Things I've Eaten

So, I am in a meeting with a bunch of people at work and someone says, “Oh, I hear you have a new employee starting on Monday” and then proceeds to ask for a new project to be done within a week when 3-6 months is a more realistic timeframe for the work involved. I’m like “WTF!” and my head explodes and I am filled with rage and think I am going to black out and then I remember I have a bunch of Genesee Bock Beer at home that will make all the pain go away. And not just because of alcohol’s usual sweet answer to all of life’s problems, but because the can is so adorably cute there’s no way you could be angry while pounding a bunch of them.

Even the meanest drunk can’t stay angry with that cute little goat and flowers on the can!

The beer is a dark amber and at $7.99 for a 12-pack it is surprisingly good.  Not knowing what makes beer bock, I used the interwebs to check it out on The Wikipedia. Turns out Bock means goat in German, Roman Catholic monks drank it, and Martin Luther allegedly drank it during the Diet of Worms. I have no idea what the hell that is, but it sounds awesome and makes me want to read Judy Blume books.

So, a lot of the stuff in my crazy box of Japanese food is pretty scary. I wanted to go with something that might be a little familiar, easing from the very familiar Kit Kats to whatever Shark Fin Slurry might await.

I picked these becayse they seemed to be highly processed, which for some reason I thought would minimize scariness. Then I opened one and was like WTF?

I really have no idea what the heck these are. The pictures on the packages sort of look like a bowl of ramen or rice… and the flavor is herby and vaguely earthy… It reminds me of some not entirely bad snack food you’d buy from hippie-packed co-op. But the consistency throws me for a loop. It’s like a cross between a puffy Cheeto and pork rind in a disturbingly tubular shape. I have a slight suspicion it could be a tentacle rind.

In any event, they were good!

So, I’m in the mood for some chocolatey covered wafers and think, “Wow, a Kit Kat bar would really hit the spot.” Lucky for me, there’s a bunch of Kit Kats in my crazy box of Japanese cuisine. But then I reach for one and am like “WTF? These Kit Kats is crazy!”

The Japanese are pushing the boundaries of flavors that can be captured and delivered in Kit Kat form. To start, I grabbed one of these bad boys:

 

Due to my inability to resize my microscopic graphics appropriately, I’ll let you know that these are lemon flavored Kit Kats. I was reassured to discover that Kit Kat means the same thing in Japan as it does here, because a bag with a bunch of Japanese characters and a lemon on it could just as well have been some sort of nanite-infused furniture polish.

 

These were delicious. Instead of the usual chocolate shell, the Kit Kats have a somewhat waxy yellow coating, similar to those weird pellets you see in the bulk section of the supermarket. Overall, the flavor reminded me of lemon cooler cookies, or a lemon wafer cookie similar to those peanut butter ones, but which may not actually exist. In fact, there’s a good chance I’m just imagining that I’ve eaten cookies like that before. Regardless, lemon Kit Kats good!

Next up, was another sure thing: Strawberry Kit Kats.

 

OK, for some reason my blog is messing with my sweetass image files. Take my word for it that the packaging is very attractive and properly conveys the strawberry flavor explosion hidden within.  As before, the usual chocolate is replaced with a pink waxy candy coating. It reminded me a bit of Strawberry Quick, and even though I am not a fan of that, I found the Strawberry Kit Kat good. Not Lemon Kit Kat good, but still pretty decent.

I was on a roll now, so figured I’d push on — the flavored Kit Kats hadn’t done me wrong yet. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard lesson that not everything is good in Kit Kat form.

Now the images are just annoying me. The whole blog interface has changed and everything is wacky. Curse you interwebs!

Anywho, I was saving this box for a while because I figured it was going to be so good all other Kit Kats would pale in comparison. But somehow, Kit Kat Fruit Parfait just did not do the trick. Maybe it’s not the Kit Kat. Maybe it’s me. I tend to get excited by things like “Mango Guava Orange Juice” becaues it sounds tropical and awesome, overlooking the fact that I really don’t seem to like a lot of tropical fruits.

As you can see from the picture, or would if it was actually a legible size, it appears that fruit parfait consists of blueberries, oranges, bananas, and melons. Honestly, those are things I tend to like. The presentation is also prety cool. The now familiar waxy shell is striped and seems to have strawberry seeds in it to add the illusion of real fruit flavor versus something out of a test tube. But something about this just turned me off.  I could swear I detected a coconut flavor, even though there are no coconuts on the packaging. Ultimately, disappointing.

Well, Japan, you’ve opened my eyes — and my tastebuds — to the vast Kit Kat possibilities that lie beyond chocolate covered wafer crisps. Bravo!

So, I get all these emails that postings are being added to my blogs, and I’m like WTF is up with all this crazy activity? After clearing off a hundred or so trackback postings that some porner’s bots added, I came across desperate please to get off my ass and add some posts. I agree. The people deserve to know which foods to consume and which to avoid. I’ve just been really lazy.

Some exciting commissioned (i.e., food that was given to me) reports will be coming soon, but in the meantime I figured I’d share this little tidbit. BTW, anyone remember Tidbits(Not to be confused with Timbits, the donut holes)? They were cheese crackers from Nabisco that were shaped kind of like elongated flattened Good’n'Plenty candies. You can still find them in trail- and snack-mixish things, but I don’t think you can buy a dedicated box of Tidbits.

Anyway, so I cleared off all the porn postings and was really hungry. And we had a bunch of leftovers that were about to go bad, so pretty much they had to be consumed in this one meal or be thrown out. I don’t roll that way.

As I looked over my taco remnants and pizza I started thinking about how fast food �restaurants contribute to the biggening of America by jamming products into other ones. For example, you can’t just have a pizza, you need a pizza embedded within a pizza. Or Taco Bell has all these crazy chalupa stuffed in a taco, wrapped in a fajita things. I’m still waiting for KFC to come out with a deep fried Cornish game hen sewn into a duck’s bladder, forced down a chicken’s throat, and stuffed up a turkey’s ass.

BTW, it turns out my laptop has a Euro key, which I think is pretty cool for all of the international dealings I continually work on, so I purposefully left that typo in the preceding paragraph.

Back to the meal. Not being able to throw away my food in good conscience, I felt left with no other option — combine. But what is the best approach? Wrap the turgid hard-shelled taco in a flexible pizza slice? Or insert a pizza slice inside the taco shell with the meat? Fortunately, there was enough food on hand to test both techniques.

It’s worth pointing out that when this adventure began several days earlier, those were supposed to be beef tacos. Man I was looking forward to them. Then I got the hamburger out of the fridge. It was a few days past the Sell Date, but it seemed to be in the acceptable range. However, the meat was grey and I definitely remember it being red when I bought it. It smelled OK at first, but then as I started to cook it seemed to have just a hint of poisonous rot stench. If we were in ancient Rome and Romans had been to Mexico, a rotten hamburg taco would probably be considered a delicacy. But, feeling bound by modern American conventions, we ditched the meat and fell back on some chicken strips. So this isn’t just a Pizzaco/Tacizza, it’s a Chicken Pizzaco/Tacizza.

Anywho, the first attempt was the pizza inside the taco. Results follow:

The shell stayed crunchy but was made slightly more pliant by the grease leached out of the pizza slice. Delicious!

Next, the pizza outside the taco. Results follow:

This was a bit more savory, as the grease and cheese are right at the forefront. The shell retained enough crunchiness to make every bite an exciting exploration of textures. However, eating was more difficult as the pizza was a bit to large for the shell and the weird angle I had to use to hold everything in caused a river of grease to course down my elbow and drip all over.

Overall, a winner!