Eating Sunday – Bachelorette Chow!

This week it’s all about food from the flip side of Sunday; the stuff you don’t want others to know about. Maybe it’s Chocodiles for dinner or chilli and cheese dumped on nacho chips. Anything eaten over the sink and out of a can, preferably with the Ramones playing in the background…

I took a completely unscientific poll of a number of single girlfriends and when asked what they eat when alone and want to make no effort, some trends emerged: Cheese (first on everyone’s list), followed by starchy carbs, charcuterie, beans and bean products like chilli, bean dip, canned black beans, and hummus, and cereal, both virtuous (Cheerios and Kashi) and not so virtuous (Captain Crunch and Fruity Pebbles).

And Glop. Glop is any number of random ingredients whooshed up in a bowl together. It generally includes, but is not limited to, a cheese product, something starchy, something crunchy, and a vegetable to give it a patina of something that isn’t completely junk.

So tonight’s dinner is a prettier version of some of the above culinary abominations (most of which I have been guilty of at some time or other)…

To start with, we have everyone’s favorite college food:

I still like ramen. Every now and then buy a packet and eat it raw when I want something crunchy. I never ever use the flavor packet and never read the ingredients.

Bring on the cheese! This was a yummy semi-soft cheese flecked with mustard seeds. Then there was a new (to me) Italian blue…

 

I really don’t think of myself as a shill for particular brands, but for Olympic Mills French saucisson d’Arles and d’Alsace, I might be willing to debase myself in any number of ways for a steady supply. It might just replace bacon as the meat candy of choice. It’s like all of the best qualities of salami, buttery brie, and strangely enough, beef jerky in one neat package…

Yes. It did deserve three photos. It’s just that good.

Here’s the full spread. Nearly everyone had a version of the charcuterie or antipasto plate. It doesn’t look too unhealthy from this angle.

Next, shield your eyes. Most people I know find this absolutely revolting, so I reserve this for quiet nights alone reading a good Umberto Eco novel. All I can say is I’ve loved it for a very long time…

Tuna with raisins. Yum! Glop. Yum!

Like I said, Glop can be any number of things swimming around together and I received lots of suggestions. Tonight’s is a take on my usual made much prettier for an audience. Here, we’ve got the base, baked potato with corn off the cob, lots of pepper, a bit of leftover cheddar, broccoli, and greek yoghurt to hold it all together. It started for me as a dish of poverty concocted out of whatever odds and ends could be had, and evolved into the odds and ends that need to get used up rather than wasted. It is an ugly bastard of a dish and absolutely warm comforting delicious.

For dessert, I dressed up another common element of bachelorette dinners: cereal. Here, I paired granola with some nectarine wedges that were roasted with butter and brown sugar, and a dollop of yoghurt.

For the record, I whipped up this spread with the realization that this is actually about four meals and I’ll be eating like a bachelorette for the next few nights. At least I didn’t eat any Chocodiles. I’ll save that for a homemade junk food blog of the future.

Lastly, Futurama is not only one of my favorite shows, but entirely protected by a copyright that belongs Matt Groening and his legal posse, so I hope Matt Groening has a great sense of humor and doesn’t take me into court (uh. what’s the court?). Ditto for Dead Milkmen.