Playbooyah

The intimacy of the refrigerator is most acutely felt when you’re visiting someone else for a protracted amount of time and you go looking into their’s for a little snack. The kind of thing that you always keep in yours. Whether it’s yogurt or grapes or ice cream sandwiches, we all have a small complement of treasures in our fridge that we do not image anyone would be without.

When we go into someone else’s fridge, it often feels alien when we discover that our little treasures, while not unique to us, are not universal in nature. At the same time, what we find instead seems a collection of flavorless—or worse yet—strange smelling savories that appear—at best—non-toxic. They can cause you to question how much you really have in common with these people that you thought you knew so well, had so much in common with.





That seems to be the case with the final installment of this series; a fellow blogger sent this photo to me.










Is that really pre-packaged Swiss cheese?

I’m no cheese snob. While I savor Camembert and English Hunter, I admit I enjoy the Fetas and Pecorinos. I’m even a big fan of Maytag Blue. (Home grown in Iowa—Go Hawkeyes!) But why would you put prepackaged Swiss in your mouth? Even melted in a closed sandwich it would taste like flavorless Play-Doh.

Bare-ly Legal

I just got home from work. After a 26 hour shift, there is nothing better than a bowl of cream of rice, steaming hot so you have to blow on each spoonful to prevent you from scalding your tongue. It sticks to the sides of your stomach and warms you as you drift into sleep, dreaming of blood counts and chest x-rays.

Even though I had to swing by the Superette around the corner for some milk, I can say my fridge is not as bare as this one.


That apple does look good though, doesn’t it?

I want to put caramel on it.

Alpha? Let's go with Alphaville

What with Wilma using up the last of the Hurricane names for 2005, I thought I’d suggest some appropriate names for storms:

• Abba
• Bowie
• Canned Heat
• Drew Berrymore
• Erykah Badu
• Fahrenheit 9/11
• Golden Palominos
• Hillary Duff
• Icehouse
• Juice Newton
• Kaos
• Lasagna
• Manischewitz
• Nirvana
• Oklahoma
• Petunia
• Quentin Tarantino
• Rove
• Struthers
• Tom Cruise
• Unbreak My Heart
• Vladimir
• Whale Rider
• Xanadu
• Yaz
• Zarathustra

Think you can do better? I bet you can, too. Give it a whirl.

Cream

Last night I went out for sushi and then headed to the Publix to pick up some dessert while I watched a little of the television. I chose a coconut creme pie. They had whole pies and half pies.

‘Why is the whole pie $3.99 and a half-pie only a dollar less?’ I asked the bakery lady. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re paying for convenience.’

‘I’m paying,’ I said, ‘for half of a goddamn pie. You’re making America obese. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

This is not as harsh as I was on the checkout girl when they were selling 2-4-1 large containers of Miricle Whip.

I took the whole pie home.

It was delicious.





Here is another blogger’s fridge. Any guesses?

Be kind to me or treat me mean, I’ll make the most of it...

The results of the survey are starting to come in. I'm a little surprised by the results so far, so I think it’s a specific subgroup that’s filling it out.

Please click here and tell me what you like about this blog and what you don’t. You can’t complain if you don’t vote.

Or maybe it’s the other way around; I can never remember which…


Anyway, at work I’m called a merciless machine, so don’t worry about hurting my feelings.

EG GQ

I made a meatloaf last night. It was my first time.

When I was a boy, I viewed meatloaf as simply my mother’s attempt to sneak onions and peppers into the purity of delicious hamburger meat.

Somewhere along the way I gave up my finickiness—a character flaw I now equate with racism or dishonesty—and now enjoy meatloaf.

I found this recipe: a pound of ground beef, 2 eggs, 1 cup bread crumbs, 1 cup ketchup, one small onion, and 1 Lipton onion soup packet.

Instead I used half ground pork, half ground beef and wrapped the whole thing in about a pound of bacon. Otherwise I stayed true to the recipe.

