"Everything" You Thought it Would Be (Except When it's Not)

I feels like there's a slight misunderstanding between the establishment and myself when it comes to bagel terminology.  Turns out there's a bit of a difference between what I ask for and what's provided.  I'm waiting for the one day when a bagelry will pick up on it and surprise me by giving me exactly what I asked for. 

For example:
If I ask for a Cinnamon Raisin bagel, I get a bagel with cinnamon & raisins.
A Garlic bagel = bagel with garlic.
Sesame bagel = bagel with sesame seeds.
Poppy seed bagel = bagel with poppy seeds.
Plain bagel = bagel with nadda.

Follow? Ok.

So what's getting my jaw all up in a cramp? I've hit the 5 main categories of bagel and no problem, but...

Now take the Everything bagel? It's got garlic, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, and.......welp, that's about it.  And, last time I checked, three toppings does not everything make (it's more like a Garpopame, pronounced Gar-pop'-ah-me, bagel. i think that could be pretty catchy).  At least try throwing some raisins in there.  That's what I want.  A raisin, garlic, sesame seed, poppy seed bagel.  Until that day though, I'll just keep eating this not-everything bagel they keep throwing at me.

But the generic "everything" bagels are alright too. They're usually just what my teeth need when they're looking for chewy gluten cheeriness, especially the ones at Bodo's bagels.  It's an absolute mob there at lunch. For good reason too.

Smoked turkey with bacon, Muenster, and watercress.  Woo! Bacon!! (or should i say, wahoo! sorry, it's a uva thing) Bacon just gets me excited. The whole process of baconizing a pig makes it like 10,000 times better. Too bad they can't genetically engineer a bacon pig. That'd pretty much be my equivalent of a cash cow.

See that side of bacon hanging out there. Reminds me of those light-catcher crystal thingies you hang in the window.  Wouldn't that be a neat idea.  A bacon light-catcher. Dual purpose too.  Good for flies.

So this was the scene of some hard-core brain power as well as some longing anticipation.  Trying to figure out how to craft the godbite.  You can't tell from this angle, but there's an increasing gradient of smoked turkey going from left to right. Thus, the eating plan is start left, finish right.  The cheese was dragged slightly to the right to ensure adequate coverage of the turkey, and the bacon was generously stacked up in the same corner.  Never skimp on the bacon. Never.  The watercress? Eh, just there to look nice-ish.

Made myself a little bacon tail.  Every sandwich should have a bacon tail.  It's also a definite fail-safe again meat slippage.  It happens to the best.  One second the bacon is in one spot, it slips, you take a bite, and the bacon godbite is gone.  I've shed salty tears when I'd much rather be chewing salty bacon.  Don't let it happen to you.

And in the end, one sandwich really isn't enough (is it ever?).  The first time I ever went to Bodo's, I had to go back for a second.  But it's really best to forgo the formalities and just order them both at the same time. 

Speed Bumps in My Ice Cream

Another ice cream post? Is he mad? No. Is he crazy? Yes. But that's not why I'm writing about ice cream again. On the eve of departing from home to medical school, I had to visit the one food place that I knew I would truly miss. The one foodery that I honestly don't know how I will live without. I have nightmares, cold sweats, and uncontrollable sporadic shivers when I imagine a world without it. I am blinded by fear and incapacitated with trembling as I think that I may never again encounter the ice cream of unsurpassable greatness that is Hoffman's (which is all absolute, made-up rubbish because I would probably travel across half the country at least twice a year for my ice cream fix from this place).


Indeed, even on a day of torrential downpours, blinding lightning, and ear-wrenching thunder, this trip of mournful departure had to be made.

The dude scooping with a bit of an airhead (there was an unrequested spoonful of cookie dough ice cream in between my Oreo and Fudge Mint Cookie flavors), but as the final product fully looked like it belonged on the cover of the Candyland board game, I found it none too difficult to forgive.

On a serious note, I find myself once again needing to speak about flavor selection. In my last ice cream post I touched on flavor pairing, something I believe many neglect.  There is an additional factor, however, that ought to affect flavor choice and needs to be considered: cup or cone.

