Monday, April 17, 2006

A Modern Day Warrior, Mean Mean Stride, Today's Tom Sawyer, Mean Mean Butt

Happy Easter to everyone. It was a great weekend in this household, gourmet and everyday chocolates were abound, as was red meat in all its luxurious forms. I had a Double Quarter Pounder on my way home from mass, we had summer sausage as a mid-afternoon snack, and a pretty tasty porterhouse for dinner. That was accompanied by a green bean salad with pearl onions and bacon, cheese-scalloped potatoes, and Katie’s delightful homemade rolls. We maintained the whole springy motif during dessert time, when Katie whipped up one of the most delightful fruit-ilicious cakes I have ever had.

I won’t go on in too much detail regarding how well the white cake, strawberry, whipped cream combo works, nor will I fully explain exactly how much of this cake I ate during last night’s foodstravaganza. What I will explain to you is the oddness of this fact: I realized, while eating this cake of dreams, that it reminded me of a specific delight. That delight: The Twinkie.

For some reason Katie took this as an insult, I suppose it has more than a little to do with the fact that she was viciously deprived of Twinkies as a child and hence cannot appreciate their gloriousness. Mitch Hedberg accurately observed that “Fettuccine alfredo is like macaroni and cheese for adults.” That doesn’t mean it is not of high quality, simply that it is a more complicated and “gourmet” version of the same basic structure: in this case, noodles and cheese sauce. Switch out the yellow processed American-ness of the cheese in the Kraft Mac and Chee and substitute some delicate parmesan. In this case you take the gooey yellow spongeyness and switch in an almost biscuit-like sweet density, switch in some actual whipped cream, and throw some fruit on the bastard. Still, a vanilla flavored cake with a generous amount of whipped topping: you get the gist.

I wonder two things about this situation: 1) Is there something about yellowness specifically that is always removed when “gourmet-izing” a classic. Would classy Cheetos have to be made with blue corn or something? 2) Why would you so thoroughly enjoy one version and not another? I mean, I guess there are circumstances where the specific changes may throw something off enough. If you are allergic to or just hate the additions, sure. If you added blueberries to my chocolate chocolate muffin from SuperMom’s I wouldn’t even bother to wash it down with SuperRich Choco-milk, but if you made it with imported Dutch chocolate and frosted it with a rich ganache, I would be in.

You know who does not get anywhere near enough props: Jim Varney. That guy was a talent and a hardcore one too. I was thinking about him the other day when I was asking myself a hypothetical “Who Would You Rather Bwn?” question: Going for an extended period of time without any video entertainment at all or watching only the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies on repeat at least 4 times a day? I realized that probably wasn’t a very hard one, but wondered if it would be a better question if you limited your video entertainment to only Jim Varney movies. Then I remembered: Ernest movies rule. I saw Ernest Goes to Camp at least 100 times. Ernest Saves Christmas was another gem. I loved Ernest Goes to Jail all except for the electric chair thing, since I had a hard time laughing at capital punishment, even at 12 odd years old. I remember when Ernest died and I was sad. But I didn’t remember the sad times, the Beverley Hillbillies for instance, or Slam Dunk Ernest. I remembered Ernest, playing an old woman, in a fisheye lens.
Hippo is too young to have seen Jim Varney in his prime, but I will have to sit her down and take a look at the early Ernest that so influenced our lives. A good dose of catnip and it will be as funny to my Persian friend as it was at so many elementary school sleepovers.

Peace,

MB-K

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