Tag: food

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general

Catsup, ketchup, catch-up

I felt a need to write a catch-up on all the various things that went on in the last few months, but immediately went on a tangent about whether or not the tomato-based condiment is named catsup or ketchup. I think it’s with a k, and maybe it used to be mostly with a c in the US, until Heinz changed the name of theirs to the k spelling a century and a half ago. I guess I can remember this with the mnemonic that it’s k and my last name is k.

* * *

OK, so catch-up.

I feel like I’ve lost the first seven months of this year on stupid stuff. I wrote about the two big trips — Iceland and India — although I haven’t posted photos from either. Maybe I’ll get that done at some point, although I’m fairly convinced nobody looks at Flickr. Maybe I’ll make a book, although Blurb takes forever and just raised their prices. Charging a dollar a page for a pocket book is highway robbery. Anyway. Another big trip coming up, and I’ll write more about that later.

Working in San Francisco has been good. The bike thing didn’t really happen. I drive or Uber to the train station, and take the BART one stop, under the water and straight to the financial district. The whole thing is a relatively painless 30 minutes door to door. They feed us, so I seldom leave the building and don’t really have an idea of what’s around. If there’s not food that day, I usually end up at Super Duper, which is a block away. A couple of times I’ve walked a loop down to the ferry terminal and back, which is a decent stroll. I should get out and explore the area more, maybe take some pictures. I should do a lot of things, though.

* * *

When S worked for Smucker, she would sometimes have to travel out to their home office in Orrville, Ohio. Their HQ has a store in it, where you can get t-shirts and socks and other swag, plus the company’s products. And a weird easter egg is that the store sells Smucker’s ketchup, which isn’t available in retail stores. She brought back a jar a few times, and it’s actually really good ketchup. It has a slightly sweeter taste, and comes in a fancy wide-mouth glass jar, probably the same one they use for jelly.

They also have a thing where they will print your picture on the label of a jelly jar. It won’t let you change the slogan below it to a custom string, except to a stock set of choices like “happy birthday” or whatever. Because presentations were the bane of her existence at that job, I wanted to get a jar with the PowerPoint logo on it, and the slogan “PowerPoint is my jam!” I guess I could DIY it, but she left that job a year ago, so never mind.

* * *

In addition to that Flickr rant above, I have no idea what I’m doing with photography. I shot a bunch of film in Iceland, and was unhappy with the results. I have little motivation to go out and take more pictures of the same three things I see on a weekly basis. I bought that Sony a6400 for the India trip, and took maybe a hundred photos there, none good. I really struggled with getting good shots and exposure, and there’s something insanely unsatisfying about using a mirrorless camera. Anyway, the more pictures I take, the worse I feel I’m doing. It’s a struggle, and it’s not bringing me much joy.

Oh, and that drone I bought at the end of 2020 and haven’t touched in forever – turns out it will be illegal to fly next month, because it does not comply with the new Remote ID rules. There are rumors of a firmware update, but they are just rumors. And even if it is fixed, there is still the Karen situation that makes it hard to fly these days.

* * *

For some reason, India was obsessed with ketchup. Maybe obsessed isn’t the right word, but I went to Pizza Hut, got a personal pan pizza, and they gave me a bottle of ketchup with it. I went to a Taco Bell, got a quesadilla and nachos, and was given a bottle of ketchup. I don’t know if it’s a thing to slather ketchup on a taco in India, or just saw a big overweight white American ordering fast food and assumed I needed a quart of ketchup.

I don’t know what brand of Ketchup McDonald’s India used; it was MCD-labeled. I know in the US, they changed from Heinz to their own brand in 2013 when Heinz was acquired by a former Burger King CEO. Burger King India used a ketchup by Veeba. Taco Bell used Del Monte ketchup. Pizza Hut used a brand called “Dr. Oetker Funfoods.” I did not use the ketchup at Pizza Hut, but the food made me horrifically sick. The crust and sauce of the personal pan pizza tasted about right. The pepperoni was way off. It could have been the lack of beef; it could have been spiced differently. Anyway, I’m off Pizza Hut for a while now.

