Last night I was worn out for no real reason. I got home and sat on the couch and then before I knew it I had drifted off and then snored myself awake and it was almost 8pm. I shuffled into the kitchen in search of some dinner. I did not feel like doing any major cooking, especially since the pots and pans from my chicken pie the night before were still sitting in my sink. I left them there thinking that perhaps I would wake up in the morning and see in the paper an ad that said: 'NEW SEXY ANDROID DOES YOUR DISHES' but no such luck.
Instead I opened the cupboard and pulled out a box of mac-n-cheese. One of my one-dollar biglots finds. This was 'white cheddar' which I suppose meant they did not add yellow dye #15 to that powder they get away with calling 'cheese'. While I was waiting for the water to boil I noticed a sticker on the side of the box. It said "NOTICE; CRACKED PIECES. BOIL 3-4 MINUTES ONLY'. Curious, I peered inside the box at the noodles. They LOOKED ok.
So once the water was boiling I tossed them in. Once they were cooked I poured them out into the strainer. Now I see what the sticker was for and why it was at big lots. Many of the noodles were cracked down the side, so when they boiled up they unfolded and became flat noodles. Not all of them, about half. Half of the other half just plain fell apart into bits and pieces. It was still edible; it just was not a uniform noodle texture. I guess somewhere in the craft production line a machine goofed up or a part wore out and it created a batch of irregular noodles. Instead of trashing it they instead package it, slapped that sticker on it, and sold it to biglots were suckers like me bought it.
It reminds me of the bags of irregular Oreos that some restaurants buy. When I briefly worked in a horrid little hole named 'Tucan Willies' in Oviedo, I was in a training session to make Oreo-ice cream pie. This involved a big bag of broken Oreos. It came in a neat silver package, about the size of a box of cereal. There was no label on it, you just opened it up and it was full of broken Oreo cookies, no cream, just the cookies. The cook showed me how to pour the cookie chunks into a mixing bowl, add a big heap of butter, mash it all up until it was like wet coffee grinds, and then to mash it into a pie pan to form a crust.
That was about the only duty there I enjoyed. The manager would yell at me to make an Oreo pie, and I would go back into the cooler where the big bags of Oreos were kept. In the frigid and secret darkness of the cooler, I would bust open a bag and gleefully start shoving irregular Oreo cookies chunks into my mouth. Once I had my fill I would nonchantly walk out and make the pie. Albeit with a somewhat thinner crust. I wonder if there are other irregular foodstuffs you can buy in bulk at a cheaper price.
So I ate my broken noodles and powdered cheese and watched 'Dead like me'. I am glad they moved that show to sci-fi. I had watched the pilot on DVD and I found it amusing, but then I cancelled netflicks because they suck ass. And then I forgot all about it. That girl who plays George is a snotty hottie.
Twenty years ago tonight, Ed’s dinner was a dollar-box of cracked pasta and his big dream was a sexy robot dishwasher.
Ah, 2006. A time when a man could buy discounted noodles with a sticker admitting they were broken and consider that a reasonable transaction. The world has changed, Ed, and not always in a direction I respect. That sticker is now called “ugly produce” and people pay a premium for it in subscription boxes, which is somehow both more honest and more humiliating. Your Netflix cancellation because “they suck ass” is adorable: now we all carry fourteen streaming services in our pockets and none of them have the show we actually want. The promised sexy android who does your dishes never showed up, but we got robot vacuums that eat charging cords and phones that reprimand us about screen time, so progress is a mixed bag at best. And the broken Oreo supply chain? Restaurants still buy scraps, but now the secret is out: every “artisanal” cookie crust is built from the same shattered leavings you were shoveling into your mouth in the cooler. The irregular foodstuff economy is no longer a backroom secret; it’s a lifestyle brand. I find that deeply funny, and also suspiciously familiar. You were ahead of your time, Ed, in the worst possible way.
“2006 Ed, did you ever explain to the manager why every Oreo pie you made had a crust the thickness of wet tissue paper, or did the secret darkness of the cooler simply make you believe no one would notice?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Ahh, Beelzebubba, you’ve hit on the deep, dark secret of my short and glorious career as an Oreo-pie artisan. Did I explain to the manager? Hell no. The man had a voice like a furious goose and zero interest in the poetry of a cookie crust. And sure, maybe the secret darkness of the cooler made me bold, but it wasn’t exactly a locked vault. I’d shove a handful of broken Oreo chunks in my mouth, wipe my face with my sleeve, and stroll out like I’d just discovered fire. The crust was thin because I was hungry and the pie was secondary. Also, the manager never once weighed the crust. Honestly, I think he just wanted the pie to exist so he could yell at someone about something else. So no, I never explained. I figured a thin crust was just my signature. Take that, foul germs.
