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“Honey, Did You Remember the Ho-Ho’s?”

A blog like dyslexic lite beer — it tastes filling, but it’s less great!

I’m no fan of grocery stores.

(Actually, I typo’d that the first time and wrote ‘grovery stores’, which would’ve made the sentence a lie, a damned lie, and perhaps even a statistic. I’ve honestly never been to a Grover-y Store, but I imagine it’d be pretty cool as long as that damned Strangle-Me-Elmo bitch wasn’t there, too. Shouldn’t Oscar have been all up in his bidness by now? Somebody needs to stick their hand wayyyy up in that little red pecker’s neck and turn him inside out already. He’s like a little sunburned Pillsbury Dough Boy — all ‘Hoo hoo!’ and ‘Ha hah!’ But I digress…)

Anyhoo — grovery grocery stores. My typing is not what it used to be (three hours ago, even). As much as I hate to harp on a theme twice in one day, what with the foody thing I wrote earlier, grocery stores are on my mind, so that’s where we’re shovin’ off from, mateys. We’ll see what patch of jagged rocks we crash on when we get there.

(So, back to ‘foody’ for a tick. If I’ve got this right — and I’m not botherin’ to look it up, so presume that I do — then ‘foody’ is the quality of being food, or food-like. But ‘foodie’, on the other hand, is some flamboyant character who wears ruffles and scarves and affects some sort of quasi-European accent, if s/he doesn’t own one already. Oh, and likes food, yes. Definitely the food thing; that’s part of the whole package. Very important, no doubt.

“It’s strong enough for a man, but shaved into a butter sauce, it makes a nice couscous alternative.”

But I like the pattern — ‘-y’ means you are like something, but ‘-ie’ means you are a fan of it. Foody. Foodie. Cool! But I think we should get more words in on this. There are lots of words out there that aren’t quite doing it right. Like crappy and crappie. Okay, so crappie’s a fish, and I suppose fish do like to poop, and eat it, and spend their lives swimming in the stuff, so maybe that’s not the best example. But how about ‘sleepie’? How long do we have to wait to get that approved? Or ‘beerie’? Now there’s a word that needs a good home. Where are the wordsmiths when we need ’em, huh? ‘Beefie’. I’m just pullin’ ’em outta the air here; how hard can it be? Or ‘sexie’. Do I have to do everybody’s job around here?)

So. Where the hell was I? Grocery stores. All righty.

Yeah, so grocery stores and I have never really gotten along. I’m not sure why; all it has is food, and I like food. I eat it almost every day, sometimes two or three times.

(Is that wrong?)

But it’s just such a hassle to go to the store, and then find a cart, and walk down the aisles, and kick that old lady’s ass who also wants the last gallon of skim milk. And Jehovah help me if I’ve been given a list of some sort as a guide. Now, if I wrote the list myself, then it’s cool — I know what the hell I meant when I wrote it, and there’s only one kind of Chee-tos to begin with, so I’m on top of it.

But if my wife (or any other sane person) actually hands me a pre-made list? Well, these days I just save time and start bleeding from the ears right there on the spot. No need to go through the whole process again. It’s impossible to shop from someone else’s list — absolutely non-doable. Like a nun, it can’t be done. Take spinach, for instance.

(No, really, take it far away to some Fourth World country and burn it. And then bury it, piss on the grave, dig it up, yell at it, and throw it back in.)

Anyway — let’s say I’m sent to the store for the usual suspects — pomegranates, cod liver oil, utility shears, unagi… you know, the staples of everyday living. So, now let’s say I see spinach on the list, down there between the ostrich eggs and the Gold Bond. Well, what the hell do I do then? There’s fresh spinach, and leafy spinach, and frozen spinach, and spinach dips, and cans of spinach and spinach soup and spinach ice cream and spinach juice and spinach pasta and spinach waffles, and how am I supposed to know what ‘spinach’ means? Or ‘navel oranges’, for that matter? Or ’12 oz. can of Campbell’s tomato soup’? I’m just one man, for cryin’ out loud! So I play it safe — I just buy one of any product that could conceivably be referred to as the item that’s on my list. Or rhymes with it, or starts with the same letter. Or has a clown on the box. So I come home with three thousand dollars’ worth of crap that nobody wants, and suddenly Saturday afternoon is gone, and sometimes Sunday morning, too. Where’s the fun in that?

(I mean, if I’m gonna spend my whole weekend in a place where I’m expected to squeeze the occasional melon, then there at least ought to be some music and dancing and fireman’s poles around. Is that really asking for too much?)

