12 posts tagged “food”

Coke Zero.  I hate Coke Zero. 

SCREW OFF, COKE ZERO, AND GET OUT OF MY OFFICE'S FRIDGE.

UPDATE:  This Coke Zero is the only thing we have with caffeine and no sugar, and it is so unbelievably disgusting.  I think I am going to have to commit suicide just to get the taste out of my mouth.  If you never hear from me again, that is why. 

Dear "Orange," if that is, in fact, your real name,

Remember when I found you and your brethren in the produce section?  You were so delightfully cheap, only thirty-eight cents per pound!  How wonderful, I thought, as I bagged you and a few others.  The first one I ate was just delightful, all orangey with a very orange-like nature.  Mmm.  Orange.

How I was looking forward to eating you after my lunch!  But as I began to try to peel you, "Orange," I noticed how pithy you were, and how tightly that pith did cleave to your flesh.  Several minutes later, and with the help of a paring knife, I had freed you from most of your bitter, white bindings and was ready to dig in, but then, "Orange," I encountered another aspect of your peculiar physiognomy.  Your sections, they were inseparable from each other!  Each time I tried to remove one of your sections for the purposes of eating and enjoying, I wound up ripping off a random chunk of flesh, one bound by no membranes, one leaking juice from its innumerable tiny juice sacs.

This is a sad, sad representation of an orange you have concocted, my friend, and your cruel illusion will not stand.  As I write this, hands smelling of citrus, pith buried below my fingernails, I am concocting a plan.  I will investigate the last remaining specimen from that shopping trip, and if he, like you, is but a hollow, haunted shadow of Orange, I will go back to the grocer, guns blazing, and demand that they stop passing off out-of-season hunks of vaguely orange-like fruit as Actual Oranges, even at thirty-eight cents a pound.

Stickily yours,

Your Sworn Enemy

There are approximately forty-seven tons of cookies, chocolate, candies, and fudge in my office today. I think every single company we work with has sent us some kind of holiday tray or some such, and the smell of chocolate has completely infused the air. And yet!  All I want is a damn bagel. Couldn't someone have sent us a holiday bagel tray? What? No?

Man, I really love artichokes.  I remember eating an artichoke for the first time as a kid--it was something exotic, part of my parents' Weird California Food that no one else around ate, and it was such a process.  Maybe that's why I like them so much, or maybe it's just because they're freakin' awesome.  They're pretty good with some orange dijon vinaigrette.

artichoke

I also really like the process of dismantling the artichoke, creating a pile of leaves as I eat--it's the same sort of perverse joy I get from creating a pile of pistachio shells.  So satisfying!

post-artichoke

Blue Velvet cupcake at my local bakery.

"Yes, Jeffrey. It's a human ear, all right."

Alternate descriptions might include: Reservoir Dogs cupcake, Van Gogh cupcake.

Update:  There is leftover pie. 

Update:   I ate some of the pie.

Update:   Pie! 

My first job was at a Fuddruckers -- if you don't have one of those in your town, it's a hamburger joint that somehow treads the area between fast food and sit-down-type dining. Customers (a.k.a. "guests," as if!) order at a counter and then can dress their burger themselves at a "produce bar." There isn't table service, exactly, except for the people who had to go around offering to refill drinks.

I finally got that job thanks to the recommendation of a friend, and it couldn't have come at a better time: I'd been applying all over town and having no luck, what with the fact that I had no job experience whatsoever and was generally shy, nervous, and bad at interviews. Eventually, we managed to recruit several friends from school, and there was soon a huge group of us all working there, which made it an extremely fun job, in spite of its generally crappy nature.

The people who came in there were just unbearable at times: try asking some redneck from a trailer park how she wants her burger cooked, and she'll ask you to "char that thang black," because she "ain't wanna git that EBOLA virus!" There were families of screaming children, ladies obsessed with the caloric content of salad dressings, and proprietary middle aged men asking you to "smahl purty" if they didn't like the look on your face.