McDonald’s tasted largely identical in India, aside from the lack of beef. Chicken McNuggets were identical, but there is no sweet and sour sauce, which is my go-to. I was forced to resort to barbecue. (Or is that barbeque?) I had a veggie burger once, and it’s like the old-school bean-based veggie burger, not Incredible or whatever fake meat. Oh, and they opened at 11:00, so breakfast didn’t start until then.

Taco Bell was weird. It was closer to Chipotle in trying to be more of a sit-down restaurant. No beef, again. I was also trying to actively avoid any lettuce, so no bean tacos. I ordered nachos, and the chips were the thicker, seasoned kind, and it was served with a mix of tomatoes and uncooked onions on the top, the cheese already applied. Completely unacceptable. (I got it no vegetables the second time, but the cheese was already pre-applied, which I hate. Too much cheese on the top chips, none on the bottom.) The quesadilla was okay, but nobody could pronounce it. They say the “dill” part like the name of the herb, Napoleon Dynamite-style. The cashier tried to correct me, and I told her I worked at a Taco Bell before her father was born. Despite my white-bread Indiana upbringing, I know how to say quesadilla.

I only went to Burger King once in the morning with an uneasy stomach in search of a hash brown, a plain white potato and grease rectangle of salvation. The hash brown was actually sort of spicy, like an aloo chop. It wasn’t bad, but in the context of needing grease and blandness to absorb the rumbling of my stomach, it was slightly offputting.

I did not go to KFC. I saw a Buffalo Wild Wings, which threw me for a loop college nostalgia-wise. Didn’t go in. Not a big fan of finger food anymore.

* * *

I am back writing. Or maybe that’s a question. I am back writing? This is probably the topic of a bigger post, or a series of them. One of my tasks is to keep typing here. The other is to pull some of the other books out of retirement, maybe freshened up. Two are back, as I’ve previously mentioned. I have a few other ideas. We’ll see.

I have no idea how to sell books now. I’ll put them on KDP, but I have no idea how to tell people, and no clue on how to “brand” myself, especially because I do not want to write the kind of stuff I was writing, and I hate the persona I was trying to sell a few years ago. (No advice, please.)

There’s also a little social media rant I could go off on here, or not. I radically cut down my social media time after Iceland, and disconnected or deleted everything entirely in like May, went cold turkey for weeks. I was down to just Reddit, and then all of Reddit went dark. I’m partly back now, although Twitter is done done and deleted. I got on Threads for two seconds, and there’s not enough Xanax in the world for me to even try. I hate to be one of those people who acts like they are above social media because they have such rich social lives in real life. I’ve been online for 34 years this month, and I’m not going to pretend. But I’ve had some serious problems online in the last six months, and have no idea how to really reconcile that. Blogging might be what I need. Nobody reads this, so it’s perfect.

* * *

I can’t think of any ketchup-related anecdotes about Iceland. I think most of the times I got french fries, they came with some esoteric mayo-based sauce, like an aioli. Oh, the one time I had a hot dog (which you have to do there at Bæjarins Beztu), it had ketchup, but it was a very sweet ketchup made with apples. The standard one-with-everything also has a remoulade and a very sweet mustard called pylsusinnep on it. The hot dogs are a mixture of lamb, pork, and beef. Very good stuff.

I had mixed feelings about Iceland when I was there, but it’s weird – now that I have some distance on it, the trip was truly profound to me, and exactly what I needed at that moment. Pardon me for being such an asshole with all these travel stories, but this was more than travel. Iceland was like an alternate universe for me, like a bizarro world. If you’re curious, go hunt down some of the work of Roni Horn, especially Island Zombie. That book is such a perfect description of how the desolation and solitude and viciousness of the island’s climate and terrain are a meditation on presence. I love that book and it makes me want to go back. And there’s no “but” in that, like “I want to go back but take two weeks” or “rent a camper” or “go when the weather is better.” Honestly, I want to go when the weather is worse.

