Some decades ago Mike Nesmith of the Monkees flew some writers from Car and Driver around in a jet he’d bought with his late mother’s fortune for having invented Liquid Paper. In the article he encouraged the writers to eat Chef Boyardee spaghetti, explaining that the key to enjoying it was to not think of it as Italian cuisine, but as something completely unrelated, Chef Boyardee.
This concept changed my life. I no longer needed to be a food snob, but could enjoy crap as it was intended.
In recent years Taco Bell has introduced flavored rice and fried potatoes as filler in their bargain menu. What resulted was not “Fine Mexican Cuisine,” but flavored and fried starch have been central to the world’s cuisines for millenia, and it worked.
For dinner tonight I made a “burrito” using leftover jambalaya (minus the protein), cheese, and salsa. After 45 seconds in the microwave it may not have been fit for an Aztec king, but it was pretty tasty. I will have it again tomorrow.
I live in a town with a bunch of terrific Mexican food joints. I still eat at Taco Bell probably once a month as a super cheap delicious American bastardization of a taco/burrito. Bean burrito with green sauce and sour cream and extra onions with one packet of traditional hot sauce. Yum!
I still remember 25¢ tacos from the Sepulveda stand circa 1970. I’m pretty sure they are identically the same today. Hell, with inflation, they must be cheaper today.
Some former friends always had to have “special” stuff.
No iceberg lettuce or even Romaine, they had to have whatever special boutique variety was currently hot.
Not just salt, but Kosher Sea Salt.
No butter, not just margarine, but special cholesterol reducing margarine.
Not just any cut of beef, but some imported cut of some other animal. (had to be imported, none of this domestic stuff!)
Their bread HAD to be from the local boutique bakery. Nothing less.
and on and on. I found it really annoying, because for all their efforts at being extreme food snobs, I never found their food to be any better than I could make at home with ordinary ingredients if I was a mind to make the same kinds of dishes.
Then the kicker. They drank boxed wine. Absolute CRAP.
Could never get my head around that discrepancy.
Olive Garden is Hell? Not real Italian food? Who fucking cares. If I want to eat what they make, I’m happy to go there, and I do enjoy their soup and salad lunch thing. Taco Bell isn’t world class Mexican cuisine. So what. I enjoy their tacos. It’s not a bad place to eat on the cheap. Dominos pizza is no good? Hell, it’s a LOT better than just about any frozen pizza, and it’s also reasonably cheap. McDonalds is mass produced crap? Possibly, and I’ll admit they’re not the best hamburgers in the world. But I ate one for lunch yesterday, and it was alright by me.
Spare me the food snob nose in the air, people. Try being starving and broke for a while, or just plain practical and modest, and you might find more pleasure in simple fare.
I knew a similar couple—Everything HAD to be imported this, and organic that, and everything reminded them of this “amazing” meal they had in Tuscany or Provance…
So utterly transparent, and for me the kicker was when I finally found out that their entire Europhile schtick was the result of one single!!! visit to Europe several years back. It became hard not to actually laugh in their faces to listen to the verbal acrobatics they would go thru to squeeze in one more out-of-left-field reference to France or Italy.
I decided I was much better off being polite, but turning down subsequent offers to get together. This was all several years back, hopefully they have outgrown this silly pretentiousness by now.
I understood that frying was fairly uncommon way to prepare foods until recently (last 500-600 years). Because the fat or lard used in frying was rather expensive, and cast iron frying pans weren’t available.
I think most starches were boiled (like rice, oatmeal, corn, potatoes) or baked (bread, corn).
Id actually rather make simple fare at home … cheaper and I can watch tv and snarf it down =)
One of my totally crappy comfort foods is a boneless skinless chicken thigh chopped into bits and cooked in the ramen along with half a small onion, 2 stalks of celery and 2 carrots, and a bit of italian herbs. I don’t use the flavor packet but do use some chicken soup base that has no mushroom in it [allergic to shrooms and many times the ‘natural flavoring’ in seasoning packs includes shroom powder] I found out long ago that if you diced the chicken and veggies to small enough, and put them and the noodle brick in cold water, and cranked it to boil, by the time it boiled, and you turned the water off and dug out a bowl and spoon everything would actually be cooked … =)
I can’t eat Pringles any more. My mom was raised on a potato farm, and she told us how potatoes are sold. They’re graded A through F. Grade As go to restaurants and grocery stores to be sold whole, Bs and Cs are made into fries and chips and whatnot, etc, etc. Grade Fs get sold to Pringles. Just for comparison’s sake, Es get sold as animal feed. Pringles are made from the potatoes that your local pig would turn its nose up at.
I bet if you gave a pig the choice between a bucket of Grade A potatoes and a bucket of Pringles, he’d make the same choice I would. Preferably the Sour Cream flavor.