It really was a fun job, though, I swear -- especially when most of the people on shift were friends and therefore good for mocking the customers, and it got a good sight better when I got to move away from the front counter and try other positions. (Heh. Dirty.) The bakery was the best, because I got to go in hours before the first customer arrived, and I could play the stereo and mess around with bread dough all morning -- not to mention that I learned a lot about baking, which I still love to do.

In the coming years, I went on to become a computer lab monitor, carrot juicer, video store snob, barista, bank slave, and gradual student. Ah, but those are topics for another time.

In response to:

What was your very first job? 
Submitted by Laurel.

Today, it seems, is going to be a day filled with delicious, delicious calories. I discovered that the market by my house has started carrying Genesis Juice (absent from the market for a while because they refused to pasteurize it -- after all, they are hippies, and what else do we expect from locally-owned businesses anymore but flat-out defiance of FDA standards -- now being treated with some kind of crazy electric pulse, but whatever, it is tasty as all get out).

Between the juice and the doughnut impulsively purchased after a stroll through the bakery, breakfast was sugary enough, but now! Now! Some clearly evil person brought a HUGE bag of Ghirardelli Squares to work, and they're sitting right on top of the filing cabinet, GLARING AT ME, in their lovely gold wrappers. "Ooh, helloooo! We are minnnnnty! Annnnnd chocolatey!" Grr. But also, mmmm.

Oh my god, y'all, the heat.  It just will not stop.  After I finished walking around downtown all morning for my temp job, I spent the rest of the afternoon glued to the couch with a pasty mixture of sweat and grime.  As I drifted in and out of consciousness to the distant, melodramatic tones of One Life to Live, the dog sprawled out on the linoleum by the front door with his tongue lolling out apathetically.  We are total rock stars over here. 

In other news, I am never eating sushi from the Trader Joe's deli case again.  Trust me, you don't want to know any more than that. (Although the confessional on-line diarist in me really, really wants to tell you.  I mean, really.  It was Technicolor Fantastic!)  I am not feeling especially happy with Trader Joe's wine either, after a particularly, um, affordable pinot grigio managed to give me an insta-hangover* last night that still persists even now. 

I am also engaged in a new project: spam collection.  I am going to let spam just accumulate in my gmail account and see how much I can gather.  Now, this is a project that requires neither energy, creativity, nor skill.  Just my kind of endeavor.  And with that, here are my favorite subject lines:

• separate yourself from other men
• possibiliy scam [Yes, I think it is a definite possibility.]
• windy machine
• enamel tutoring
• Stop looking at skinny actresses like at something incredible.  Just be like them. [If it's as simple as that, then, fine.  Fine.]
• If you always look down at your penis from above [Then...then...? Finish the thought!]
• Times have changed and ugly stomachs are not the example of beauty anymore. [Oh, how I long for those halcyon days of yesteryear, when ugliness and beauty were synonymous!]
• vis-a-vis unthinking [Looks like the work of the Academic Jargon Generator to me!]
• hideaway ceasefire
• With Viagra Pro you can fuck anything that moves. [Wow, Frank Booth is sending me spam! I feel important.  Maybe next he'll send me a love letter, straight from the heart, motherfucker.]

frank

*Insta-hangover - when drinking a couple (or a few) (or several) glasses of wine results in an immediate headache.

Hmm.  Well, guys, I appear to have a bunch of lychees in my house.  See?

strange fruit

Can anyone tell me what these lychees are doing here?  What's the deal with them, anyway?  I mean, once you get past that hard, spiny skin, you would think you should be rewarded with The Most Delicious Fruit Ever of All Time.  That would only be fair, right?  Why bother having a hard, spiny skin if you weren't defending some wonderful treasure that lay beneath it? And yet, the fruit, it is nothing special.  It has a faint grassy aftertaste and the pits are enormous.  Nice going, lychee.  I mean, seriously.