Food Thoughtz Restaurant Review: Playa Cabana - Hacienda

Tonight M and I went out for dinner together. We settled on the Hacienda branch of the burgeoning "Playa Cabana" franchise because it seemed cool and hip. And also Mexican, which is what M was looking for. We had settled on this place specifically because they serve nachos, whereas most other Mexican restaurants seem to make their nachos using that disgusting liquid cheese that comes out of a pump.

Things started out well enough. We ordered a bucket of beer. And then I noticed a little addendum to the menu saying that they were not willing to make substitutions except in the case of allergies, when possible. I kindly asked the waitress that though I understood they had this policy, would it be possible to order nachos totally plain, just with cheese. (And let me just state that while I understand that making substitutions and exceptions in a kitchen is likely really annoying, I feel like when your order is changed to be the most simple version of that dish, it really should not be a problem.) The waitress said she didn't think it would be a problem but that she would have to double check with the kitchen. Meanwhile, M ordered a chorizo burrito.

The waitress came back and said it wouldn't be a problem. And I said "great," because I was really looking forward to those nachos. A quick note about the nachos: they were listed under the "appetizer" section of the menu, which is pretty common. I'm not sure I have ever seen nachos listed elsewhere. They are generally considered a food to be shared, and they also usually come in heaping portions. I ordered these nachos with the expectation that I would eat approximately half of them and take the other half home to eat tomorrow. One thing I've learned this year is that re-heating nachos in the oven is delicious. The nachos were also $14, which, again, is a pretty standard price for nachos. I saw no reason to consult further with the waitress about the size of the nachos, because every other waitress' response to this question in every other restaurant is something along the lines of how enormous the portion is.

And then the nachos arrived. And first of all, they arrived approximately five minutes before M's burrito, which is always really frustrating. But more frustrating still is that "nachos" consisted of eight chips. EIGHT CHIPS. For $14! Eight of them! I was outraged. I still have not calmed down. Meanwhile, in the five minutes that it took me to come to terms with the fact that I just spent $1.75 per chip ($2, if you count the tip), M's enormous burrito arrived.

Words cannot express the kind of outrage I experienced tonight. The "nachos" were designed in two circles, with four chips per circle (so do not think that I am exaggerating the smallness of this portion: there were exactly eight chips). Above you can see a photograph of the final chip. I did not take a picture of the entire ("entire") meal, but we might understand this as an example of metonymy.

In hindsight, I regret leaving any tip at all because I think it was unconscionable of that waitress to not divulge the true nature of these nachos. At first I thought it was not fair to punish the waitress for this pathetic attempt, but frankly, it was. And also, she was a pretty garbage waitress in other respects as well. She brought us the bill before M had finished her food, and then she whisked away the sauces that M was using, also before she finished her food. And then she just left the ATM machine with me and walked away. Like, what am I? Is someone going to pay me for ripping off this "merchant copy"? Give me a break. Also, give me like 100 more chips.

In conclusion, I hope this shitty garbage restaurant crashes and burns, and I hope that whatever monster is behind this atrocity ends up on the streets, unable to make anything work for him/herself. And then I hope that I just so happen to be strolling home from Costco with about twelve double-packs of bulk-sized chips, and he is asking for food. And I will say, "Oh? All of these chips I have with me? I am actually planning to just put them straight in to the garbage. I suppose I can spare eight for you." And then I will stare him straight in the eyes. And then I won't even give him those eight chips unless he forks over $14 first. And even then I won't give him those chips, because whatever chips I manage to buy at Costco will probably taste better than the garbage I endured tonight. I hate this restaurant. I hate it so much. I hate it enough to start a Yelp account and give it a terrible review.

Playa Cabana (Hacienda branch): I hope you are reading this. I hope you can taste my rage as strongly as I wish I was tasting a full serving of nachos. You are the worst. You are the worst place in the world and I hope you cease to exist. If you are in fact reading this, please comment below to ask for my address in order to send me $14 worth of nachos. I will eat them, vomit them up, and then parcel that vomit off into fourteen servings so that I might mail it straight back to you. And because I expect this will not satiate my rage, I will probably do something else that I have not yet thought of.

Self-Contained Shell Lasagnas

If I know anything about Robert Burns—beyond the fact that he inexplicably has his own day—it’s that he once wrote a poem with the line “best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley”, but as neither mouse nor man, my best laid schemes almost always stay on track. Except this one time when I tried to make self-contained lasagnas in large shell pasta. It was a disaster. A delicious, terrible, ugly disaster.

Okay, but let me just give you an overview of my thought process here: I love spaghetti bolognese, and I like lasagna fair enough, but how amazing would it be if everything that I loved about these two dishes was contained in a single, large shell (I mean, obviously not a single shell; of course I ate about ten of them). Right? Like, if I cooked a bunch of large shell pastas, and then lined the interior with cheese (probably cheddar, but parmesan or mozzarella would work fine as well), and then filled the rest of the shell with bolognese sauce, and then grated more cheese on top of all the shells and then baked them. Right?! Has anything ever sounded better to anyone?

So finally, when I was in Grand Forks for reading break last year, I did it. And … it didn’t really work out the way I thought it would. First of all, I forgot the interior cheese lining, which was a huge mistake because the end product didn’t have nearly enough cheese. But it was also a lot harder and a lot messier to stuff the shells than I thought it would be. And in the end it just looked terrible. It was so disgusting. It looked like a fake organ display in a low-budget haunted house. But I ate it anyway, and they were pretty good. Maybe they weren’t as good as I was anticipating, but still a pretty solid meal.