While I am traditionally a fan of the cup for a couple of reasons:
1. It is usually easier for the scooper to give you more ice cream. With a cone you run the risk of crushing the cone as the ice cream is pressed down. Making the scooper's life easier equals more ice cream.
2. Many times the bottom of the cone is not filled with ice cream (especially when you're dealing with hard ice cream) again because of the risk of crushing the cone with pressing down the ice cream. And, what I do NOT want for my ice cream godbite is a big bite of cone with no ice cream (and eating the cone from bottom up is such a class-less way to eat it).
3. Companies frequently put little paper wrappers around the handle of the cone (dumbest idea ever) and not only is the paper commonly difficult to take off but glue residue is also more often than not left behind (can you say "unappetizing?" - cone glue, now an important part of a healthy and balanced diet)

I am not, however, a hard and fast no-cone proponent. I'm just selective.

Regardless, I do suggest some thought enter into your flavor decision once the choice of cup or cone is made. It all has to do with eating technique.

With a cone, the primary tool of consumption is the tongue.  Like a land-mover shifting mountains of earth, the tongue journeys in ceaseless revolutions removing ice cream from the cone.  NEVER should any teeth ever be involved!!! If there are, you're eating it wrong (yes, it is possible to eat wrong).

So, if the ice cream has huge chunks of chocolate chips or whatever other add-ins you choose, this will impede the tongues smooth glide around the cone (think hitting speed bumps in a parking lot while traveling at 50 miles per hour). Not a fun experience.

With a cup and spoon, those speed bumps (don't call them "humps." i've seen that and it sounds weird) don't exist. It's like Superman built a steamroller and ran right over them. poof. gone.

So choose your flavors wisely.

One last thing of the subject of ice cream pairing, I recently heard tell of a tea and frozen yogurt (i'm not a fan of frozen yogurt and i don't consider it anywhere near equal to ice cream) joint opening up near my home in NJ. Think about it. Tea. Frozen yogurt. tea. frozen yogurt. Doesn't that just strike you as wrong? I'm sorry, when I'm sitting down to a ginormous bowl of chocolate moose tracks ice cream I'm not thinking, "Oh what I wouldn't give right now for a big ol' cup of steaming green tea." Who thunk up that crazy idea? If only I could make millions of dollars by not investing in a company, I'd be rich off of that one. I give them a month before they close the doors on that brilliant idea.

The Mish-Mash Flavor Dash

So brother is planning on conquering his first marathon this coming November by hitting up the Philly marathon. But, training can be hard and super brutal particularly on those "long run" days. As miles add up, the legs plod, the back stoops, and hills look like mountains. Then, blindly and without warning, the body feels the first touch of cold, hard clay and  *WHAM*... flat on your behind, staring up through a starry daze you gaze upon the insurmountably tall, brick and mortar barricade in front of you. Congratulations, you've met... The Wall.

Enter gel shot doohickey. I have it from a good source that Logan swears the resulting feeling is what he imagines being on drugs must be like. Sweet. Now we'll have kids addicted to energy gels.

What I'd rather have stuffed in my back pocket for a much needed energy punch is a slice of this puppy.

 It also sure beats those chalky, gag-inducing recovery shakes. Really. Try it some time.

The cake is pretty much a taste marathon in and of itself - or perhaps an Ironman triathlon through flavortown.  Chocolate cake flavored with honey, coffee, and vanilla and almond extracts, almond creme filling in the middle, apricot preserves on top, and a rum-bittersweet chocolate ganache icing.

It was my post bike ride pick-me-up, and it was seriously good.

Also, in the course of eating it, I think I  discovered that flavor is the 5th dimension.

The only problem is that there are SOoooooooooo many flavors and they're sooooooo far away from each other... relatively speaking. So for a godbite that would include the almond creme, apricot preserves, rum-bittersweet chocolate ganache, and chocolate cake without requiring a mouth funnel, a little flavor shuffling was required.

Yup yup.

Now go run a marathon.

Sandwich-craft

Ever get the food blahs? You know, when you find yourself eating the same thing over and over again day in and day out. When no matter what you eat, it all tastes the same. When after you finish chewing it only feels like your mouth was moving up and down over a cloth gag because your stomach is full but there's no taste left over from the food in your mouth. (this intro has the promising beginnings of a solid infomercial, but I'll press on) When you're like, "Yay! It's din-din time! I think I'll have....the same thing as yesterday."

