Too sweet tout de suite December 2
I went into the grocery store a few weeks ago, a place where I normally just get the exact same things every time, because it’s easy and it’s not like I do enough cooking to make my meals interesting anyway, but I had just been talking about pudding, so I naturally went to the pudding/JELL-O section to see what flavors of JELL-O they had. Which was minuscule (I go to a small grocery store because it’s only two blocks away), and mainly strawberry and cherry, with some orange, green, and raspberry as parts of two flavor packs. But no raspberry as a separate pack. And I don’t really like cherry and strawberry. I’ve overcome that before, but I like to buy stuff I like rather than stuff I can tolerate. It’s just my thing. And I wasn’t going to make JELL-O from a powder, as that’s just a pain and I always just end up drinking the liquid because I want it now. Instead, I just looked at the pudding choices. There were the boring ones, and then there were the JELL-O Oreo pudding cups. If you’ve never had them, you’re missing out on awesome sweetness. If you’ve ever had fried Oreos, then you know what it tastes like, because it’s like sweetened liquid Oreos. But no batter. Man, when I had a fried Oreo at a fair back in college, I made it through a bite before I started to feel ill. Just insanely sweet. These are not nearly as sweet, but they do taste like liquid Oreos, getting rid of the one problem with Oreos: the solidity and occasional grittiness of the cookie section. No problems with the Oreo pudding. Just sweet, sweet deliciousness, and all it takes is opening up the package.
Of course, the issue with the fried Oreos is that they’re frying something in a sweet batter that doesn’t need to be any sweeter than it already is. Just think about people who’d put extra sugar on an Oreo: that’s just disgusting. But deep-frying one: that’s just Southern. Which, sometimes, isn’t that far off. Deep-fried Mars bars are a Scottish invention, and therefore should be ignored from a culinary standpoint. That the US also deep-fries Coke now is another sign of the decline of our civilization. Frying things can be good (especially okra, which is far better fried than cooked in almost every way), but you can go overboard. Other things that should not be fried: JELL-O, lettuce, celery, cole slaw, vichyssoise, marshmallow peeps, twigs, pants, used condoms, and babies.
Matthew Barney Gumble Dec 2
In high school I spent one regrettable summer working the counter at an A&W in the mall (it wasn’t all my fault, it was my friend’s uncle’s place, was why - still, my decision-making was clearly pretty questionable.) We used to go in on our off days and just fry ourselves up a whole ridiculous passel of chicken tenders (the only good thing there… besides rootbeer I guess) and take them with us to watch sports or whatever. The last night we were working together I swear we put just about everything in the store into the deep fryer at least once, to see what would happen. The coolest were the thin, clear plastic dome-tops for like a milkshake, y’know? Those things would spread out super thin, you’d have this enormous sharp wavy disc when you fished it back out. In retrospect, I used to do a lot of really irresponsible things.