What I really miss is this whole free-delivery Internet grocer thingamabob. That shit was cool! You sit at your computer — where you’re gonna end up, anyway — and click on your colas (or sodas, or pops, or Cokes, or fizzies, or whatever the hell you happen to call it in your neck of the planet), and your frozen microwave burritos, and your Ho-Ho’s, and then you hit send, and a few hours later some friendly dude who won’t let you tip him shows up at your door with a bunch of someone else’s groceries. It was like the Christmas present you always get from that senile aunt you have that lives far away somewhere — you never quite knew what you were gonna get, but it sure as hell wasn’t gonna be what you asked for. But it’d be delivered right to your door, you’d at least get it in the month or so after you expected it, and you could probably eat it if you got desperate enough. So we ended up with a lot of other people’s Brussels sprouts, and pickle relish, and Secret roll-on antiperspirant deodorant (which, incidentally, ended up being the best tasting of the three. It’s strong enough for a man, but shaved into a butter sauce, it makes a nice couscous alternative.) But sadly, all of the online grocers around here started charging a fee for the privilege of having your menu scrambled into a state of higgledy-piggledy by their parsimonious produce packers, so we moved on.

I suppose we’re better off, in the end. Now we get just the little packets of carcinogens and acrylamide that we want, not some batch of tofu crap ordered by the health goobers next door. Of course, now we have to look the cashier in the eye as Twinkie after Twinkie slides across the pricer and down the chute, like some hedonistic wet-dream waterslide. But my wife tends to take care of that. She makes the lists, you see — well, she has to. I’m not allowed near the kitchen anymore, since the… unpleasantness. (I still say that dogs can regrow toenails, but we’ll find out for sure in a couple more weeks. Maybe if they come back, the dog will stop looking at me like that all the time.) So I’m allowed to get my sippy cup out of the fridge, but for anything else, I need oven mitts and adult supervision.

(The former of which make it much harder to unroll my Ho-Ho’s as I eat them, I have to admit… and no, ‘unrolling my Ho-Ho’s’ is not a euphemism. Well, it will be now, but it wasn’t when I wrote it. Fun!)

So that’s that. Actually, my wife’s at the store tonight, and I think I hear her coming back now, with her grocery bags full of yummy goodness (again, not a euphemism). I’d better go find my wallet (unlike the lackeys from the store who used to deliver, she happily accepts tips, and happily kicks me in the shins if I don’t pony up). Then I’ll strap on my oven mitts and head downstairs to help. I just hope she didn’t get spinach waffles again…

Call for Two of These, and Take One in the Morning

More changed subjects than a schizophrenics’ pep rally!

It’s almost dinner time, so I’ve decided to torture myself by looking at restaurant takeout menus. I won’t actually be able to order anything on the menus, you understand — I’ll be in the office for another hour or more, and then I’ll drive home, and then I’ll be able to sit down and really give food a good thinking over. In the meantime, any consideration of food is purely theoretical, and serves only to make me hungrier, which distracts me from what I’m actually doing.

(Which is writing this entry, which itself is distracting me from what I’m really supposed to be doing. It’s all circles within circles, folks, circles within circles.)

“And by cracky, if we’re gonna pay for that food, then it damned well better be swimming in some sort of grease, preferably squeezed from some sort of dead animal, and ideally with a separate cup of the stuff that we can drink for dessert.”

So, anyway, I’ve got these takeout menus, and they all look the same after a while. Or more accurately, they all look like one of two things — greasy pizza menus, or greasy Chinese food menus. Around here, at least, that’s about all we can get delivered to the office. Or maybe it’s just all I ever eat. Eight of one, half dozen the other. Whatever.

(How is it, by the way, that these two niches of cuisine have become the de facto takeout/delivery choices? I mean, I understand that as Americans, we all want to exercise our inalienable right to make other people prepare food and bring it to our doorsteps. And by cracky, if we’re gonna pay for that food, then it damned well better be swimming in some sort of grease, preferably squeezed from some sort of dead animal, and ideally with a separate cup of the stuff that we can drink for dessert. And if it takes more than twenty minutes or so to get said food to us, then we’ll have no choice but to follow the 31st Amendment of these United States and call the restaurant every two minutes, belligerent and profane, until the food arrives. No, really — it’s in the Constitution. Look it up.