I was there - bored so dull with my mind molding with the rotten, fly-eaten thought of consuming another sandwich. So what did I do? I treated my problem like a fully fledged homeopathic quack. I ate another sandwich. Like treats like as they say. Though I did it without the whole "potentization" via the super serial dilutions they so love. (i don't know how i'd dilute a sandwich. that'd be gross. pureed and diluted salami on rye anyone? reminds me of hospital food).

But before I arrived as this brilliant solution (get it? dilution....solution.....baDUM TISH), my crazed mind came up with the fantastic idea of creating my own mint extract.  The things that happen when you love science and you stare at an ingredients label so long you begin to think, "Hey! I might be able to make this by extraction with alcohol and then distillation!!"

I've talked about awesome sandwiches before like the FatSandwich, Chicken Parm and this egg monster, but this sandwich from Rosario's Deli in Freehold, NJ is my ABSOLUTELY favorite sandwich ever.

I don't even know what it's officially called.  I just point to it and say, "I'd like the eggplant sandwich."  That's it.

But before it looks like that...

...it looks like this...

...and then this.

Really nothing special.  Other than the smell (which is awesome) and some solid ingredients this cold, plastic-wrapped dinger of a sandwich may as well be Dream #8 in the Nightmare of Food Blahs. But I help it realize its full potential.

Enter the Chamber of Transformation. It's a magical little box that things go into and mysteriously come out 1,000 times better. So I set it on broil and let it do its thing.

One issue.  There are two halves (duh.) though i sometimes wish there were three. But that's not the issue.

"So what's the issue?" you ask.  "Just stick the sandwich in that ol' magic box, wait for the cheese to reach the perfect bubbly lava melt and for the bread to have that crisply browned crunchy crust (a result of my favorite reaction of all time) and then pull it out."

godbite problem:

The better half is eaten last. Because it's eaten last it cools and can become soggy and cold again.

Take a look at my awesome Awesomeness vs. Time graph of awesomeness.

As I am a fan of eating up the curve rather than eating down the curve, the solution, as suggested by the graph, is to take the 1st half of the sandwich out at a point halfway up the curve timing it such that you finish it and are ready for the second half when it is at the max point and when....

 ...it looks like this...

...creating this.

The best sandwich I've ever had: eggplant, toasted bun, melted mozzarella, basil, roasted red pepper and a tiny bit of olive oil with the bread catching the juices pressed out from each bite.

Nothing short of magical.

Too Good to be True

There are some things in life you just don't expect.  Like finding the best pizza you ever did eat at a little hole-in-the-wall, unsuspecting pizzeria called Vinnie's or Luigi's smooshed between and dwarfed by two bookending buildings (the aura is even better if you have to walk down 4 1/2 steps to the front entrance creating a slightly cavernous I'm below ground, but really I'm not; this could be claustrophobic but it's actually kinda cozy type feel to the place).  Or like when you finally stop at a seedy-looking, gaudily aluminum-paneled diner decorated with, among many things, a faux 70s-era jukebox.  Even though you've driven by a million times, you stop this time because it's the only place open at 1am and you finally discover they serve the biggest, fluffiest buttermilk pancakes you've ever set eyes on.

Then there are some things that are just too good to be true.  Like those online pop-up ads telling you that you're the site's 10,000th visitor and as such they'd like to give you $10,000 (if you would just give them your social security and credit card numbers); or that you've been chosen to fill out a quick survey for a free iPad (and then you end up having to sign away your life by filling out a minimum of 5 offers from advertisers that will hunt you down and relentlessly torture you if you ever decide to cancel your subscriptions); or Prince Khemczaerasikkii's illustrious aunt died and left him boodles of money that he doesn't know what to do with and wants your help getting it into the US and all he needs is your bank account number to transfer it and viola you are rewarded with 50% of his inheritance.

I had a similar experience.  Sort of.  But not as illegal.  It was more like finding Luigi's (i've never actually found Luigi's, but I've always thought it would be nice if I did).

Take a look.  Careful like.

I was down apartment shopping in Charlottesville for med school.  Found a nice place but had some time to kill before the person showing the place turned up.  So what better to do than scout out the communal laundry room.  Sounds like fun, right?  No, I guess not.  But I was bored. 

And right there, smack in the grungy, old corner looking seedy, dilapidated and right out of the 70s sat this old Pepsi vending machine. 

