I really love a lot of things. One of those things is efficiency, which often leads me to try to combine things that I love for maximum enjoyment and efficiency. At best, this results in sublime sensory experiences, like the shower beer, or douche-bräu. (A variant of the douche-bräu is the scheist-bräu, which I consider to be an unhygienic extreme.) At worst, I often experience something on the spectrum between sensory overload and utter disaster.
When I was a kid and even a teenager, most of these disasters were food-related. We used to host Christmas Eve dinner and every year, my grandmom would buy a bottle of Sprite "for the kids." Invariably, the bottle would sit on the garage step, unopened, because nobody likes non-caffeinated soda. It would be like never keeping alcohol in the house and then bringing out the bottle of Sutter Home White Zin for special occasions (Oh, god, we did that too). Anyway, I would sit on this little tidbit of excitement until a few days into the new year, savoring the only time of year there would ever be a bottle of soda in the house (or near the house...why did we always keep it in the garage, with the white zinfandel, like they were some kind of liquid pariahs?).
Finally, one day I would snap. My willpower would be no match for this bottle of Sprite, so I would come home after school to fix myself a snack that makes my 25-year old nutritional sensibilities weep each time I think of it. I would pour myself a tall glass of sprite, no ice. Then I would unearth a bottle of chocolate syrup from the fridge, and empty about three inches of what is essentially brown, chocolate flavored, high-fructose corn syrup into my glass of clear, lemon-lime flavored, high fructose corn syrup.
Lest the magic of this experience be lost in translation through my adult perspective, let me rephrase that. I would pour a huge glass of awesome Sprite, and put like, a whole bunch of delicious chocolate syrup in there. Then I would stir it up, chug half the glass, and refill it so I could then savor a full glass. But the recipe wouldn't be complete if I stopped there. No, I had to find some cookies. Sometimes, because this was usually right after the holidays, there would be homemade chocolate chip cookies. Other times, I went for the corn-product trifecta and sought store-bought monstrosities like E.L. Fudges, Oreos, or Chips Ahoy.
Here's the part where you're free to start judging me, because this is where I think it gets unusually gross. I couldn't be satisfied with just dunking these cookies, which would have been weird enough because my liquid of choice was Sprite and chocolate syrup. No, I had to sink about four cookies to the bottom of the glass and continue sipping my multi-flavored corn juice (and eating a few dry cookies) as the cookies softened in their syrupy grave. Once I had quaffed all the liquid and the cookies were good and soggy, I would take a spoon and mush the cookies into a pudding, sometimes adding some more chocolate syrup for good measure.
Once I was done consuming this culinary abortion, I would inevitably feel completely disgusting, but the greater effects were often inconsistent. I would either slip into a corn-induced coma or tackle my homework with incredible gusto. To this day, I can't fathom how this behavior didn't result in weighing 500 pounds or having all my teeth fall out. There were consequences though, but I didn't realize it at the time. I'm pretty sure I could thank those eating habits for my incredible pizza face that didn't really go away until I...changed my eating habits? Amazing.
Did I mention I would do all this while watching Oprah?
So, guys, don't leave me hanging here. I can't be the only person who ate this way in high school, can I? Feel free to comment and share your secret snack shame.
Ok, I'll bite.
ReplyDeleteI still do the cookie pudding thing but I always do it with milk instead of soda. Sometimes, often when I have no real treats in the house I make toast and put a tablespoon of melted butter on it and then sprinkle sugar on top. I just recently got really into fried pickles. My local cheap bar sells baskets of fried pickles with amazing chipoltle dipping sauce for $3. I like mixing alcohol with milk - cherry brandy and milk are really really delicious together. I really really like crackers with a shit tonne of surface salt and when I eat them I lick or suck off the surface salt before biting the cracker. If the crackers in use at teh time are cheez-its, they usually disintegrate from my intense salt sucking before I even get to the chewing phase. On the weekends I like a breakfast of wet, undercooked scrambled eggs in which I dip toast and then dip the egg-moist toast into chocolate milk. Whenever I feel like poo, a raw oyster brings me back. Nothing I eat is particularly gross, but sometimes the habit is best kept private. That's how I eat currently.
In high school I would have 1 bowl of cereal in the morning, 2 poptarts and a milk at lunch, and whatever my mom made for dinner - usually steak and potatos and asparagus.
-Colgan
So I used to be a vegan and my Mom owned a vegan restaurant and health food store. I had eating down to this incredible science, and almost everything I ate was raw or involved nut loafs and soaked almonds. Anyway, my best friend Ryan was vegan too and we had some other friends who were vegetarians. Well one night my Ryan and are driving and we’re like, you know what’s good? Pizza. That’s good stuff. Pizza and chicken. And ranch dressing. And chocolate cake. So we hit up a pizza joint, buy the super meaty-mcmeat, heart attack pizza and chicken and then we went to the grocery store and bought every non-vegan, non-soy, non-raw food we could find. We also picked up Sisterhood of the Traveling pants and then went back to his dorm. It was a very low point in our lives. Well, we get into the pizzas and we’re mostly done with the chicken and we’re washing it all down with pop and cake when there’s a knock on the door. Who could that be? Oh, our extremely judgmental vegetarian friends who think we’re cool because we’re more extreme than them. We panic, and run around frantically trying to destroy the evidence. We hid the embarrassing movie so we wouldn’t lose our street cred (I mean, vegan intellectuals don’t watch Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) and threw all the food into his closet. I mean like, piled pizza slices and chicken wings into that sucker. His dorm room forever smelled of marina sauce and ranch dressing. We had to clean our faces off so as to not be suspicious. We let them into the dorm room. It felt like the pizza was the tell tale heart and they could hear the pizza and chicken screaming in the close, let us out! Eat us! We’re delicious because we’re made out of animals and animal products and processed ingredients. After a really uncomfortable 10 minutes they finally left and we resumed our anti-vegan indulgence. We kept our indiscretion from all and the next day I made scrambled tofu over veggies and we pretended like it never happened.
ReplyDelete-Diagonal Neighbour
I used to make toast with butter and cinnamon sugar, and then I started to get "creative" and add whatever dessert-y crap I could find. Peanut butter, maple syrup, chocolate chips, jam, more sugar, and sprinkles. Oh, and marshmallows. I have a distinct memory of eating toast with sugary Easter bunny sprinkles on them. They were like ultra-thin conversation heart shavings shaped like bunnies, and they were probably five years old, because my mother would use them only at Easter, and not throw out the unused ones but save them for the next year.
ReplyDeleteAlso, potato chips and cream cheese.
Oh wow, you guys are all fantastic. It's nice to know I'm not alone, and now I kind of feel like I'm even slacking a little. Jen, I totally ate pop tarts exclusively for many a high school lunch, which probably played a role in the afternoon sugar binges, but meh. You only live once!
ReplyDeleteShamefully (now. but gloriously then) I use to chug maple syrup from the bottle. And while we're sharing, I'll admit that I also use to drink soy sauce like it was juice.
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