Right? Look at how terrible this looks. Who could ever
want to eat this? But eat it I did.

I made the same dish again this summer and ate so much of it that I couldn’t move for a full twenty-four hours. This time I remembered to line the shells with cheese. It was still really messy, and the dish didn’t come out of the oven looking particularly appetizing, but yeah, I would say it was a pretty good meal. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily worth the effort, because it’s certainly not significantly better than just regular pasta topped with cheese, and in fact I’m not sure if it’s better at all. But anyway, I still have half a box of large shell pasta which have virtually no other application, so I guess I am just going to have to make this again.

The best-laid schemes o' shells an meat

So oft are destroyed

An'lea'e us nought but grief an' defeat

For want of promis'd joy!

Armadillo Potatoes

This afternoon I read an article that someone posted on facebook about how you're eating food wrong. There was a picture of this delicious potato that looked like an armadillo. I was intrigued and needed to try it. I went out and bought potatoes. I tried it. And you know what? I'm not doing it wrong. I have been eating potatoes correctly my entire life. These armadillo potatoes weren't that great.

They ended up looking pretty good though, right?

Basically I just sliced them up as best I could while ensuring that each slice was still connected to the body of the potato at the bottom. Then I brushed them with olive oil because I got a free pastry brush on the street about a month ago. Then I sprinkled kosher salt on them (admittedly too much). And then I popped them into the oven for what felt like eternity, but was realistically more like an hour and a half, which is still way too much time to spend preparing a potato.

I think one of the reasons I didn't really like these potatoes (but don't get me wrong, I obviously still did really like them; they just weren't as good as pan-fried potatoes) is because I'm not all that crazy about olive oil. These potatoes might have been much better if I painted them with butter instead. I don't know. In the end they kind of just tasted like exactly what they are: potatoes painted with olive oil.

They also seriously took way too long.

Tonight I fashioned my potatoes like armadillos

Nothing relevant rhymes with "armadillos."

NB: I have labeled these potatoes as "Food I Have Tried But Would Not Try Again." Obviously I have so many more potatoes ahead of me in this life time. They just probably won't be these armadillo potatoes.

Melona Ice Bar (Mango Flavour)

Several readers will likely remember a recent Dear Food Thoughtz post in which a young woman had come under the sway of these mysterious Korean popsicles and feared they were ruining her life. In order to provide the quality of service that Food Thoughtz has built its reputation on, I tried to track down these ice bars myself before writing a response--but to no avail. I have recently uncovered a cache of Melona bars in a nearby Korean grocery story (you may remember this grocery store from my Japanese chocolate biscuit craze-daze), and yesterday I bought one and ate it.

 And ... it was just okay. I have had better and I have had worse, but I don't imagine I will ever become addicted to these. I recently had an orange creamsicle and was amazed by how delicious it was. I love creamsicles, and these Melonas just don't cut it. There are so many quality icepops out there, and it's not enough anymore to have a fairly rich, creamy, fruity flavour. I'm slightly curious to try the other flavours, but honestly, I just don't think these things are going to win me over.

I actually don't really like creamy popsicles. Creamsicles are almost an exception, but not really, because it's only the ice cream centre that is creamy (and tastes like those delicious Screamerz at Shell that were so expensive I could never afford to buy one) and the shell is just like a generic popsicle. I just don't really find popsicles that are really creamy or taste too much like real fruit to be refreshing on a hot summer's day.

Here's a series of pictures of me looking terrible while eating a Melona bar. But does anyone want to talk about how
Baskin Robins is still in business? I had no idea it was until I moved to Toronto. At least there is still one in business.

So, I don't know. I don't know what else to say about these. I was really disappointed, but I didn't hate it either. One day I might try the honeydew flavour, just to test it out, but I'm in no big rush to get another. One good thing about them, I guess, is that they're pretty cheap. I think this cost 70¢ in the store, which is a pretty decent price. 

In closing, I would just like to point out that Binggrae, the company that produces Melona, also produces a red bean popsicle, and even the idea of it is nauseating. It is, according to the Binggrae website, the "No.1 red bean ice bar in Korea since 1970's." How many red bean ice bars does Korea even have?! Is this even an accomplishment? Would it be possible for me to make a red bean ice bar at home and market it as the "No. 1 red bean ice bar in Canada since just now because this isn't even  a thing and also it's disgusting but still No. 1"? You should all take this invitation to read through the Binggrae product list on their website because some of the descriptions are really great, and I'm kind of interested in that Melona waffle...  Oh. Nevermind. I just read the description. It's full of red bean paste and shaped like a fish. There were a lot of other interesting looking ice creams at the P.A.T. though, some of which might of been Japanese, which based on their chocolate-filled biscuits, seems a lot more promising.

Here's the P.A.T.'s selection of Melonas, plus this disgusting looking
"B-B-Big" red bean bar.

I'm only human and got swept up in the craze

Of these South Korean ice pops, hoping they would amaze.

But they didn't, not really, they were only okay.

Booze Thoughtz: Rosé fröccs with a single frozen strawberry

Hungary has a long list of accomplishments under its leather-satchel-affixed belt: it was a Hungarian who first isolated vitamin C; it was a Hungarian who invented the rubik's cube; and it was a Hungarian who invented the ballpoint pen (fun fact: his name was Bálpont Zoltan, which is where we get the word "ballpoint" from*). But perhaps their greatest achievement of all is fröccs, a delicious wine-soda water hybrid that probably isn't Hungarian in origin at all, but rather Austrian (?), which is why we normally refer to the drink as a spritzer and not a fröccs. Even so, my first encounter with the drink was in Hungary, and even though I also procured a wife from Hungary, by far my greatest takeaway from that proud nation has been fröccs. 