I have such a clear memory, like one of those memories that I will have for the rest of my lifetime, of sitting at the top of Bjarnarfoss, after spending an hour climbing up there and then falling. It was way too cold and I was dressed wrong, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I broke my leg or not. And I was trying to calm myself down, and figure out how to get back down on one leg, and I sat in the mud at the top of this mountain ridge, looking out over all of Snæfellsjökull and the ocean, and being the only person there for miles and miles in every direction, completely alone, everything silent except for the melting snow and ice of this waterfall. Everything in my mind shifted, and I wish I had a word better than “profound” to describe this, but it was almost overwhelming how serene and deep the experience was. I have to go back. I will.

But that’s not the trip this month. Stay tuned on that.

Categories
general reviews

City of Gold (2015)

City of Gold is a documentary about Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold. I’m ambivalent about the current spate of foodie-oriented TV and movies, but this was less of that and more about an interesting and quirky artist, and the real main character was the city of Los Angeles.

One of the main focus points is how Gold is the champion of the off-the-beaten-path restaurants, largely immigrant-focused. It’s a healthy counterpoint to the current post-election culture that has swallowed the news cycle, and the doc shows several examples of how he championed a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and made their business explode. An example was Meals by Genet, a restaurant in Little Ethiopia on Fairfax run by Genet Agonafer. She fled Ethiopia for LA with her young son, and struggled through the usual low-pay food service jobs. Her son, through her support, eventually grew up, went through medical school, and became a doctor. When the space on Fairfax opened, he maxed out every credit card he could find to get her restaurant going. When Gold reviewed it, she could not cook fast enough to handle all the new traffic, and now she’s flourishing because of his nod on the 101 Best Restaurants list he publishes.

There are several stories like this, where he writes about his favorite Thai food, taco trucks, Korean places, and works the Pico strip, eating at every small ethnic restaurant along its length. And that’s why I say LA is the main star here. I’m unapologetically a massive fan of Los Angeles, and wish I would have spent more time than the brief half-year I lived there in 2008. There’s some city planning porn in the doc explaining how LA has multiple city centers, and grows outward from each one. Many people — mostly those who have never spent any time there — decry this sprawl. But it’s a feature, not a bug. It means different parts of the city blossom and grow to provide different experiences for a widely diverse population.

Sure, that sprawl means unending chain restaurants. You’ll find at least 150 McDonald’s chains in LA county. But it means there are so many spaces for weird, eccentric, or authentic food. This is one of the big surprises of the city, and shown well in the film. There are big Zagat-reviewed fancy places in LA, which are all stuck in the 90s. But you can roll into a mini-mall in El Segundo and find mind-blowing food from any country or region of the world, sitting next to a cash-for-gold place.

Gold writes for the LA Times, but the movie shows his ascension through the ranks. He started at the LA Weekly as a proofreader back in the early 80s, when he was studying cello at UCLA. He moved up to music editor, then got into food. There are so many interesting intersecting paths here; he’s got the connections to the food criticism world, and you see Robert Sietsema, Calvin Trillin, Ruth Reichl, and so on. But he’s also a regular on KCRW. He was a champion of the early LA gangsta rap scene, spending time with Snoop Dogg in the studio while he recorded his first album. He played with the post-punk band Overman. He was around for the early 80s punk scene with X and the Germs. And it seems like he’s had a thumb in every little food scene within LA, from the old Jewish delis (he actually worked in Spielberg’s mom’s deli back in college) to food trucks to everything else.