I'm not much a fan of soda, but I love playing this game called If I were going to get something, what would I get? (it's very similar to the highway game played on road trips known by the equally descriptive name of If I were going to stop at this rest stop, where would I go at the food court? it's super fun.  try changing up tradition and slip it in between the 155th and 156th time you play the alphabet game).  And naturally, when playing If I were going to get something, what would I get?, you want to keep it as realistic as possible so you have to look at how much it'll cost you (hint hint look at the picture again).

And that's when I got the Prince Khemczaerasikkii email-shudder down my spine. $0.50 for a soda??! Really?  Was I actually going to be taken in by Prince Khemczaerasikkii's broken English email suspiciously addressed to "Dear United States Residing Recipient"? I half expected this to happen.  But, it was one of those things where even if you don't want the soda, you have to try it just to see if it actually works.  And it did. Made my day in fact.  I talked about it for the next 8 hours.  Prince-man had actually transferred the money to my account.  Booyah!

Let's go on a brief tangent shall we?  What does "Dr. Pepper is made with 23 flavors" mean?  I certainly can't taste 23 different flavors all at once?  In fact, I just get one, general taste (albeit with multiple layers) in my mouth that I call Dr. Pepper.  And what does "flavor" even mean?  Are there 23 different flavor-producing compounds that each individually activate a taste receptor on my tongue?  In that case, I ask, "Why only 23? That's pitiful."  Don't most foods have multiple flavor elements?  Or, does this make it better than another product that just has 15 so-called "flavors"?

Come on Dr. Pepper guy.  And, am I really supposed to trust a guy who named it after the father of the girl he wanted to marry?  This qualifies the man as a super smooth, fast-talking salesman - a professional at marketing as well.  He's basically dancing on your brainwaves with that 23 flavor tagline.  Oh well, it may not be Luigi's or buttermilk pancakes, but I can't argue with 50 cents.

An Ice Cream Dream

So I've been Henry David Thoreau-ing out in the pastures of dinners, the wilderness of desserts (see what I did there? Desserts is almost like deserts and a desert is a wilderness...eh, eh?), and in the vast expanse of various edibles.  I needed some one-on-one time with my food.  A time to reconnect and explore.  To search my feelings and uncover my deep desires.  To become curious.  To sweep away the dust and grim of commercially produced, eternally preserved, inside-spackling slime of modern fast food-ist philosophy.  And I can think of no more liberating nor uplifting food to celebrate my success than the high queen of all dairy products, ice cream. 

Eating ice cream like nobody's business runs in the family - through my mom's side actually.  It is most certainly an inherited trait (it's passed from parent to offspring via the Cream Gene).  In fact, sometimes I think my brothers and I are so good at it that it's kinda like a superpower.  Like the Incredibiles, except they eat ice cream.  Almost as if Mr. and Mrs. Ice Cream got together and had little ice cream-eating monsters, known as the Dairy Demons - but good...demons.
 
I know many superheros say their great power is also their greatest curse, but I'm really not seeing any downsides right now.  So if you're ever attacked by an ice cream goblin from the arctic, you go ahead and take a rusty, old spotlight from some slick-dealing, used-car parking lot and shine a great big ice cream come right up there into the night sky.  I'll be there.

Photo Courtesy of Alison Dunn

But, ice cream is also serious business.  Logan right there is totally engaged with his ice cream cone.  Fully focused and completely concentrated.

He and I I like to think of ourselves as ice cream critics. Not snobs.  You can't be a snob about ice cream.  It's too legit to be a snob about.  But critics, yes.  It actually doesn't take much to make us happy either.  We're lax critics - but thoughtful ones.  We've got only two rules.  1) Give us good ice cream - a fairly broad rule and the details vary by flavor.  A more in depth, flavor-specific discussion requires its own post (plus think of how many flavor specific posts that frees me up to do!).  2) Give us lots of ice cream.

See? Easy-peasy.

Photo Courtesy of Alison Dunn

Even if we get both of those two things, turning down the offer to finish off another person's ice cream violates Dairy Demon Code, rule #24.

Photo Courtesy of Alison Dunn

We've even got a method.  Simple but critical.  The head-tilt.  Turn your head rather than the ice cream because turning the ice cream risks it falling right off the cone.  It may not be useful crying over spilled milk, but dropped ice cream is a whole different ballgame.