Recently, as I was browsing the fröccs hashtag on instagram, I came across a delicious looking rosé fröccs with a frozen strawberry as an icecube, and I had to have it. A week later I bought one of the cheapest bottles of rosé I could find a proceeded to recreate the drink. The results were anticlimactic. It wasn't bad by any means; just uneventful. A normal food critic might not even bother with a review of such an unimpressive drink, but here we are. The strawberry, despite being a better-than-average organic Ontario strawberry, did nothing to improve the taste of the fröccs. In fact, its addition wasn't even noticeable. The biggest disappointment, though, was that the strawberry actually tasted worse when infused with wine than it did in the first place.

So while the drink wasn't terrible, I definitely wouldn't recommend trying this on your own. Or, I mean, do, but be prepared to be underwhelmed.


*Not true. His name was Bíró József, which is why the English call it a biro.

Food Thoughtz Review: Coastal Cheddar

Even though Coastal Cheddar comes from Dorset, I assume the “coastal” refers to the Salish coast where all of those feet washed up on shore, because that’s exactly what this cheese tastes and smells like. This cheese was so disappointing because I love cheddar cheese so much. The sting is always worse when you’re betrayed by those you trusted the most and those you held the most dear. Finishing this block of cheese was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but last night, with a heaping bowl of wagon wheel pasta and spaghetti sauce, I did it—and I have never been more proud.

This actually is one of those mystery-foot shoes.

Pillsbury Sugar Cookie Dough

Oh boy, this is going to be a difficult one for me.  Ever since I spent a week in Lethbridge with my sister when I was 13 during her first year of university (which, irrelevant, but: we have since both agreed that she was really irresponsible), I have been in love with Pillsbury’s raw sugar cookie dough.  In case anyone is wondering about the connection here—although it should be obvious—my mum bought my sister one as part of a large grocery-haul and it just sat in the fridge.  Every single one of you should be familiar with the product I am talking about because it’s delicious.  I’m talking about the holiday sugar cookie dough that Pillsbury releases during specific holidays (definitely Halloween and Christmas, but I think Easter as well) that has coloured images of reindeer or pumpkins dyed into the dough itself.  It used to come in a tube and you had to slice off the cookies yourself, but now they come in pre-sliced pieces on a flat slab. 
For whatever reason, I was left to my own devices one evening, and I devised to slice off a sliver from the tube in my sister’s fridge without her being any the wiser.  But then I continued to slice off slivers until I had eaten over half the tube.  I was in love.  Ever since then, I have bought this cookie dough at least once a year, and sometimes several times during a single season.  I always go into it knowing that I am a disgusting human being, and with that in mind, rarely feel any shame when I eat the entire package in one evening.  My consumption rates probably peaked during my first year of university in Montreal because I lived in such wretched squalor and subsisted entirely on brown rice and coffee that more than once I suffered from fainting spells and needed to compensate by eating as much sugar as I possibly could as quickly as possible.

More recently, I bought the Halloween cookies this October while R was in New York on business.  I waited for him to leave so that he wouldn’t judge me (only to later find out that he also loves this cookie dough, but only eats it cooked, whereas I only eat it raw).  Again, I ate the majority of the pack in one evening, only to be crippled by pain and nausea.  It states quite clearly on the package that you should not eat the cookie dough raw, which is weird, because it’s not as if there’s any other way to eat it (no matter what R has to say about it). 

This pictures is the worst, but you
get the idea.

Following that harrowing experience, I abstained from buying any more cookie dough, even when the Christmas themed dough came out.  Until R came home from work with a package, and I allowed myself just one measly little raw cookie.  I did not get sick.  I am fairly certain that the reason I got sick before has less to do with the raw eggs and more to do with the sheer quantity I had consumed.

At any rate, no matter what this dough has done to me in the past, I have continued to love it because 1) raw cookie dough is delicious, 2) it is even more delicious when it comes in a package and you don’t have to make it yourself, and 3) there is so much dye in each cookie that it has that amazing artificial taste that I love so much (artificial colours is my favourite food).

It's embarrassing to admit that this was the "best series" of
pictures that I took documenting this moment... but it is.
Even though my hand looks like a novelty gag present from
Spencer's Gifts.

But there’s another kind of Pillsbury sugar cookie dough that comes in a shrink-wrapped tube and resembles a loaf of polenta or some gross sausage-type “food.”  And this is the sugar cookie dough that I am not happy with.  Not because the dough itself tastes any different from the seasonal cookie dough (with the obvious exception of the artificial dyes), but because the package showcases these beautiful star-shaped cookies with white icing and blue sugar crystals and promises “perfect shapes every time.”  And then Pillsbury was too cheap to throw in a complementary star-shaped cookie cutter or any icing and sugar!  And I know they could because I went through a pretty dark phase last year in which my diet consisted almost entirely of those Pillsbury cinnamon buns, which come in one a menacing vacuum-sealed tube that literally explodes open, but which also includes a little tub of icing that fits perfectly in the packaging.