One of the things I liked about the film was showing Gold, how he lived in a house filled with books on every horizontal surface, his close relationship with wife Laurie Ochoa (now entertainment editor at the Times) and his struggles with writer’s block, even though he still publishes 150,000 words a year. He’s a jovial looking guy, with long hair and always with a smile on his face, and it’s humorous to see him pecking at his Macbook at the kitchen table, then wandering off to pick up some random book and not get to a review his editor wanted yesterday. We’ve all been there, but I think the rewarding thing was to see him struggle with it and then at the last second crank out such engrossing and descriptive criticism.

The only sore spot with this film is it really, really made me want to go back to LA. Watching those long pan shots of the strip malls and restaurants of West Hollywood and Koreatown and Culver City and Sawtelle gave me such overwhelming nostalgia for the place. There are things I like about Northern California, but we don’t have city centers like that. We have downtowns surrounded by bedroom communities, and it’s just not the same. Yeah, the traffic sucks, but the traffic here sucks too, and we don’t have 350 days of sunshine a year and such an overwhelming food scene. I really wish I was back, to drive down Pico and look at everything, even if I do just end up at Norm’s at three in the morning, eating pancakes. Great film.

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general

Freshly

I am lazy. I can cook, but given the choice, I don’t. That means either I eat sad microwave dinners, or I go out to eat, and eat too much. That has been catching up to me, and I had to do something out of desperation. I wanted to get those Zone delivery meals, where they  cook everything and measure it out and do it to a certain nutritional profile, and then deliver them every day. I think if I was given three pre-portioned meals a day and told to eat just that, I’d be fine.

The big problem with this is that most Zone delivery things cost roughly as much as my mortgage. They also usually use their own delivery people, which means they will 100% get lost or not be able to get in my building. (Case in point: Amazon Logistics always fucks up deliveries here.) And some of the food delivery things have some flexibility with getting less than 21 meals a week, but some don’t.

I thought about Blue Apron, since they advertise constantly, and a bunch of people won’t shut the fuck up about them. But those involve cooking, and they’re more for two people, and my wife doesn’t eat. So that was out.

I finally found Freshly, which seemed to fit the bill. They delivered with FedEx, packed in ice. They have meal plans of 6, 9, 12, or 21 meals a week, which you pick from their rotating menu. They list ingredients and nutritional information. And their web site did not look that impossible to use.

I tried this out with the 9-meal plan. I did not need breakfast, since I have oatmeal each day. I also left some dead space for weekends or going out for lunch once in the week. 9 meals, including shipping, was $99.

First, packaging was interesting. The meals came in a cardboard box, which was lined with some padded stuff which is actually recycled jean denim, wrapped in brown paper. Then inside that were alternating packs of white plastic containing a frozen gel, along with the individual meal trays. Each meal tray was in a cardboard sleeve with nutritional info, then was a standard black plastic bottom/clear plastic wrap sealed top.

The food was all made with minimal ingredients, no preservatives. I generally don’t care about that either way, but it was all fresh, not frozen. There was zero prep involved: poke holes in the top, nuke for two minutes, done. I plated them after cooking, but that’s it. No flavor packets or mixing or anything else. It’s just prepared food in a plastic tray.

The meals I had ranged from pretty decent to excellent. Each one was protein-centric, with mostly carbs from vegetables and no sugar or starches. The best meal was a Lebanese meatball dish with spinach, chickpeas, tahini, and raisins. I would have easily eaten nine of those. There was also a beef provencal with brussels sprouts, and I absolutely hate brussels sprouts and I ate all of them. The first meal I ate was the most meh, a paleo toasted almond chicken. I wasn’t entirely into the coating, but even there, the chicken was perfectly done inside and not dry or knuckly or weird.

As far as ordering, their web site lets you choose what you’re going to get a week in advance. You can skip a week or throttle up/down from your chosen plan if you need to. If you did nothing, you’d get the same stuff as last week. It looks like it would be fairly easy to cancel the account if I needed to bail completely. (There’s a link at the bottom of the subscription settings page, so it’s not completely buried, or one of those things where you have to sit on hold for an hour.)