Secondly, the head-tilt makes you lick around the cone.  Licking upwards chances that you might push the ice cream right off the cone while if you lick downwards (I honestly don't know how that would be achieved without turning the cone upside down - in which case there's no hope for you - or without maintaining an extremely uncomfortable position) the ice cream that gathers at the tip of your tongue - like snow before a plow - will succumb this crazy thing called gravity which you must never have heard about if you're actually using this method.

Eric, Logan, Me, Meryl.
Photo Courtesy of Alison Dunn

Now that the basics are out of the way...

On the way out to Clarion, PA  to hang at Casey's house after graduation, Alison informed us about The Creamery at Penn St.  After her description, we didn't question, we just knew we were stopping there.  To psych ourselves up, we read their list of flavors from their website while in the car.  We couldn't handle it.

The Creamery is truly the gargantuan cone mecca for ice cream fanatics everywhere.  Though they only permit a single flavor per cone, their enormous size and miniature price are more than enough for me to overlook this smallest of offenses.  And no, you can't get a small cone.  They only offer one size.  Don't complain, just turn in into your lunch, or dinner, and smile.

It was so good we stopped there twice.  Yes, really.  Once on the outbound trip and once on the way back.

Can't take anymore ice cream talk?  Shame on you.  But, I'm almost done.  This is from my favorite ice cream shop in New Jersey.  Hoffman's Ice Cream has three locations on the Jersey Shore. So why did I get a cup while at Penn St. I got a cone?  Do I prefer one to the other?  Yes, but it's all about knowing your ice cream.  At The Creamery you get more ice cream getting a cone rather than a cup.  At Hoffman's you get more ice cream in an cup rather than a cone.  (there's street-smarts and then there's ice cream-smarts).

 So patriotic with the flag in the background.

Pairing ice cream flavors like pairing the proper wine with a meal.  It may not ruin the meal, but if you do it right, it can make all the difference.  My flavors: Chocolate Explosion (chocolate ice cream with brownie bits and fudge swirls) and Fudge Mint Cookie (the flavor that won best flavor in NJ one year and is basically Cookies 'n Cream but with mint ice cream and fudge swirls).  Both excellence flavors and an exceptional pairing.

As is my practice with any variation of Cookies 'n Cream, my last bite always contains a large cookie piece.  Examine, isolate, and attack.  I'm an ice cream super hero.

Fry me a River

When it comes to desserts, I am a great believer in two guiding principles:

1) If it can be dunked in chocolate, then dunk it.
2) If it can be deep-fried, then deep-fry it.  

I won't call these laws because they will vary depending on the dessert, the occasion, and a person's prevailing mood. As one must be discerning with an eye open to the prevailing artistic designs inherent within each culinary specimen (recognizing subtle strategic variations in plating arrangements) when formulating a plan for the godbite, so too I would recommend restraint and good judgement be practiced with regard to these two principles.

Disclaimer: blind devotion to one scheme with strident disregard to the great flux of variables will most certainly lead to disaster. 


That said, I don't believe I need to justify these suggestions.  What with the popularity of chocolate fondue and county fairs where they deep-fry just about anything that's edible (and even things that aren't. paula didn't heed my disclaimer. go figure. somehow i think people would eat tires if they were deep-fried), they seem rather obvious.  Nonetheless, these principles serve as the basis for one of my favorite times of the year.

Despite my brothers and I being between the ages of 22 and 19, every year we still ask my parents for Easter baskets.  (i hate to think what'll happen when we're actually supposed to act grown up, but that isn't now, we refuse to let it happen).  If we could, I'm sure we would ask them to hide the baskets around Penn's campus so that we could run around in our PJ's (do people even wear those anymore? it sounds so infantile - not that my description of myself right now is helping to combat that imagery) crazed and frothing at the mouth thinking of the sugar high we'll soon be on that is sure to carry us until midnight (as a conservative estimate).

But what is so exciting is what's in the Easter basket.  Forget the traditional candy, peeps (yuck. i don't want to get started on those. they are so gross), and fake grass.  These have...

...drum roll, please....

You read that label correctly.  And on the right is a chocolate covered Twinkie.

Two all-time favorites made even better.  If you can dunk it in chocolate, then dunk it.

These are SO good.  I look forward to them for so long every year, and they never last long enough. 

See, I always cut the Twinkie in half (most definitely not out of concern for calories. those thingies couldn't be farther from my mind) with the idea that I can make it last longer if I eat half one day and half the other.  Never ends up working out that way.