Pillsbury easily could have repackaged these sugar cookies to accommodate the frosting and tacked on a cookie cutter, perhaps to the exterior of the package, for added value.  It wouldn't even have to be a stainless steel one; I would be perfectly happy with plastic.  Additionally, the cookies, when sliced from the loaf, didn’t even make perfect round cookies.  They cooked poorly and ran together and refused to lift off of the baking tray, which is a problem I never had with the seasonal sugar cookies.  When I wasn’t eating the dough straight from the loaf (ew, such a gross sentence), I had to eat the half-burnt/half-raw crumbs with a spoon because that was just the way these Pillsbury sugar cookies crumbled.

This was the most successful baking attempt. The photo
has since been instagram'd to Pillsbury and I am still
waiting for a response or a free voucher or something.

I'm not really sure where to go from here.  I've always found the Pillsbury brand really endearing: the "Pillsbury poke" really worked on me because that doughboy is beyond adorable.  I want to keep supporting this company partly because I imagine some of the money going directly to the doughboy and partly because Pillsbury is owned by General Mills, and I typically like their products (Lucky Charms, Green Giant), but it's hard to stay true to a brand you love when you no longer want to give that doughboy a playful poke in the tummy, but rather a forceful slap in the face. 

These "perfect cookies every time" are as broken as Pillsbury's promises.

To close things out, here's a picture of the wrapper itself:

You might also notice the "Do not eat raw cookie dough" warning.
This, just as much as the "Perfect shapes every time!" claim, is a bald-faced lie.

“Perfect shapes every time” — what a joke!
Forget your tummy, doughboy: your brain needs a poke.
Next holiday season when you roll out this sugar cookie dough,
Remember Pillsbury: you reap what you sow.

Don't be surprised if your sales take a tumble,

Your empire, like your cookies, will inevitably crumble.

But then again, let's stick to reality:
I gobbled these up in their entirety

Cartoon Food

The first time that I can remember experiencing an insatiable desire for an item of cartoon food was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was probably 4 or 5. I felt it again every time I read an Archie comic and saw Jughead wolfing down a platter of (thankfully plain) burgers. Is this what Plato meant by Forms? Ugh! If only I had cultivated an intimate relationship with an Ancient Philosophy scholar! Otherwise my knowledge of Plato’s notion of Forms is limited to the veritable onslaught of vague references that undergraduate English students are bound to make whenever the words “shadow,” “cave,” or “dark” pop up in a text. (If there’s anyone out there interested in getting a BA, but they don’t know what in, I suggest English literature. It is always enough to say that something reminds you of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and go no further.) Regardless of my limited understanding of the term, I will nevertheless go forth and claim that cartoon food functions as an ideal Form of food, and that no doubt Plato had the Ninja Turtles in mind when he developed his theory.

Perhaps it is a bit problematic that cartoon food necessarily followed the material objects of pizza and burgers, but because I came into consciousness after these cartoon forms had already been established, and because I have made no effort to actually understand what Plato’s theory of Forms actually entails, and because I care for no one’s relationship to food but my own, I am going to grant myself some wiggle room here. And if Plato is arguing that we only ever see the shadows on the wall and never the real thing, let me just point out that Plato (probably) did not have access to TV or Archie comics—despite my previous claim that Plato wrote The Republic during the commercial breaks of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

For me, the pizzas of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Jughead’s burgers are not simply representations of pre-existing food that we physically ingest. They are perhaps modeled on those physical foods, but in their production and through cultural dissemination, they have been transformed into the ideal (or idea) of that food, and it is precisely through their artificiality that they become an unattainable promise of reality that we must always strive towards and inevitably fall short of. It is for this reason that pizzas and burgers have never tasted as sweet on my tongue as they do in my head (or my “brain-tongue,” if you want to be scientific).

So you can imagine my delight when a Müller superstore opened up in downtown Budapest with at least a quarter of one floor devoted entirely to German candies, mostly Haribo and its cheaper cousin, Trolli. And what does Trolli make? GUMMY BURGERS THAT LOOK AS IF THEY WERE TAKEN STRAIGHT OUT OF A CARTOON. It was like stumbling out of a dark cave where I had been munching on tasteless chimeras and into a ray of light to become the Philosopher Queen I always knew myself to be.

Although either Hairbo or Trolli also makes gummy pizzas (and gummy eggs, which are somewhat appealing to me), they are too small to actually capture the form of a cartoon pizza. It’s difficult to say what exactly is so great about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ pizza beyond saying that it looks like pizza: it’s sloppy and droopy and looks delicious. The gummy pizzas, on the other hand, are little more than pink, globular, semi-triangles.

It is perhaps easier to explain what I mean through a collection of curated TMNT pictures taken from the original cartoon, the live-action movies, and a toy.

Here we have an image from the late-80s to mid-90s Turtle era.What is remarkable about this cartoon pizza is 1) its uniformity -- all pizzas in the animated series look more or less like this one; and 2) the lack of detail -- there is no effort to try and portray the different shades of cheese or pepperoni, which we all know to be part & parcel of a real pizza. The nondescript pizza allows enough blank space (this is especially true of the slightly yellow-ish cheese entirely free of shade) for us to project our own desires onto that pizza; the form is open enough to accommodate within itself our own ideal pizza. If this is pizza at its highest point of artificiality, it is also pizza at its highest point of desirability. It perhaps bears mentioning for any turtle fans that Donatello is kindly offering his slice of pizza to the viewer (or at the very least making a cheers gesture), while Michelangelo has already begun to scarf his down.