The one bummer about the whole experience is that the food expires fast. I got my meals on Thursday, and they were all marked best by Monday, and the weekend of eating out was in the middle of that. Their web site says you can freeze meals, but is really dodgy about it, saying some freeze better than others, but no specifics, and no instructions on the best way to thaw them. I froze two of the meals (a chili, and an asian steak) and they were not as on point as the rest of them, but were as decent as an average TV dinner. There’s no real way around this, other than maybe two deliveries a week, or knowing what freezes well and planning on that.

Other super minor gripe is there was no FedEx tracking number. That’s a big deal for me because every delivery person fucks things up, even though I am home all day, and it’s nice to feed the number into a delivery status app.

I ended up losing 3.3 pounds last week. I generally only lose weight from diet. I don’t subscribe to any belief on fad stuff like paleo or gluten-free or no-GMO or any of that. You eat more than you burn, you gain weight. That said, I also walked 36 miles last week, so there’s that. But I think having controlled portions to prevent me from gorging, and not having any bread or empty carbs helped most.

And the Amway part of the post: If you’re interested in trying this, go here: http://refer.freshly.com/s/7xqc7. Like I said, it’s not exactly cheap, and it’s not available coast-to-coast, either. But it’s been good for me so far.

 

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general

So what do you eat now?

One of the problems with losing weight is that everyone, especially people from back home, will ask me “so what do you eat now?” I think most people expect that I stopped eating sticks of butter and switched to eating sticks of margarine and that made me magically drop 60 pounds. I think this phenomenon scrapes upon an issue of mine with unhealthy eating: the fact that my “default” cuisine is junk, because I have such a limited palete, and most of the food I’ve eaten as an adult was purchased from a drive-thru, because I don’t know any better.

I was a picky eater as a kid. I had a huge list of things I would not eat, and many of these carry over to today. I knew kids who were much worse – I knew a kid that would only eat Oscar-Mayer bologona, and any attempt to sneak in some Eckridge or another brand would cause him to have a fit. And I guess pretty much every kid brought up by the current nanny nation has a huge list of food allergies and limitations – seems like everyone is allergic to wheat, dairy-intolerant, and unable to go near peanut products or processed sugar. (Good luck ever eating in Indiana, btw, where the closest thing you’ll find to a vegan meal is the big bacon cheddar sandwich at Wendy’s.) I did have a period of extreme allergies where some genius in my family suddenly said I was allergic to chocolate, and I spent a year or two with my family substituting out my Easter and Christmas candy and probably subconsciously damaging me mentally (only to find out a year or two later I was actually allergic to penicillin.)

But here’s the thing – was I a picky eater because I was a picky eater, or because my cuisine was so limited, and I was never introduced to far-out stuff? Anthony Bourdain often talks of his first culinary experience as a kid, visiting France and eating a fresh oyster, and suddenly having his world turned upside-down, forever destined to do weird shit like eat ox testicles in backwater Cambodian former Khmer Rouge refugee camps. I led a much more white-bread existence, food-wise. For most of my childhood, my mom stayed at home, and did the cooking. I’m not going to say she was a good or a bad cook – actually, she later worked as a cook, and there were certain dishes she would make that I wish I could have now. But we weren’t rolling in money as a kid. And we lived in Indiana. So most of our menu was derived from Kroger’s general and more economical staples: meatloaf, frozen pot pies, canned vegetables, shake-and-bake, casseroles. Spices other than chili powder and A1 steak sauce were pretty much foreign to me. Wonder bread was a way of life. We didn’t venture far out of the box, and if it wasn’t in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, it probably wasn’t at our kitchen table.

