A New Project for the Pork Snorkel Crew

Legal Disclaimer: Despite all similarities and a completely identical roster, the Pork Snorkel Crew is only loosely affiliated with Team Pork Cloud Mexico.

As chief scientist of the Pork Snorkel Crew, I am currently involved in researching a new breed of Oreos.  My lab team and I will be attempting to assemble jumbo Oreos from regular and double stuffed varieties of the popular snack food.  These enormous cookies will hopefully have diameters in excess of three inches, while remaining structurally strong enough to scoop soft-serve ice cream. These new Hand Oreos* should revolutionize everything, everywhere, and will probably win a Nobel Peace Prize after the cessation of the Toll Wars once the cookies are shipped to the Middle West. 


As I have not received notice from the FDA to halt testing, human trials will begin in a little over two weeks.

* I will not be calling them HOreos.

Boardwalk Food at Rehoboth Beach, DE: a mini snorkel

Starter: Top Dog's Chicago Top Dog.
I thought I would start with a classic, since I love Chicago-style hot dogs. Top Dog tried really hard to capture the essence, but ultimately failed. They had the right relish and celery salt, but there was lettuce and diced tomato on the dog. To say nothing of the total lack of hot peppers or a pickle spear would be a disservice to Chicago dog's everywhere, because a hot dog isn't Chicago-style without these two items. Overall grade: a generous C-

Salad Course: Thrasher's Boardwalk Fries
If you skip Thrasher&'s, you are skipping the beach in the words &"beach trip." Thick cut, peanut oil fried, slightly seasoned, some small sections of intact potato skin, with a consumer added dash of salt. Thrasher's does a brisk enough business that each serving is practically fried to order, and the best fries I've had since the last time I went to the beach. The flock of seagulls harassing me for some fries and the booming of the t-shirt store's shitty techno remixes of current shitty radio songs kills the mood a tad. Overall grade: A-

Main Course: Buffet of Eye Candy
AG would murder me if I went into any detail. Overall grade: B+

Dessert Course: Dolle's Fudge
I purchased three pounds of fudge in chocolate, peanut butter and chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate nut. I can't really describe the fudge other than to say that I meant to bring some back to a friend in the city, but none survived the trip to the car. In other words, I boughted you some fudge, but I eated it. Overall Grade: A

Unrelated addendum: Of course, I took a ton of pictures of the food. However, I used Pinko Punko's camera and that contraption seems incapable of downloading photos. PP probably has some excuse for this, but whatever it is, it's a bad lie to cover for his laziness.

My Life is a Constant Veil of Tears, Post-Modern Tears

I've been reading through the archive of Pictures for Sad Children, catching up on comics I've missed or forgotten since disconnecting the internets from my apartment. This comic about bugs in the flour reminded me of an incident from two summers ago. I was over at my brother's watering our tomatoes while he was off on a vacation. I stuck around to watch some tv and eat some of his food. The only food he had was crackers and mustard, so I ate some crackers with mustard. I got thirsty after eating most of the crackers in one package and went to get some water. I came back to the couch to find little black bugs crawling all over the crackers. I had previously thought the little black dots were part of the cracker. I was wrong, and horribly so. I drank as much water as I could and hoped that the bugs weren't toxic. I shoved the crackers in the freezer to kill the bugs, and also in the hopes that maybe my brother would eat them and therefore get some measure of revenge upon him for leaving me bugged crackers. He had not intended to leave any food for me at all, so I guess the joke was on me.

I nearly barfed all over the Metro on the way home, but held it together. I guess I've matured, or maybe just gotten dumber.

Report From Consumers in the Field

I received these images from one of my brothers and an associate in consumption. Be warned that the images you are about to view are delicious in the extreme and may result in the sudden craving of 44 inch diameter doughnuts or fractal fritters.




I think I just ate 1500 calories by looking at these photos. Time to hit the gym. And by gym, I mean comfy chair and Battlestar Galactica season 4 DVDs.

Cooking With The Genius: Pumpkin Soup

I looked up a recipe for this, and figured that I would have plenty to fudge after securing my pumpkins. Full pumpkins have three reasons why they are better than canned pumpkins: pies, soups, and seeds. Baked pumpkin seeds are great. So I schlepped to my local and bought:

2 pumpkins
3 water filters
1 gallon of skim milk

I needed the filters because my old one was no longer working and the milk for breakfast, however the pumpkins were a little harder to find. Turns out the store was sold out, so I got "pumpkins," and by "pumpkins" I mean two packs of Oreos on sale.

Maybe I'll share my recipe for pumpkin soup, if I can get some pumpkins. For now, "Pumpkin" Soup consists of Oreos dipped in coffee and garnished with sadness.

New Target Acquired

I must have one of these morsels of hot awesomeness before the year is dead:


A quick search of the interwebs turned up this Yelp page, unfortunately Chowhound did not contain any pertinent information. I would have spent more time there, but I am overcome with a craving for bacon-wrapped meat articles. Also, I am still experiencing a Baltimore high from an awesome crab cake sandwich, of which I only got two bites and lust for more. Sadly, Henninger's is closed on Sundays and Mondays but damn that was a good crab cake at Jimmy's.