In this image we begin to see the transition from the cartoon pizza to one that retains its cartoon qualities, but is nevertheless tangible and touchable in real life. While we could no doubt hold this small plastic disc in our hands, we cannot actually eat it,* which is, of course, the main goal. Although these toy pizzas of the TMNT franchise serve as an interesting bridge of the gap between the real and the artificial, they nevertheless remain as elusive and as illusory as the pizzas on the tv screen. If anything, these pizzas might increase our frustration at the impossibility of ever actually reaching the ideal form.

Finally, here is a still from one of the live-action TMNT films and we can see how these ideal pizzas cannot be sustained in physical reality, and ultimately break down. The pizzas in these movies are no more desirable than any pizza we can acquire in real life, and ultimately probably less so since I assume that they had probably entirely cooled off during filming.

In closing, here is a series of images that was once a gif, but I don't know what gifs are, and I certainly don't know how to post them here. I think that a series of stills is actually more useful to our purposes here since we can walk through these images one by one.

In the first three panels, notice Michelangelo's infectious (to the viewer, obviously not to Donatello) joy at the anticipation of consuming this slice of pizza, which surely can only be amplified by the promise of many more (there are three pizzas in front of him).

In the fourth and fifth panels you can see him begin to unhinge his jaw like a snake so as to be able to fit the entire slice in his mouth at one time. His lower jaw juts outwards not only in a snake-like unhinging, but also somewhat like a bib to catch the dripping cheese. The liquid quality of the cheese, especially apparent in the second piece that he holds in his other hand, indicates both that the pizza is obviously still hot and fresh, but also that the cheese is appropriately greasy.

In the final panel we can see Michelangelo's total bliss at having just consumed that piece of pizza, and we are assured that it was just as delicious as he had anticipated it to be in the first panel. Given that he ate it in a single gulp, we can be sure that his ravenous appetite can more than account for the remaining pizza, and based on our knowledge of Michelangelo's character, we can be certain that he will enjoy the remaining slices with the same relish as the first. Unfortunately for the viewer, because we will never be able to eat of this pizza, we will never experience this bliss first hand. Our disappointment is only augmented by it being acted out in front of our very eyes.

* Choking hazard! 

Art, as we know, doesn't represent the real,

But illustrates instead the impossible ideal.

 And our attempts to mimic the Form found in cartoon

Inevitably ends in an embarrassing culinary lampoon. 

The Scone

Everyone: prepare for disappointment. Scones are not cream horns. Am I the only person that didn’t know this? I would keep hearing scones mentioned—on TV, in real life, on the internet—and I would think, “Oh my god, I would love to eat a scone right now!”

Do other people actually know what scones are and still eat them? You know they’re not cream horns, right? Cream horns are those delicious things made of puff pastry shaped into a horn and then piped full of whipped cream; scones are like a sweet bun but aren’t because they don’t have yeast or something. I don’t know. I do know why they’re not delicious though: because they’re not puff-pastry-horns-filled-with-whipped-cream.

Having recently achieved my goal of being accepted into a
Masters program at U of T, all that is left for me now is to
burrow into a giant cream horn and forget about the outside world.

But now that I know what scones are only by knowing what they’re not, I can say with absolute certainty that I do not want to eat one. I’m afraid that they would be much too dense or perhaps not sweet enough. A cursory google image search has led me to the conclusion that scones must be eaten with jam, and I don’t like the idea of needing to eat any of my foods with jam just so that they will be sweet enough for me to enjoy. Total dependency on a condiment is a sign of weakness.

Until just now, I assumed that the word “ensconce” was somehow related to “scone,” like to envelope oneself in a scone. But now I have learned that “sconce” means fortress and is not related to scones at all! And because I thought scones were cream horns, I thought it had something to do with living in a cream horn in the same way that a hermit crab lives in a shell. And now the only thing that is saving the world from being an ugly and inhospitable place is making very rudimentary splicings of hermit crabs in cream horns.

Learn from my mistakes and do not be hasty:

The scone is not a cream-filled horn-shaped puff pastry. 

And unlike the cream-horn, the scone

Will serve neither as a suitable nor portable home.

Smarties

This post might reflect negatively on my mother’s parenting skills, but no food has proved more formative in my development than Smarties. I was potty trained on Smarties. I sat through hair cuts with the promise of Smarties as a reward. I learned about the subtle nuances of colour because of Smarties (and as a result had the self-satisfaction of informing people that “mauve” was my favourite colour, and not just "purple").

On the left are the Smarties of my childhood. On the right are the Smarties of your child's childhood.

 But in 2009, Nestle, bowing to public pressure (I hate when corporations bow to public pressure)*, removed the artificial colouring agents. The result was devastating. First of all, they look terrible. They look like those cheap, shitty, knock-off Smarties that you would sometimes find in bulk sections of a shabby and run-down store and that your mom would buy for you because she didn’t know any better (I mean, obviously not my mum, but one of those less adept mothers who are always arguing that that the cheaper knock-off versions are the same as the real thing). But more importantly, they also taste terrible, and it turns out that the most delicious part of a Smartie was the artificial colour in the candy shell. By removing the artificial colouring from Smarties, Nestle has managed only to make Smarties taste more artificial--if only because the original Smarties established an expectation of taste which is now inevitably disappointed; they taste artificial not because they once tasted like a "natural" food but because they no longer taste like Smarties, and to continue to taste like Smarties is the only responsibility they have to the consumer. Nestle never made any attempt to sell kids or parents on the health benefits of Smarties, and as far as I know, they have never even succumbed to that pathetic marketing ploy of saying that Smarties are "part of" a balanced diet or that they are a "good source" of calcium. Smarties are, and always have been, a treat, that is to say, a deviation from your normal dietary routine.