One strange deviation from this rule was asparagus. When we lived in Edwardsburg, Michigan, there was a farm across the street from us, and for some reason, asparagus grew wild right on the fence line between Redfield Road and this large industrial farmland. I think they must have grown asparagus there, and never tilled up the land right at the fenceline, and the stuff kept growing back like weeds. My dad used to go over there and pluck out a bunch of the stuff, and then my mom would cook it in a pressure cooker and cover it in butter. Most of our vegetable intake was canned corn, canned green beans, canned mixed vegetables, and the occasional head of iceberg lettuce broken up into a salad with no other vegetables and maybe some bacon bits. I still love asparagus, although the advent of the microwave makes it way easier to cook.

A few limitations shaped our menu, some making sense, and some more random. When you have a limited budget and three kids constantly screaming bloody murder and doing crazy shit like we always did, it’s hard to spend time perfecting your duck confit, or piece together anything that involves hours of immaculately dicing and prepping 17 different ingredients. That’s when the “throw three things in a bowl and bake for 40 minutes at 375” comes in handy. There’s also the economical advantage of buying a pound of hamburger, a box of hamburger helper, and a tube of ready-bake rolls versus buying all of the crap you need to make a good Coq Au Vin and three side dishes. And the local Kroger or IGA did not have much more than the basics, especially in the pre-foodie 70s. I don’t know if Elkhart had any old-school butchers or farmer’s markets or other produce shops where once could piece together all of the ingredients in four or five shopping trips, but good luck doing that with three kids in tow.

I also have no particular ethnic background that shaped my family’s food definitions. I guess my grandmother on my mom’s side made a lot of good food, but it was just your basic meat-and-potatoes stuff: turkey, gravy, roast beef, ham. She was from Poland and the rest of my grandparents were from Austria, but there were no specific dishes from the motherland that I remember. It wasn’t like my grandparents were off the boat from China/Japan/India/whatever and my mom would live to whip up Chinese/Japanese/Indian/whateverian food like her mom used to make. When we had time and money to eat fancy, and we weren’t already going over the hill and through the woods to grandmother’s house, that usually meant a butterball turkey and some Stove Top Stuffing.

When we did go out, I think the most ethnic food I ever ate was Pizza Hut. It wasn’t like Elkhart had an Ethiopian district or Koreatown where we could partake in a variety of food. And even if they did, I don’t think my parents had the patience to deal with bringing me or my sisters to a place full of unknowns. The reason McDonald’s is burned into my system so much was because the cheeseburger happy meal was an easy go-to for me. Maybe Italian was one ethnic derivative we had in northern Indiana – places like Columbo’s, that were mostly pizza joints but would dish up some good pasta or a chicken parm. But I don’t think I had Chinese food until I was in college, and I know that Indian, Thai, and even Russian food was something I didn’t learn to enjoy until after I moved to New York.

So when I suddenly decided to get in shape and stop eating Quarter Pounders for every meal, I was faced with the situation that I didn’t know what to eat instead. Eating just vegetables seemed impossible to me; it was like making Kool-Aid without water. Even if I ate 19 pounds of the most complicated salad possible, I still would feel like I was missing the meat course. And avoiding fried food was absolutely befuddling to me. Weight watchers kept me focused on point values instead of complicated rules, and I was able to figure out substitutions and what would make me get through the day without crashing. But I still can’t explain to people what I eat instead. I didn’t lose weight by suddenly only eating Ugandan traditional dietary staples or by switching french fries with only purple-colored fruits, or anything like that.

I still can’t eat like Bourdain. I still don’t like olives, mushrooms, most seafood, or anything that still has eyes. But I somewhat understand the cult of spicy foods now, and I think I’m beyond being fixated on long-passed fast food chains like Hot-N-Now and Burger Chef as my salvation. I still can’t explain what I do eat in under a thousand words, though.

