What I eat, apparently

Oh, the Chick-fil-a, it goes so fast.

Featured today are the salads made of the straggling remnants of chicken from the Cow Appreciation Day debacle of several day’s past. Let’s just say it was good while it lasted.

A box of 4 chicken strips is entirely suitable as well as wholesomely appropriate for festooning the garlands of an otherwise potentially bland salad…or two!

The first of the salads has Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing slopped all over it. This is the only honey mustard, in dressing form or honey mustard form really, that you will ever need.

I have a hell of a time finding good salad dressing. Most of it downright sucks. Or it is too tangy. Or too oily. Or too bland. All of which are attributes of ’suck’, come to think of it.

Here is a Venn diagram I have made especially to illustrate this problem:

Mind, you there is a bit of a gap between ’suck’ and ‘not suck’ where many dressings surely lie. There are many dressings I have yet to try, and will probably never try, to save myself from the crushing possibility that with each new dressing I try, and promptly reject, the ’suck’ circle will only expand.

It should be noted, however, that this rule does not seem to apply to restaurant dressings. More often then not, they are comprised of not suck. Maybe my refrigerator has a spoiling effect on dressings, maybe they slip downers into my appetizers at these so-called ‘restaurants’, who knows really?

I don’t give up, though. Oh no. When the going gets tough, the tough seek alternatives.

This baby is seasoned (and quite delightfully, I might add) with pineapple juice, barbecue sauce, and chipotle sauce. Worked much better that I might have expected. I recommend it to all.

I will do many things for free food. I am also always interested in a good excuse to dress up and look ridiculous. Therefore, Cow Appreciation Day, a.k.a. the day all Chick-fil-a locations give a free combo meal to anyone who dresses up like a cow, was right up my alley. If you at least wore a cow related item, like a cow print hat, you’d get a free entree, but as far as I was concerned, that was for the wusses who couldn’t handle being a real cow (err real person-dressed-as-cow).

The cow regalia in full, along with an obviously much better dressed cow:

Now, the best way to go about this day is to figure out how to hit as many Chick-fil-a restaurants as possible. Unfortunately, this idea did not strike me and Christine, my partner in crime for the night, until about 6:30 pm. So we ended up hitting 5 of them. There was an elusive duo of guys dressed as cows who’d come down from Baltimore, according to rumor at least, and were in the process of going to 30 Chick-fil-as. That’s a serious commitment right there. We never managed to run into them, though, just passing rumors.

And there seems to be a strategy to doing this. First off, after the first meal that wasn’t designed to be eaten that night, I stopped getting any combo that came with lettuce and tomato, as both would surely get wilted and shriveled by the next day. Also, no more sodas. Bottled water was is the way to go. The real problem was the fries. Fries just don’t last well as leftovers. The sides that you don’t have to pay extra for (cole slaw, or carrot and raisin salad) just don’t do much for me. Sadly it never occurred to me until after it all that the $.25 extra to get a fruit cup side might have been covered in the ‘free combo’ price. I’ll have to remember that for next year, as fruit cups can go a long way.

I ended up with about 80% of both of our waffle fries, I compiled them all into this conveniently large container:

All in all, it was quite fun to hit all of those restaurants, next year I may even take the day off just to try to hit as many as I can, for there are few things better in this world then free chicken.

I’ve been thinking about meat pies lately. That, and a Hot Pocket that was actually satisfying. Sadly, they are no longer the furtive pleasure they once were at age 16 or thereabouts, they’ve evolved to this sad sad pocket filled with more air then anything else. So I’m all like ‘I can beat that, I’ll make an Awesome Pocket!’

So, first the dough.

This baby took two sticks of butter! Well, Blue Bonnet, AKA Pseudo Margarine Non-Butter. It’s so cheap though, I can’t help it! (Maybe cheaper then your mom, even!) Anyhow, the recipe is for empanada dough. I’m, uh, actually not sure I’ve eaten an empanada before, to be completely honest. I’ve read a few Isabel Allende lately, and they totally made me all hungry for them, nonetheless!