Smarties were important to me not just because they were my favourite candy or because I was rewarded with them and through them learned to perform certain tasks or to behave in a certain way; they were important to me because they were this material item that, at the time, seemed more anchored in reality than I did. I grasped at Smarties as a means by which I might build on or understand my own identity through something tangible and stable. It wasn’t important to me whether or not other people recognized me as that kid who really liked Smarties, but it was absolutely crucial to me that I be able to recognize myself as that kid who loved Smarties more than any other kid in the entire world. They also served to imbue me with a sense of national identity because, at the time, the only identifiable difference to me between Canadians and Americans was that there were Smarties in Canada but not in the States.

The most recent Smartie advertisement I’ve seen was one in which teens showed off their talent--like playing guitar or rollerblading--and the catchphrase at the end was “show your true colours.” But the old ads with the tagline, "When I eat my Smarties, I eat the red ones last" were so much better. I loved these ads, in part because I could see myself as a deviation from what Nestle had established as the norm: I obsessively made sure that I never ate the red ones last. I was terrified that if I did eat the red ones last, I would just be like every other fool who ate the red ones last only because they had tricked themselves into thinking that this was something they truly desired or that truly defined them as a Smartie-eater. But on the other hand, this kind of ad also granted access into a community of those who did eat the red ones last. Instead of trying to celebrate a sense of belonging (and, as a result, setting up a structure of community that one could define themselves against), Smarties is now trying to insist on a sense of celebrating difference and individuality--“our colours”--which is kind of ironic given that every Smartie in the box looks is a nearly identical greyish-brown colour. Although I don't like the connection Nestle is trying to make between "true" and "natural," this advertising scheme certainly makes more sense that sticking with the old "eat the red ones last" campaign since there no long are any red ones to eat last.

I remember trying to figure out whether or not different colours of Smarties corresponded to different flavours. I knew, even at such a young age, that of course they didn't. But being able to argue that purple is the best "flavour" is a great synesthetic experience in and of itself. So many of my vivid childhood memories are tied to Smarties, and it's as if I have lost the opportunity to ever experience those memories in a sensual** way again. Up until 2009, eating Smarties always made me recall what it was I thought about and how I felt when I was little and eating Smarties. Perhaps it’s worth noting here that the definition of nostalgia isn’t just a longing for the past, but that there is pain built into that process: it’s like going home only to realise that your home is a different colour than when you left it.

*I understand that a corporation like Nestle is only concerned with selling its product. But it's the responsibility of a corporation (especially a corporation like Nestle that makes products that are not necessary) not to cater its products to the public, but to create a need or desire where one doesn't actually exist. And this is something that Nestle in the past (albeit with disastrous results) proven itself to be particularly masterful at.
**Not that I have the desire to experience toilet training specifically in a sensual way, but I am referring more to the sense of accomplishment and how that accomplishment was rewarded.

To eat Smarties was once my favourite activity


But ruining things is, for concerned parents, a natural proclivity
And now something that was one part delicious and one part aesthetic


Was said to be carcinogenic and made their children frenetic


And other arguments that were similarly pathetic.


So in a move that was justified as health sensitivity
And marketed by Smarties as snack progressivity 


(but in reality is just deplorable corporate reactivity),
They switched to the “natural” instead of the synthetic.
And although I would like to try and be apathetic,
It’s hard when Nestle isn’t even remotely apologetic.

The Salad - pt. II

After reading the previous post, it may shock you to learn that I have actually tried a salad before, and that I did so entirely of my own volition.

It all happened in January, 2010, while I was wintering in southern France (I will never get tired of that phrase). I was staying at a beautiful and totally self-sufficient hostel, and I even had my own private room. Few people realise that when I jokingly say that I travel in order to find myself that I'm not entirely joking. I often do travel with a specific purpose in mind. I will recognize a certain obstacle in my life and go on an elaborate trip to try and remove that obstacle from my life in the privacy that anonymous travel provides. I went to Central America with the intention of learning how to dance and to read Moby Dick. (I only accomplished one of those things and it remains one of the greatest regrets of my life. I mean that completing Moby Dick is one of the biggest regrets of my life. I never learned how to dance. I guess I regret that too, but not as much.)

Before I went to Europe in late 2009, my restricted diet was really starting to weigh on me. It seemed impossible that I would ever be able to become the person I wanted to if I continued to refuse to try new foods. At the time, I foolishly wanted to be a person who could go to dinner parties and eat like a normal person. I wanted to be able to one day own cook books. I wanted to have cupboards full of ingredients and I wanted a spice rack that would hold more than just salt and pepper (adding pepper to foods is actually still pretty new to me, so at the time it would have been just salt). My time at the hostel in Nice seemed like a perfect opportunity to branch out and explore new things. I had ordered several dishes of spaghetti bolognese at the hostel before, and knowing that it came with a side of green salad, I always asked for no salad. But then one night, I didn't. I'm still not sure if I simply forgot or if I purposely forgot or if my subconscious desire for a normal life was dragging me toward that salad and forcing me to confront it. But in any case, my spaghetti arrived, and sure enough there was a green salad on the side.

This is the picture that accompanied my thoughtful expose that appeared
in a certain publication that shall not be named.

I stared at it for a long time. I considered the person I had become and questioned whether or not I wanted to continue on this path of extreme food avoidance. And then, I just stopped. I stopped thinking about what eating this salad would mean; I stopped wondering how much I would hate it once that lettuce was in my mouth; I stopped thinking about the exact amount of time it would take before the taste and all remnants of that salad would be washed away by the pasta. And I just ... took a bite of the salad. And I swallowed it. And I hated it.