But given all of that, I’m still not sure how Signorina Pizza and Lady Fried Rice ended up winning the pageant to represent all of cholesterol-dom in the food delivery industry. Certainly, I would think that Senorita Burrito and Frau Bratwurst, for instance, would have scored just as highly in the artery clogging competition, and they don’t take nearly as long to get into their dresses as their fellow foodstuffs. I can really only see pizza and (American-bastardized) Chinese food having one advantage over other fatso foods, but I suppose it’s a big one: the morning-after test.

See, it’s pretty much a given that if you’re going to actually call someone up on a regular basis to bring you these piping hot boxes of premature death, then you’re also unlikely to be able to pull yourself together the next morning to figure out toast. Or cereal. Or even how to get out of bed. So you want — no, you need — a food that can be carried from the front door directly to your nightstand, withstand the first barrage of flying forks and fingers, and then sit quietly overnight getting ready for round number two.

And of course, pizza is the Grand Poobah master world champion in this process, hands down. I mean, Chinese food is fine — the grease congeals a little bit, and gets the rice all crispy and sticky, and the chicken or beef or whatever tends to mush up and disintegrate after a few hours… this is well and good, of course, and all very appetizing, but nothing compared to the culinary crescendo that is day-old pizza. Slightly-used pizza is a delicacy worthy of royalty, and yet available to all. You don’t even have to be the one who starts the pizza on day one; you can swoop in hours, even days, later and partake of the true feast that is cold, stale pizza pie.

See, there are even two classes of pizza, if you ask the true connoisseur. There are ‘eating’ pizzas, and then there are ‘aging’ pizzas. It’s like white vs. red wine. Some pizzas, you really don’t want to think about eating until they’re at least twelve hours old. At least. Many can be profitably enjoyed into their third or fourth days (though at that point, you need to pick and choose a bit about what started out a mushroom, and what turned into a mushroom along the way). Still, a good aging pizza is a sight, and a taste — and often a smell — to behold. The crust is the first to change, becoming rock-hard on the bottom and chewier as it nestles into the toppings. Pepperoni and other meat-like items will become somewhat rubbery at first, then gradually harder and finally dense and shrivelly.

(But then again, don’t we all?)

Onions and peppers will wrinkle as well, and regale the eagle-eyed watcher with a stunning progression of browns and grays before settling into a thick, crunchy black. The tomato sauce, oddly, is relatively inert throughout the process — it thickens a bit, and serves to glue everything together, but it doesn’t really do anything. Just like a damned vegetable…

But the cheese — the cheese is the real star of the show. If you order a pizza while you watch your Saturday cartoons, by dinnertime you’ll be able to caulk your tub with the cheese.

(Not that I’m suggesting any actual housework or physical activity, mind you. It’s just a figure of speech. Don’t get your knickers in a twist over it.)

By midnight, the cheese is cement. Don’t be tempted to gobble it up then, though! A truly spectacular pizza needs to gel overnight. Rock yourself to sleep with the lullaby sounds of the cheese gurgling and churning, working its greases deep into the pizza. Sleep well, and long, and when you wake, your new best friend will be there waiting. Don’t bother with cleaning, or washing, or brushing anything at that point. Don’t even get out of bed. Just reach over, open the box, and grab a little slice of Heaven, all for yourself. It just doesn’t get any better than that.)

Nice. One paragraph of topic, six pages of parenthetical aside. Just what I get for writing hungry. Well, on the good side, I diddled all my time here away, so I can go home and actually get some food now. Of course, on the bad end of things, I did eat three packets of hot sauce while I wrote it out of desperation. Plus a plastic spoon. Oh, and my left sock.

So anyway, things didn’t quite go where I planned, but hopefully we all got something out of it. Now you know that a Little Caesar’s ‘Pizza Pizza’ deal isn’t just dinner for four anymore. Now it can be a psychedelic three-day tour through the wonders of pseudo-Italian cuisine, the effects of atmospheric moisture on baked bread dough, and an exploration of what hungry little things are hiding within the walls of your house this very moment, waiting to stamp their hairy little feet in anything tasty you might leave lying around.

(Which reminds me: do be sure to finish the pie before the anchovies start to walk off by themselves, hmm?)

So clearly, this has been of service to you today. Ooh, and I learned how to spell connoisseur.

So it’s yet another win-win blog entry. And since my work seems to be done here, I’m off to order some dinner. And tomorrow’s breakfast, and lunch as well, all in one handy square box. I can hardly wait to clean off my nightstand and get started. Bon appetit!