Tagged! Things To Eat Before You Die

Picking up the gauntlet thrown by Tart Sarah (one of three), I give you  Things To Eat Before You Die

 

1- Kalua pig, plate lunch style with two scoops of rice and a scoop of macaroni salad, from a roadside stand in Hawaii.  One day I hope to install one of those bovine research portals, so that I can, er,  manually increase my throughput and be able to eat this all day.  No really, all day.  (I'll skip the macaroni salad, because I am strange and picky.)

2- Cheeseburger, with a fried egg on top, with french fries and a milkshake.  I mean, a cheeseburger is great right?  But then they put an egg on it.  A freakin' fried egg.  So wrong.  So right.  Enjoy responsibly.  You can get this at Red Robin; yeah, it's a chain.  I think there might be something about this meal that requires a certain economy of scale to achieve.  (Honestly, in this case the fries are just there to cleanse the palate between waves of juicy burger and milkshake.)

3- Hudson Bay bread and peanut butter, washed down with kool-aid.  This is one of those situational entries that wouldn't taste nearly as good if you hadn't just spent the morning paddling across bright clean lakes and carrying a canoe on your shoulders through knee-deep mud.  (Also, after lunch it's your turn to ride in the middle of the canoe, where your only responsibilities are to contemplate the dragonflies and not get your fingertips bitten off by pike.)

4- Steak and hashbrowns.  Set out on the counter to come up to room temperature an hour before grilling, liberally coated with freshly ground pepper and kosher salt.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of medium, on the rare side of the street -- it shouldn't need a tourniquet, but will require first aid.  Only a couplefew minutes each side on the hottest grill you can light.  I'm too lazy to grate my own potatoes, so I use the dried kind that you reconstitute with hot water in the little milk carton.  Cooked slow; browned of course, but not super-crispy.  Salt only.  This is the Food of Men.  Served with a tall Velvet Crush (that's kool-aid and gin).  (You may think that the drink detracts from the manitude of the meal.  You would be wrong.  It is the presence of that incongruity, that paradoxical imperfection, that allows this meal to ascend to Capital Letters of masculinity.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

5- Homemade ice cream, fresh out of the maker.  It's never quite as awesome the second day -- presuming it lasts.  If I was Stan Lee, I would say "'Nuff Said" here; but I'm not.  Inter the extra ingredients of your choice to the churning, icy tomb and prepare your mouth for a dollop of heaven.  (Or something like that.)

I guess I kinda fudged* with my five choices, in that they are closer to examples of things that I love than things I expect other people will love.  Even then, I had some trouble coming up with five items for the list.  The topology of the Foods I Love graph is flatter than I expected.  It's like a broad expanse of rolling hills (with a few chasms around places like "beets" and "condiments") that doesn't have many isolated peaks that rise high enough to be all that distinctive from a few counties away.  Rather, they don't rise high enough on their intrinsic culinary qualities alone.  Mostly they are elevated by fond memories of family and friends, which doesn't translate so well into Eat Before You Die prescriptions intended for the general audience.

Well, that and I won't cop to loving aerosol cheese on corn chips.

 

 

Anyhoo, there it is.  Now:  I choose you Clarkachu.

 

*OMG I forgot fudge!