But you know what trying that salad taught me? That I never ever have to try a new food ever again because if I already know that I hate it, then I hate it. It taught me to put faith in my own judgment and my ability to know myself. It taught me that I don't have to own cookbooks or cumin--or even know what cumin is--in order to live and happy and full life. And it also taught me the importance of ordering a dish without a side of salad, because I'm pretty sure you get more spaghetti that way.

Stop trying to find yourself, you'll only prove to be a fool

And the process by which you try must necessarily be cruel.

If you know you don't like something, then please don't tempt fate--

What was once cold indifference will become solidified hate. 

Rice

Hot damn! The rice at Rancho Chico's is SO GOOD. One time I asked what
rice they used and where they got it from, and the waiter was obviously
uncomfortable and said he didn't know, but I know that he just wasn't willing
to tell me. I don't even care if they won't tell me. I am more than happy to
pay $3 for this mystery rice, and going to Colville is a pleasure in itself.

When I was about four or five I came up with a great joke that drew on all of the important elements of my life and wove them together into what seemed at the time the greatest comic query ever produced:

Q: What did Michael Jackson say to the bowl of rice?

A: Let’s eat!

Black or White was my favourite song at the time and I guess we were having rice for dinner. Who knows. Rice is such a boring food that it’s impossible to remember when you’ve eaten it. I had a 10kg bag of rice in my closet and now it’s gone and I guess that I ate it because it’s no longer there.

But the charm of rice lies in the ease with which it is forgotten. Like an undervalued friend, it’s always there for you. But unlike the undervalued friend trope, you won’t learn a valuable lesson in taking things for granted once they’re gone because rice will never ever desert you because there is so much rice in this world and it is so cheap. It's a food that, until now, I have never really had to think about. I eat it because it's filling and cheap and doesn't really taste like anything.

Here is a delicious plate of plain rice that I enjoyed in
Bogota. I was with my mum at the time and we had met up
with a girl I met in El Salvador a few months before who was
now living and working in Colombia. She took us to this
restaurant where both she and my mum ordered really
outrageous and enormous dishes, while I happily consumed
this and contented myself with the knowledge that I was
not a disgusting human being who hate disgusting things.

Honestly I don't know what else I can say about rice. I realise now that a lot of this post is about me eating rice in Central America. I guess that's because that was the time in my life when rice really took the centre stage of my diet. By eating almost nothing but rice, I was able to forget about food and stop worrying about what I would eat that day and focus on the important things, like learning how to smoke and, for the first time in my life, really enjoying casual drinking. Rice allows for great things to happen in your life without ever taking the credit for them.

Some Ways that I Like to Eat Rice:

• With cheese sauce. Not with cheese sauce, obviously--that would be disgusting. But my favourite dinner is white basmati rice, sausages, and broccoli and cauliflower smothered in cheese sauce. I eat the sausages first so nothing touches them/is touched by them, and then I eat the vegetables. But once the vegetables are gone, there is still a pool of cheese sauce on the plate, and I like it when some of the cheese sauce touches the edges of some of the rice, but I don’t think I would ever like to push the rice onto the cheese sauce because that would be too much. It’s just nice to get a hint of cheese sauce with your rice because then you can remember and savour how delicious that cheese sauce was.
• White basmati rice with mixed frozen vegetables and soy sauce. I don't know if there is anything else to say about this except that it's a relatively new development for me. I had always relied on fried rice if I found myself in a Chinese restaurant, and one day I finally realise that I could just more or less make it myself and avoid Chinese restaurants all together. Eating rice with vegetables and soy sauce makes me think that maybe I am growing up and broadening my horizons.
• 1 part brown rice, 2 parts butter. When I was little and my mum was doing some baking, I used to lick the butter paper after she was done with it. Eating rice with tonnes of butter tastes like butter but feels like rice. It's like licking butter paper without the guilt of actually licking butter paper.
• Plain. Eating plain rice with no butter or salt is a sneaky way of tricking yourself into having an ascetic experience without actually committing to asceticism. It’s like learning something meaningful from the Orient by looking up Buddhist prayers on Wikihow.com--which I just did because I thought I would be able to make a joke about Edward Saïd, but then I lost interest.
• In a restaurant. I love going into ethnic restaurants in big, bustling cities like Vancouver or Colville, because I know that there must be at least one person who sees me enter and think, She must be a good person. She must really care about the world. Why else would she be eating at an ethnic restaurant? Ethnic restaurants always serve plain rice, and it's always the cheapest thing on the menu. And for some reason, it's usually way better than rice that I can make at home. Must be all that ethnicity.

This was kind of a weird moment for me because while I do (now) enjoy rice
with vegetables, I definitely don't enjoy rice with these vegetables. I don't even
remember what was in here... Corn, obviously, and I think some crushed tomatoes
that had cooked into the rice so it wasn't really very traumatizing, and, I don't know,
carrots? Anyway, like all of the other pictures in this post (with the exception of the
first one), this was taken in Central America and I was really hellbent on
experiencing new things.

Something to Keep in Mind:

 

Of the food I eat, I never expected that rice would be the one to betray me. But betray me it did. During my trip through Central America, I was too busy finding myself to ever even question where I was finding my rice. I lived almost entirely off of rice, and I never worried about how it was prepared because it's rice and it's really hard to mess up rice. But did you know that rice can go bad? You probably did because no one was surprised when I told them that I got rice poisoning and was so miserable that I wished only for death.