Categories
general

Food indecision

I get into this phase maybe once or twice a year when I simply cannot pick out what food to eat. I mean, the clock strikes noon, I am famished, got plenty of cash on me, and it’s not shitting rain or hot enough to liquify the sidewalk or anything else, but I simply cannot decide on what kind of food I want to eat. I can’t even think of a genre, or a direction to walk. And it goes on like this, meal after meal, until I am continuously more and more fatigued with things because I haven’t had a good meal in days. Yes, I’ve had a meal, and I don’t exactly look like a UNICEF kid, it’s just I can’t find something that makes me happy. And this is probably a bigger metaphor on life, because I also can’t get any writing done, find a book I can really stick with reading, and so on. I’m sure there’s a medication for this. And I’m sure one of it’s 7492 side effects are that it causes loss of appetite.

Anyway, yesterday we went out and went to Flowers Cafe, which is a sort of hippie-esque diner a few blocks over on Grand. It’s not a hippie place in that they serve wheat grass and tofu hot dogs, it’s just a deli, but with lots of retro flower-power type murals on the walls. It’s not too overdone, and they make a good reuben, so we order there a lot. And for whatever reason, we went there for breakfast on Saturday, and I got two eggs on a roll with bacon and cheese, and it completely kicked this food neurosis thing in the ass. It was a really good sandwich, and I loved it, and I wish I could get another one right now, except they’re closed, and I just ate dinner anyway.

After a day of walking around with Sarah and her friend Dre, we ended up seeing The Devil Wears Prada, which was funny, but probably not too relatable to those who don’t live here. We also went to this diner afterward called Big Daddy’s, which was the typical shit-on-the-walls genre, but not corporate, and with the typical menu where, instead of just saying “hamburger,” it says “Daddy-o Burger.” I just wanted a hot dog, and was presented with a giant plate that had pretty much an entire pig’s entrails stuffed and tied off into a hotdog. It was excellent, but it was also like half my body weight in food. Anyway, it’s a good place to crash if you’re just north of union square. I wish it was closer to the office, but then I’d probably need some paramedics to cut me out of my apartment in a few months.

Speaking of, I was on this food nutso thing the other day, and it popped into my head that I really wanted to run for the border and hit a Taco Bell. It usually happens once a year, but there are none by my new digs (there’s actually an old one, boarded up, with the tri-stripe awning still there and the logo spraypainted out) so I did the research and found the closest one was a half mile from the office, over on West 4th. Me and a couple of coworkers planned it out like a jailbreak, since we didn’t want to spend our entire lunch break trying to get over there. And Taco Bell has a very short halflife, before it congeals and turns cold and completely inedible. (And forget about microwaving that shit.) So we decided to cut over on the subway, one stop, hit the KFC/Taco Bell, and put in our giant order for all of the other people who wanted in but were too chickenshit to make the run. We got back in 30 minutes flat, ate, and then spent the afternoon wishing for napdom, hoping the gurgling in our guts wouldn’t go bad. ‘Beller’s regret. But I was happy.

There’s something in the sauce of that Mexican Pizza that reminds me so much of when I used to work there. And when I was thinking about it, I realized – it’s been twenty damn years since the summer I spent working the drive-thru at the ‘Bell, saving up for one of those new-fangled CD players and a dual exhaust for my Camaro. Shit, I remember when I was twenty, so it makes me feel even worse to remember something twenty years ago. It’s so weird though, that tomato sauce always reminds me of buying food when I went off-shift, leaving with a big bag of taco supremes and nachos and riding home on my ten-speed. When I first had my car, I dumped an order of those cinnamon crispas under the front seat, and spent months trying to vacuum up that sugar-cinnamon dust from the crevices of the carpet. Of all of the cooking smells mixed together in the back line of a Taco Bell, the most overpowering one was the crispa smell, maybe because it was the only sweet one. I don’t think they sell those anymore, but if they did, it would be an instant time machine for me.

Crap. It’s pouring rain outside. I have to go to work tomorrow, which sucks. Then I get the 4th off. Then a 3-day week. Whole Foods had nitrite-free uncured hotdogs, and they actually taste pretty much the same, so that’s my little homage to the whole July 4th, picnic, barbeque, drunken fireworks, whatever thing. That’s all.