I usually attack these by biting off the bottom layer of chocolate and eating toward the ends.  That's because the chocolate shell is both thicker at the top (and there are sprinkles up there!!!!) rather than the bottom and there is greater chocolate coverage towards the rear.  Have to make sure that there is still cream in the last bite though.

For the Oreos....bite, chew, suck, let it melt in your mouth.  It's pretty impossible to mess eating them up.

And speaking of Oreos, that brings up principle #2.  Fried Oreos.

This past weekend was Spring Fling at Penn.  An event most significant to me because it means two things.  Free food and fried Oreos.  The Oreos aren't free though. Actually, they pretty much bankrupt your wallet.  It's okay because the stomach is a pretty good at negotiating, and it'll persuade the wallet that it's worth the investment. Bu, as good as they are, this year wasn't about fried Oreos.

Ever since a county fair several years ago when they were selling fried candy bars - only for me to decide not get them on, regret my decision, and return the following year to find out that they weren't being sold anymore - I've have had this great burden on my stomach (err...heart) to eat a fried candy bar (not the most epic of missions, but that's the gritty reality of truth).

This year turned out to be my lucky year.

Once in the proximity of the tent selling fried Oreos, a strange feeling passed over me.  I want a fried candy bar.  Maybe they are selling them this year.  I looked.  And there they were.  Right on the sign, "Fried Candy Bars ---- $5."  The whole thing might've been freaky if I wasn't so happy.

Photo courtesy of Kerry McLaughlin - so that I didn't smear grease & powdered sugar all over the camera.

Let me tell you, they were epic.  Assorted mini candy bars (Twix, MilkyWay, and 3 Musketeers) battered and deep-fried.  Imagine your favorite chocolate chip pancakes and multiply the taste by 10.  These were good.  And lest you ask, no, these aren't for sharing.  You can eat all six of them on your own.  I promise.

The only downside to all of this was that it made me rethink my two guiding principles of dessert - was I somehow not getting the full potential out of my desserts. 

What if --

What if I had a chocolate covered Twinkie or Oreo and deep-fried it?

Just Stupid Good

So here I am ensconced on some pretty awesome pictures for a blog, but with a vibe antithetical to the typical loquacious propensities customarily spurred on by such images.  Lest I am tempted to posit the remote happenstance that I might still manage to pull something off by interspersing a smattering of high-brow verbiage...

...I am reminded that it would require a lot of time spent searching the thesaurus.

So I'll best be moving on.  <-- that's more like the typical grammar level I'm feeling right now.  The longest word is 6 letters and formed by smashing a suffix onto a four-letter word like I was the Large Hadron Collider (adding prefixes and suffixes is so much more exciting when it's phrased that way).

Onwards to things more worthy of your attention, like cookie dough.

Thrown in ice cream, or baked, or baked and then thrown in ice cream, or just eaten raw, it's pretty good - to make a dramatic understatement.  I've never realized it before, but the way I've always thought about cookie dough has always been so one-dimensional.  I would take it and eat it inside the box never thinking of the limitless possibilities available to it.  Cookie dough could only do one thing at a time and that was it.

Well, I lie.  There's always been cookie dough ice cream on cookies to make an ice cream cookie sandwich.  But even that is hardly revolutionary thinking.  It doesn't even require cookie dough ice cream.  Any will do.

But now, say you were to replace that ice cream with raw cookie dough. 

Yeah.  Has it registered yet?  Raw cookie dough between two baked cookies.  There isn't even a metaphor I can think of for it.  It's just stupid good. 

(the recipe for those who'd like)

For cookiage this serious, I had the uncontrollable urge to build a pyramid (it's best never to the strangeness of those urges or you'll begin to wonder about yourself).  Except it was more like a triangle.  But a pyramid would have been cool.  That's what I want to be buried in - a cookie pyramid,....not a triangle.  Actually, I'm rather like the Bermuda triangle of cookies.  They disappear if they get too close to me.  So I'm a cookie-eating triangle wanting to be buried in a cookie pyramid.  That's quality stuff right there.

 And a close-up for good measure.  Close-ups are always needed.  I wish I was as photogenic as it is.

I don't doubt that these things could actually be used as bricks for building a pyramid.  They are quite heavy.  You've got like four cookies worth of material there.  But because it's a sandwich, it only counts as one dessert.