Maybe I'll Get to Stop at a Culver's

I deserve a big damn butter burger.

From Hell's Heart, I Bake At Thee

PUUUUUUNNKKKOOOOOO!

Ahem.

Tonight, I bake-a da cookies. You like-a da cookies? I include a picture of some of the ingredients I used:


You will notice the slimy tentacles of my master creeping over and around the flour and sugar. I can not prevent the invasion of His Great and Grotesquely Alien Dimension from seeping into my kitchen. My mixing bowl summons forth the Shoggoth and Mi-Go like moths to the bright candle flame of my Master's terrible glory. MY soul is lost and yours soon will be.

Here you can see the shapeless mass, approaching horrific sentience:


I can barely contain it with three spoons. Thankfully, I have been granted a third tentacular appendage with which to stir my Master's newest assault on sanity. This caustic mixture consumed and annihilated my assistant's mixer. The motor could not long operate within a greater universe that includes a hexadecimal dimension of time and space and imploded, singeing my assistant greatly. It would not be the last wound suffered in the service of my Master.

I am not sure what this is, but it has no place in this contest:

Or does it?

Blue Girl, what is best in baking? I'll tell you: To roll your dough, see it spread before you, and hear the lamentations of the icing.


Some claim to be able to see Jesus in a corn chip or a tortilla, I see secret messages in the icing on my cookies:




What does it mean? The world may never know. My unknown and unknowable Master commanded that I prepare suitable vessels for His terrible confections:


Helob gives her/his/bird/spider's usual opinion: Needs More Crickets.



I predict the esteemed Judges of the Hallowed Holiday Bake-Off will react thusly:

Though AG May Ban Me (AGAIN), Snag Is Right

Menorahs are indeed made from Chanukah Hams. Here is one such ham in its uncut form, much like a 7 day old baby Jesus:

An Uncommon Mistake

Tonight, I am making tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

The ingredients list contains one mistake that should be easy to spot. You have one guess each.

Large can of Safeway tomato soup
Dash of basil flakes
Sprinkle of cumin
Shake or two of pepper
Drizzle of celery salt
Drazzle of seasoned salt
Large block of colby cheese
Twelve grain bread
Organic salted sweet cream butter

This one is really easy.

UPDATE: To clarify this, the mistake was not eating four grilled cheese sandwiches and dipping them in tomato soup while watching The Biggest Loser. I thought I was going to watch some Bionic Woman and Life, but instead I got fatties on a treadmill. When I heard that one of the women started the contest at 240 pounds, that hit close to the bone. I need to get back into my routine of waking up and doing pushups and situps.

Or Perhaps the Pepper Steak Variety

They are indeed good and mighty.

Totally unrelated: Get Your War On is celebrating six years of enduring our motherfucking freedom to totally point out all kinds of fucked up shit through clip art comics and has posted all the comics on one page. SUX2BU Dialuppers!

The Score, or How to End a Pork Snorkel Before It Really Begins

La Pasadita Ultimate Barbacoa Burrito: 1.
The Genius: 0

This freaking burrito is as big as it looks and just as obnoxious. (Unfortunately, the archives of Well Rounded Nerds do not permit me to find that post at the moment.) The barbacoa was cooked to a state that could be called sub-rare. This is not exactly desirable when you are already worried about the hygiene of the establishment. My colleague in consumption had expressed concern about the ripeness of the pico de gallo prior to our meal's arrival. I was able to try the pico, green salsa and the reportedly heavenly black salsa. I am a fan of the spicy food, much like my adorable nephew, but I was not impressed with either topping. I was forced to concur with my esteemed compatriot. These salsa-esque food products were perhaps too genuine. But back to the burrito.

I forced myself to ignore the rare-ness of the meat and instead enjoyed the rice, lettuce, guac, beans and cheese. There was not enough of either to over power the burrito or take away from the flavor of the meat. This was almost unfortunate as the meat could have been flavored more. In fact, it would have been nice if it had been flavored at all. It tasted like and undercoooked flank stank that maybe had a jar of spice waved in its general direction. Still, I wasn't only there to enjoy it so much as to climb the fucking Everest of Burritos. To carry this metaphor to a stupid conclusion, I got altitude sickness and had to carried down the mountain weighing thirty pounds more than when I started climbing.

The worst part wasn't the pain of my belly, but the full knowledge from the moment I left the establishment that this too would pass. I ate the burrito at 3 PM on Saturday and had no desire to eat anything until 1 pm on Sunday. Even then, I was only mildly peckish.

However, at 5:45 PM Sunday afternoon, I knew that it was time. I managed to hold everything together until 6:04 PM, mostly to give the other patrons of Intelligentsia on Broadway a chance to use the bathroom before I rendered it unfit for human, animal or silicon-nanotube based lifeforms.

The EPA has since rendered that establishment a Superfund site. I'm sorry.