Sunday, Swilly Sunday

Spurred on by the Rutt's Hut experience I worked hard at home to create some more food experiences where the comfort caused by eating was near-opiatic (I think he means "similar to opiates," Ed.) and inversely proportional to their nutritional value. This glorious blend of masochism and satiation is what you will repeatedly hear (via the voice in your head) me call "swill."

The first thing I ate was actually the most healthy thing I ate all day and it contained an egg, so I might lose my American Heart Association funding after today. I cannot, however allow that to stifle my journalistic integrity or, by association, my meandering palate. If I ever own a diner, this will be on the menu as a "dippy egg." That's what my grandmother called them when we were growing up and it has just stuck as a family word.

In a bowl mix a 1:1 ratio of slices of buttered toast cut into squares and poached eggs. The ratio is of course slices:eggs but I know how the MIT kids get on the comments section so I thought I should nip this one in the bud before I spark another spamoff. More important to the recipe than the ratio of egg to toast is the ratio of salt to egg. Ideally, you introduce about a quarter teaspoon of salt directly to the egg yolk before stirring the egg and toast together and putting a dash of pepper over the whole mess.

A nice touch is also to use all of the wispy trailing egg whites from the poaching water and not just the main glob that holds around the yolk. This adds to the "sopping wet, soaked in butter and golden boon of the chicken gods" effect that master chefs refer to when teaching "dippy eggs" at the Sorbonne. There is, however, a longstanding feud over whether any of the toast at all should retain it's crunch, or whether the entire dish should succumb to permeation by the eggy virtues.

We only had one egg left, though, and while one egg to one piece of toast is a great addition to some hash browns and bacon, it is not enough breakfast for me. I cut up some of my giant Sarris' peanut butter meltaway Easter egg and nibbled from that as my roommate and I listened to some Joe Frank radio shows.

Just the chocolate was making me kind of sick, though, and I thought maybe eating some real food would keep you from telling on me to my mother, so I made some rice and reheated a bag of CoCo Ichi's 角煮カレー, a soupy Japanese curry which counts as swill because I reheated it out of a sealed pouch. If it is food you can mail, then it counts as swill.

If you have never had Japanese Curry, go to Japan and walk up to any of the presumably Japanese people you might see upon exiting the travel vessel of your choice and say to them "anata no opai o mitte kudasai." This will scare most people off, but if you find someone who laughs, you should then say to them "Can you please tell me where the nearest Coco Ichi's Curry House is?" They will probably drive you there themselves, and it will probably be next to a FamilyMart.

It is however important to pronounce the word "curry" as "kah-ray." Some other words you might think you know how to pronounce but are wrong about are "Su-tah-bah-ku-su" which is where you get your yuppyjuice and "Mah-ku-do-nah-ru-do-su" or "Ma-ku-do" for short or "Maku-maku-iiiiiiiiii-makumakuchan" if you are a teenaged girl, all of which refer to that ubiquitous American hamburger chain that is actually worth going to in Japan.
It's not just the shrimp patty "ebibaga" sandwich or the reasonable portion sizes, but the fact that the employees seem to take their job seriously and, at least outwardly, don't despise you for coming to their store. After your curry and rice (kahray raisu), cross the street to the FamilyMart and get a bottle of Dakara, a tall can of Lemon Chu-Hi (hi like "HI!!! NICE TO MEET YOU! AMERICAN!?!"), then walk around the neighborhood enjoying your traditional Japanese beverages, then duck into the golden arches for the "ebibaga seto" or maybe just the "bigu maku seto" for the less adventurous. That's a great formula for a tour of Japan that you can do almost anywhere in the country. You will probably see a lot of English instructors doing the same thing.

Also in my Japan-related diet today, but not really so swilly, was a tall glass of iced "houjicha" which is a very deeply roasted green tea. It’s more mellow than the green tea most Americans are familiar with, and I find the smoky character of the deep roast very refreshing when the tea is chilled.

Later, my other roommate came back from actually leaving the apartment on a Sunday, wacko, having brought back lots of gifts for the apartment that he found in the $1 aisle of the local supermarket. I'll skip all the useless crap I couldn't eat, but of particular note was a box of Lego brand fruit snacks and a box of Christmas cookies.
The cookies were still good, or, well, as good as I imagine they ever were, seeing as how they are all 50% sawdust and 50% red clay. Even if you didn't know they were 4 months old and came from the dollar aisle, there's something about the art on the tin that is even tackier than usual for holiday butter cookies that let you know not to expect too much from the contents.
The Lego snacks, however, were truly disappointing. If Lego were willing to risk all the choking lawsuits by putting their name on a product that you are actually supposed to put in your mouth, they could have at least made them actually function kind of like their actual products, maybe. All of the "blocks" are only the 2x2's, which isn't very dynamic, and although they have the little Lego nubs on top, they had no holes on the bottom into which the little nubs of another block might fit. Though they actually tasted like quality fruit snacks-- I mean at least as good as Shark Bites or the like-- you would think that with the actual Lego logo on the box and each individual wrapped packet they might actually function. This is probably why they were in the $1 aisle. How about all you MITCMURPI guys start harassing Lego instead of worrying about my ratios? FACTISTS! ... i mean FASCISTS!

And then, much later, I got a terrible flash of swillspiration, "swillsagna," which in it's high concept form is just layers of swill that are saucy enough with other swill that might give some vague division of the general swill into "layers" and then heated in an oven.

I took about 4 white flour tortillas and cut them to fit a 8" round cake pan by placing the cake pan on top of them and then cutting off everything that stuck out from the edges. Then I put a little olive oil in the pan and layered a tortilla in the bottom. I proceeded to layer Tostitos nacho cheese dip and a mixture of canned black beans and diced onions, green peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes and frozen french fries between successive sheets of tortilla or the tortilla scraps, toping it off with one tortilla covered in olive oil. I let the whole mess bake at 350F for about 15-20 minutes.

Somewhere in there, I also ate 2 potato chips and a bowl of rice with a healthy dusting of Adobo seasoning. When my Southwest Swillsagna came out of the oven it was already after 10PM, but it is never too late for swill. I ate about 20% of it, which is easy to estimate because it was shaped like a math problem. My roommate had a similar portion and the rest is waiting eagerly for it's big field trip to Lunchtime Lefover Land.

And just because I don't want you factists decrying me at the next den meeting, I said "about 4 tortillas" even though tortillas appear to be rather discrete units because I ate quite a bit of the scraps from the trimming process as I was cooking. I'm a nibbler. I've come to terms with that and I think you should get over it.

Special Bonus Feature: the first person to comment on this posting by correctly giving the number of words in any language that uses the roman alphabet as the language existed prior to 1937 can be formed by exactly using all the letters in MITCMURPIRITUMASSSORBONNEFASCISTPENELOPE will be immediately gifted with a secret knowledge.