In Rio Dulce (or should I say Rio Not-So-Dulce?) I ordered a plate of rice from a street vendor just as I had done countless times before and would continue to do countless times afterward. I watched as the woman scooped out a large portion from a stainless steel bowl that was sitting on a counter and heap it onto my paper plate. But I had no qualms with eating relatively cold rice that had been warmed only by sitting out in the sun all day and was of questionable freshness. None of this was of any concern because with my restricted diet, food poisoning had never even entered my mind as a possibility for me. I ate the rice in the same way that I eat any rice--as a simple means to an end--and washed it down with a litre of beer. The afternoon and evening passed as any evening in Central America passed: lazy hammock reading followed by a rousing game of gin rummy, and this specific night, with a bag of hickory sticks which I did not enjoy in the least. When I was in bed, I broke out in a sweat and began to feel the waves of nausea wash over me. Convinced it would go away by morning, I committed myself to the task of falling asleep with great success. I was awoken at around six in the morning with an immediate need to vomit. So I jumped out of bed with the grace and agility of gazelle and ran down multiple flights of stairs to the bathroom on the main floor, certain that I would make it in time. And I did--sort of. Just as I breached the threshold of the bathroom door but had not quite made it to the stalls, I projectile vomited everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I was like a veritable fountain, spewing hickory sticks in all directions. When I had expelled what I believed to be everything that had ever been in my body and surveyed the pool of vomit that now surrounded me and covered the majority of the bathroom floor, I calmly asked the hostel receptionist to provide me with a bucket and mop to clean up the mess. I showered, I brushed my teeth, and I went back to bed. Mere minutes after crawling back into bed, I was once again on my feet and rushing down to the bathroom. This time I managed to make it to the sinks and clogged not one but three sinks with hickory sticks. After scooping the puke out of the sinks and into the garbage, I again showered and brushed my teeth and went back to bed. The third time I didn't even make it out of the room and instead just dry heaved and dribbled bile into a garbage can which, in retrospect, would have made more sense to use in the first two instances.

Upon arriving in Livingston, I remained in bed in the fetal position for one
day and one night until I finally felt well enough to greet the world, at which
point I was told by a nurse that I had suffered from rice poisoning because,
duh, rice goes bad.

The next morning I had to take a boat to Livingston and it was one if the hardest things I've ever had to do. I arrived at the hostel and immediately went to bed. Until I had an eye-opening conversation with a British nurse the following night, I had been under the impression that the hickory sticks had made me so sick. It was the first time that I had ever tried hickory sticks, and they gave me the distinct impression of being rejected McDonalds' fries that were too old, dry, and crusty to sell. But, you guys, it was the rice. It was that Rio Dulce rice that had been sitting in that stainless steel bowl in the sun for God knows how long. And what followed this revelation was an existential crisis almost as painful as the rice poisoning itself. I was force to reevaluate my life and the decisions I had made. Could I still eat rice? What would it mean to give up something that had, for so long, been such a central staple of my diet? How could I continue a trip in a region that depended on rice as much as I did and not eat it? Ultimately I abandoned all of these difficult questions and resumed eating rice with the same reckless abandon as before.

A plain bowl of rice

No one cares about it.

They're missing out. *

* See what I did there? That's a haiku. Get it? The Orient?

Potato Update

The other day I bought a bag of frozen hash browns and consumed it in an embarrassingly short period of time. I took several pictures to commemorate the occasion, but I am only posting a few because I worry that the only thing more embarrassing than eating that many frozen hash browns that quickly is taking 15 pictures of myself doing so and posting them on the internet.

This is the first picture I took. I look pretty at peace with the situation. I now
regret that I didn't take a series of pictures of myself struggling under the
burden of shame that was the inevitable result of this potato feast.

And then I found out that you can take a series of four pictures in sequence,
so of course I took 13 more.

I meant for this post to be a warning to anyone who has ever idealized a certain food from their past, as I have with McCain's frozen hash browns. I was going to write about how sometimes you remember something being so delicious, but when you revisit it, you're kind of disappointed. I was going to write about how it's easy to conflate these foods with past emotional states, and why it's wrong to think that eating a food from your childhood--a time in your life that you typically associate with happiness--will ever be able to fill that void that has been steadily growing since those first tinges of adulthood. But now that I am looking at this mound of hash browns, I kind of just want to go out and do the whole thing over again.

Grits

Had I never agreed to discover America with my sista in 2008, I would still be happily ensconced in the idea that grits were an especially greasy form of breakfast potatoes. But when I started to do some more research into the Grit Belt--where we would be spending a large portion of our time and where my sister would now be living--I realised that grits were not the refried deepfried greased-up heavenly hashbrown dish I had always dreamed of. When I found out that grits are actually just some disgusting porridgey dish made out of ground corn, I realised that the world would never be as beautiful as I once hoped it would be, and I gave up all hope for the future. The world is a cold, hard place, you guys.

Here’s a terrible article about just how far America has fallen.

Sometimes learning new things is a difficult and lonely experience.

Fun Footnote: Evidently there is a Christian rap duo known as GRITS ( = Grammatical Revolution In The Spirit, obvs). But I feel like if I was part of a rap duo, I would not name it GRITS. Because every time someone might try to search for the group on the internet, they're going to wind up with a bunch of pictures and stories about grits (the food, not the grammatical revolution).

When I discovered the true nature of the grit,
My world began to crumble, bit by bit.