So, the innards. They started as a well meant attempt at spinach and feta, but ended up also including chicken, cilantro, tomatoes, almonds, raisins, as well as garlic, cinnamon, cumin, and a few too many red peppers. Err, and probably plus other things I’ve since blocked out. Ah yes! Sour cream. It is sour and creamy and delicious in my gaping maw.

So then I dun rolled the dough. Yeah, I’m not too up on that. I’ve done it, bitterly, a few times with sugar cookies, before I vowed cookie cutters were a Waste of Life. Seemed necessary for this, though. Albeit, I have no rolling pin. So I just rolled out balls into flatter, larger balls using a random bottle from the ole Liquor Corner. Look, they’re purdy!

And then they had a magical oven adventure. Yay! I captured this one as it was trying to escape.

They ended up looking, as well as tasting, better then I’d anticipated, especially considering my lack of experience with pocket-like substances. Actually, I would have been mildly pissed if they’d have come out badly, considering the amount of labor that went into these wee laddies. I’ll do this again another time, except make twice as much dough and freeze 1/2 of it. Dear God, that would be like an entire box of butter, err pseudo-butter. Ah, artery-clogging good times.

Oh yeah, here’s the final result, all hacked open.

The picture is horrific, I was apparently shaking from hunger at the time. I would have added a lens flare or something, just to sparkle it up, but that requires a thing called motivation coupled with this other thing called ambition, both of which are a little sparse in these lazy pocket-filled days of mine. D’oh!

Potatoes are a beautiful thing. Spudtastic, even. Spudilicious. Spudariffic. And a whole slew of other words I could totally make up if I felt like it.

I made these babies. Sliced them up, fried them in a pan with oil, sprinkled them with various seasonings, and dipped them lovingly in ketchup right before they got to hop right on into my giant gaping maw and slide on down my throat. An adventure for all!

Now here’s a question: Is it just America that’s so wealthy and so religious so as to think people should feel actual guilt for eating not so healthy foods?

I don’t like buying into the sort of thought process that makes a chocolate cake ’sinfully good’, or that eating something delicious yet low-calorie means that you can do it ‘guilt-free’. When did food stop being a fuel and start becoming a furtive hidden pleasure? I blame puritans and supermodels, it’s all their fault!

Admittedly, I’m an American here too, and the pull of wanting to eat more crap then I technically need is often greater then I can resist. But it seems smarter to just be mathematical about the matter. Your body needs x amount of food to fuel the y amount of energy you expend. To maintain your body weight, increase and decrease both at equal levels. To lose weight, decrease x slightly and increase y slightly. If you eat that extra cookie, you can justify it mathematically via doing an extra lap around the track, and so on.

When you start assigning moral values to the food you eat, all of the sudden you’re a better person if you eat no cookies, despite the fact that, after doing a gazillion laps, you body might very well have a legitimate need for that cookie. And then, the inevitable. The snake in the garden lures Eve on in. You’ll take that box of Swiss Cake Rolls from the tree of the knowledge of binging and purging, and before you know it you’re signing over entire paychecks to Little Debbie as you gorge upon the creamy soft meats of a thousand wrapped treats, praying to the Jesus that in his day never knew such temptations like you face, aisles of boxes full of mouthwatering sinful Death.

‘Cake is Death’ is the 1984 of our gastronomical nightmares, and it must be fought at all costs! I will stand, agnostic and true, and speak “Cake, please”.

So I got this chicken, see. And I’ve been fantasizing about things involving coconut milk for awhile, now. And I had all this basil that was just rarin’ to get gnawed upon. So it follows that, despite all my best intentions, a chicken curry would be made.

And I think I figured it out - I gotta start using a wok more. The vegetables were in much better moods then they would otherwise typically be. Also, I used a teeny 5.5 oz can of coconut milk, rather then the behemoth can I usually use. Apparently ingredients get cranky when they spend too much time swimming around in unnecessarily thick fluids. Aside from that and a bit of curry, I used pretty much exactly the same seasonings used in the green papaya salad - insanity!

This may have been the best curry I’ve ever made, in fact. Here is a picture high in contrast and low on detail!

Actually, I’m still not sure what makes something a curry, and what doesn’t. Does something become curry simply by adding curry powder or paste to it? Even if it’s not a lot? I just don’t know!