It was delicious.

The next time I make it, I think I’ll chop up some jalapeno peppers, use refried beans instead of the bread crumbs, and use a taco seasoning packet instead of the Lipton soup: Mexican Meatloaf.

These are pictures from someone you don’t know. Someone who I don’t know either, but she says kind things about me in emails. She was gracious enough to share these with me—with us. My favorite item is what appears to be a Tupperware dish filled with eggs.

Juggs of Juice

Yesterday, I had a peanut-butter & banana egg creme, my typical after work snack. I use two frozen bananas (chopped), a tablespoon of chilled peanut butter, two raw eggs, and a cup of milk. I put them in the blender for two minutes and then drink it while I read my mail.

This is the fridge of an other blogger. Any guesses?

Blue Bell Boy

Last night, I watched Eraserhead and ate iced ginger snaps. ($1.99 for a one pound bag at Publix)

I eat them by turning them upside down and letting the icing dissolve in my mouth before chewing the ginger snap. I eat little nibbles at a time. It prolongs the magic.



These pictures belong to one of the bloggers in my referral section. See if you can guess who it is. If we want to get all high-school-english-class, we could even ask what information we can derive from these images.

Marziporn

‘Do you like music? Sure, everyone says they do’

~David Byrne, in True Stories

Like everyone else, I love eating food. This is not unusual. It is assumed and understood that loving to eat food is quite typical. It could be considered universal.

Because of this, it annoys me when I hear someone talking about a family vacation and they say, ‘my family is all about eating. We go from lunch to talking about what we are going to eat for dinner.’ I used to attempt saying ‘Really? How unusual!’ but I got called out on being condescending, which to me was an admission of how ridiculous their comments were.

People will try to attribute their love of food to their heritage, which is even more annoying. Because, really, what heritage doesn’t include a lot of eating? The Chinese? Indians? Italians? The French or the Spanish? Hispanics? African-Americans? I’ll admit that Argentinean and Columbian teenage girls don’t eat, but even Ethiopian restaurants are delicious.

May we simply assume that people love to eat food and stop thinking that it somehow marks us as special or unique?


I would like to try the next level up.

I’ve recently noticed how much I like looking at food that I have no intention of eating. I have become rather captivated by looking at food that someone else is going to eat.

Food porn, if you will.

I noticed it when Bitterbug started posting pictures of food he was eating. Now, I am not necessarily saying that I masturbated looking at these pictures of food, but lets just say that www.submissivenurses.com had a few less hits that week.

Later, I saw pictures of the contents of someone’s new refrigerator on a blog, and I was equally mesmerized. (I cannot remember whose blog that was, if someone knows, send me a message so I can credit them.)

My suspicion is that I am not alone in this desire to look at other people’s food. The success of the Food Network has attested to the fact that people enjoy looking at food they are not going to eat and a great deal of paintings throughout history take food as their subject.


So I’ve asked some of my friends to open their refrigerator doors to you, and show you what’s inside. This, for me, adds a bit more prurient and nosy element to the aspect of food porn. This is the do-it-yourself, hidden-camera of food porn, which I think makes it all the more alluring.

I suspect that seeing inside someone’s refrigerator is a bit like-not quite looking inside their soul but-getting a glimpse of a private aspect of themselves they do not show many people.




To be fair, we will begin with mine.

You like me! You really like me!

While I was away, I developed quite a fan club. Take a look at these ringing endoursements:

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These days, indeed!

But I didn't think the sites they referred to were very interesting, so I went ahead and changed the links. I'm sure Friendly Guy 1212 and Enlargement (curious name, isn't it?) won't mind.

Well, all told, that went about as well as could have reasonably been expected.

Ah, the stories I have to tell since we last spoke...

But I’m not quite yet ready to tell them. It’s going to take a little time to put things into perspective.

So let’s just have fun this month. The posts won’t be coming every day, but I’ll try to have a couple each week or so.

And come November, I’ll start sorting this out.