post things that I admit aren’t good enough to post,
Dorn
7/01/2020

Aminos update

– In which Dorn demonstrates the power of the post.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Modesty prevents me from claiming it must have been my mention of coconut aminos in a post less than a month ago that brought it such instant acclaim, but the facts speak for themselves. In today’s Washington Post, food columnist Ellie Krieger wrote that “Two formerly fringe ingredients go mainstream: Nutritional yeast and coconut aminos” (Washington Post Food Section, 7/18/19).

Her story concentrates on coconut aminos’s composition, flavor, and uses, mainly casting it as a substitute for soy sauce when the latter’s saltiness, gluten content or lack of Paleo-credentials disqualify it from the menu (you blog readers knew of these qualities of aminos already!). While generally positive about its place in the kitchen, Ms Krieger is skeptical about the health claims made by some coconut-aminophiles:

People are also buying into coconut aminos because they believe the many false and misleading claims they read about the ingredient online… though fresh coconut sap contains vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, scant — if any — are retained in the processing of the sap into coconut aminos, and there are no studies to back up any disease prevention benefits.

In other news (specifically, other news on the same Washington Post online page), food and culture reporter Maura Judkis reports that “KFC’s Cheetos chicken sandwich looks toxic and tastes like a missed opportunity” . (Washington Post online, 7/17/19). She allows that eating the sandwich did not kill her, and in fact it actually tastes better than it looks (which recall from the article title is “toxic”), and she reminisces about the food she enjoyed when she was young: “In the early part of this decade, stunt food used to be stuntier.”

To be fair, Cheetos is a notoriously difficult ingredient to work into a recipe, compared to, say, Twinkies. My grandson K— showed me Good Mythical Morning, a YouTube show that subjected several ingredients to the same culinary test: each ingredient was substituted, one at a time, for almonds in the process used to make almond milk (basically, soaking in water). Twinkies made a passable twinkie-milk beverage; so did fried chicken. But cheetos-milk just didn’t cut it (“too greasy”).

I’ll bet two successful Cheetos substitutions are: (1) for Rice Krispies in rice krispy treats, and (2) for cornmeal in corn dogs. I haven’t tried either of these, but if I do, I’ll let you know.

Thanks!
Dorn
7.18.2019