wideeyedfunk

Tag: comfort food

  • The meatballs are in the crockpot.

    The outside world was a rude -6°F this morning. The dogs wasted no time out there during morning walkies. They failed utterly to enjoy the hard, crystal blue sky and sparkling snow. Fair enough. I am appreciating it from my office window.

    Death dealing icicles are dangling from every house for blocks. One neighbor has glaciers forming in the deep vee swales of his roofline, the forward ends are ten-foot long broadswords aiming for earth. Or his car. Because he parks under them.

    SnowYard

    The snow squeaks under feet and tires. The ground isn’t the ground anymore. We’ve all given up trying to clear sidewalks and driveways entirely – we’ve taken to forming a smooth surface of the trampled up, super frozen mass. My boots thunk on these elevated walkways. Miss Tibbit-The-Useless-Little-Black-Dog pees on them and it all disappears. She can’t be the only one. Melting day is going to be awesomely gross. Bleach down the neighborhood gross.

    CrystalsIn desperation I applied Swarovski Crystal tattoos this morning. They are tiny, wee crystals on adhesive. Now my cheek bones sparkle like the snow. I figure that if I disguise myself as a Snow Sprite I’ll be warmer. I won’t mind the frigid temperatures, shocking winds, and massive banks of snow. Two years of this nonsense ran the WideEyedHousehold out of Minnesota a few years ago.

    In further desperation I made meatballs in marinara sauce. A warm, meaty, herbal aroma ought to make us feel secure, warm, and content in these horrible depths of winter. They are in the crockpot now. Sure enough, their happy scent is wafting up from the kitchen. Later the Spouse and I will run out for crusty rolls and provolone cheese. Of course, we are also going to pick up snowshoe gaiters because we are going out into the cold for a hike tomorrow. Probably I should apply more Snow Sprite crystals and eat lots of meatballs in preparation.

  • Peckish.

    And then I came across the WideEyedSpouse,
    standing in the dark kitchen,
    eating pickles.

    I left him to it.

  • Chips Weren’t Meant to Be Baked

    Offending baked chips. Note the clear "Baked" marking. They don’t want us to be surprised. They know there are disappointments inside.

    I just ate a thin piece of ranch flavored cardboard. Oh. Wait. I’m looking at the bag I pulled it from and I see the problem. It’s a bag of BAKED potato chips. BAKED.

    Friends, let me say to you: chips were not meant to be baked.

     I know. We eat too much fat. We eat too much salt. We eat too many chips. And by “we”, I mean “I”, but I am not alone because some food scientist/dietician fool decided to bake chips. And some management fool decided that this was marketable. And what is truly remarkable is that taste testing fools told them this resulted in edible, even maybe good snacking. They lied.

    I am at the least a third generation chip snacker. I know chips.

    The Snack Man at the chips.

    Grandpa always had a bag of chips at his house. Those chips were always open, the top of the bag carefully rolled and clothes-pinned. They were always tucked up high – on the top shelf above the cereal, the crackers, the unused old dried soup packets. We kids needed to climb onto the chair, to get up on the stool, to stand on the counter, to reach the chips. Friends, those chips weren’t baked.

     My dad was known as the “Snack Man” for years, after one of my brother’s girlfriends noted that he spent a certain amount of time munching from bags of chips at the pantry door. I used to lie around in bed reading a lot when I was a kid, but the sound of a foil bag rustling in an entirely different wing of the house sent me running. If the Snack Man was at the chips, an empty bag was sure to follow.

     I am broadly experienced in chips. I’ve eaten chips on three continents. I’ve had chips deep fried in lard, peanut oil, various vegetable oils, and once in the Russian Far East, chips that perhaps had been cooked in industrial waste oil.

    Deep fried chip goodness.

    I love chips. But again, friends, not baked chips. A baked chip is just a chunk of potato. It tastes…like a potato. Or, if it has flavor chemicals all over it, it takes like a piece of cardboard with flavor on it. Baked chips are no kind of chip at all.

     After the apocalypse, zombie, nuclear winter, whatever, who cares, I’m heading out with my shotgun to find a chip delivery truck. I’m going to pry open the cargo doors, make myself a chip bag chair, and snack. I’ll eat chips until I run out of shells for the ghouls or chips for the belly. Because, of course, no one is going to have time to make chips in the aftermath. Like prescription antibiotics and gasoline, chips will be a finite resource.

    If you are reading this and you work for a chip company, I beseech you, tell your people to stop baking chips. Spend your time making more deep fried chip goodness. If you are reading this while eating chips, I can only applaud your good taste. If your chips are extra dark, small-batch, kettle-cooked, I bow to your greatness.