That's why those food judges on the Food Network say presentation is everything.  It can make or break the dessert.
1 cookie sandwich = 1 dessert
2 cookies + filling on the side = 3 desserts (if not more)

 Such a solid dessert.  Chocolate cookies with chocolate chip cookie dough filling.  Fills the mouth like an explosion.  A good explosion.  An explosion where if your mouth could talk it'd say, "I just can't take this it's so good!" 

....oh...yeah....your mouth can talk.

Nom-noms...

...num-nums...

...and last but not least, yum-yums.

The 4 Elements of Deliciousness

I was feeling rogue.  Best beware when I'm feeling rogue.  Serious stuff goes down.

It's last semester senior year, and I felt like trying a foodtruck I hadn't visited yet.  Turns out that it was fairly easy.  I've drifted into a comfort zone, visited the same foodtrucks over and over - don't want to mess with a "real"-ly good thing.  But then I heard that the Philly foodtruckers were thinking of unionizing and hey, if they can do something crazy, then so can I!  You go foodtruckers; stick it to the government and park on whatever sidewalk you want!  Just so long as you're still willing to sell me something that tastes good and is absolutely horrible for my health, you've got my full 2000 recommended daily allowance caloric blessing.

So I've heard of this truck called Bui's a couple of times - it's got some awesome artery-clogging, fat-filled meals of happy contentedness. So last night (I'm trying to appear "normal" by saying I only thought about this the day before.  I'd actually planned this for a couple of days) I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm doing for lunch.

And, this morning, it just so happened that my path took my right along Bui's at 38th and Spruce.  No kidding, I was still at least 150fit away and I could smell the bacon cooking.  That's what mornings are supposed to smell like.

My heart started beating faster and my legs nearly pulled me to the truck window to eat "lunch" at 9am.  Somehow I resisted.  I'm not saying eating lunch at 9am is a bad thing.  It's just that when you've planned something for so long, it's important to stick to the plan and not throw in any crazy variables.

It was a smart move too.

Forget the 4 elements according to Classical thought.  This sandwich has the four elements of deliciousness: Egg, bacon, ham, and sausage.  Booyah!

(it also has cheese and a mysterious orange-y substance called "Bui sauce" - it tastes good, that's all that matters. i don't ask questions - but i couldn't include them in the metaphor cause that'd obviously mess it up, duh)

I had a hunch about this sandwich.  So, after some careful investigation, which really consisted of me sitting down and trying to think up something that I thought was clever (it's obvious that I have very low standards for myself and why I never discuss posts beforehand with people - partly because they'd be shot down pretty quickly and partly because I make it up as I go), I ascertained two possible reasons for why this foodtruck is named "Bui's."

1) The owner's last name is Bui and the truck is, in fact, named after the owner.

Generic, traditional, not all that suspicious, but doubtful.  If it's not interesting, it's probably wrong (I could swear that's how Sherlock solves his cases).

The second, much more sinister, and, in my view, much more likely explanation (that was a lot of commas) is that this foodtruck is part of an underground, multi-national organization of foodtruckers bent on a evil plot - a plot they think everyone else would consider so absolutely far-fetch that we would fail to sense it even if provided a stark, blatant clue right under our very tongues.  And I, with my enhanced sensitivity to my gut instincts, have seen and tasted it.

2) It has something to do with buoys (you know those things that float out on the water and every little kid wants to take home even though he has no idea what they're supposed to be - don't tell me I was the only one who thought that way).  I don't know what exactly it has to do with that, but all I know if that Bui = buoy.  You can't argue with the evidence.  Possibly, they want to make us as fat as buoys.  Wouldn't surprise me.  But if all their food tastes this good, I'm down with helping them out.

After all, consider that this sandwich is called the Hangover Special.  I'm pretty sure it's because your stomach is hanging over your pants after eating it.

(imagery is more effective when it's true)

I really enjoyed this one.  Every single bite in fact.  Crunch on the outside, fat in the middle...yummers.

And that right there is the "Bui sauce" dripping down.  Had a nice, spicy kick to it.  Definitely an honorary bonus element.

Thought I'd switch up the godbite picture and do a godbite video.  It allows the necessary visualization of all the needed angles.  Feel free to slow it down and pause as needed.  Sometimes still imagery just doesn't cut it.  Maybe next I'll experiment with 3D.