Picnic, Hold the Sand

My brother and I both love this meal.  However, we are adament about having picnics INSIDE.  It just so happens that both of us have had enough disappointing outdoor eating adventures that we like to keep most food inside.  Eating in our backyard is fine, but much beyond our door step, or the doorstep of some restaurant we don’t eat food.  Going to the park just invites disaster with food.  Flies, sand, debris…other families.  And picnic food is never very good, either.  Warm egg or tuna salad, or worse—warm lunch meat.  The worst is when your parents pre-make sandwiches so that when you GET to your locale of choice, they’re soggy, and othewise gross.  The part of the trip that is most fun is really pulling drinks out of the melting ice in the cooler.  But that’s not even THAT exciting.

That being said, this a much better, much fancier alternative to the outdoor picnic.  Throw a frisbee at the park, leave the food out.

Soft Boiled Peanuts

Boiled peanuts are amazing.  They’re salty and savoury, and can be served hot or cold.  They’re strictly a finger food, and I prefer them over dried/roasted peanuts any day of the week.  And the best part is, is that as long as the peanuts you buy for them are relatively fresh, they themselves will be fresh!  If you make a big pot, be prepared to give them to friends or to attract hungry on-lookers.  They go bad relatively quickly, despite being very salty.  They are veggie matter…and WILL rot.  Like I say in the video, we throw a hamhock in for a smokier flavor.  I don’t really recommend eating the hock afterwards, though, because the water tends to get a little merky (you don’t have to wash the peanuts very well).

We Bought a Bunch of Pot and It Got Totally Roasted

Haw haw, weed joke.  Aren’t I funny?

I haven’t had pot roast in a long time.  It’s a fairly simple meal, at least the way we do it.  We throw the hunk of meat onto the grill to sorta lock in the juices, then toss it into the pressure cooker for a couple of hours until it’s tender…with veggies and some water, of course.  We almost cut this up, but it was so tender we just shredded it.

I also enjoyed the asparagus.  But more importantly…about this fruit salad…In a previous post, I videoed a “tropical fruit salad” thing that looked remarkably like ambrosia.  Well, after that moment, and the first conversation that my brother, my mom, and I had about ambrosia—it was mentioned not FOUR but FIVE times in two days, in completely unrelated scenarios, BY DIFFERENT SOURCES.  How freaky is that?  Ambrosia isn’t one of those things you commonly hear or talk about in conversation.

Kung Fuud

Ah! What better comfort food is there for the average hungry American than some filthy delicious Chinese buffet delectables. The New Hunan is a neighborhood favorite. So far, it is the best Chinese Buffet in Memphis that I’ve been too. I strangely remember there being a grander and much more varied buffet somewhere on Germantown Parkway (the sort that serves chicken feet), but since I’ve only been to it once, The New Hunan wins.  I’ve been to two different Tasty Buffets (also Chinese buffets).  I stopped going when I realized that one of them had “Tasty Customer” written in their parking spaces.  I’m kicking myself for not having the phone that had the picture I took of it.  Sadly, that phone was shot off into OUTER SPACE one year while at the fair.

Soupa Chicken – - – Activate!

It fights crime! It cures the common cold! IT’S MADE OF GOLD! It’s SOUPA CHICKEN!

Okay, so maybe it’s not really made of gold.  And maybe it doesn’t cure anything.  But it does make you feel good.  Not that I feel bad.  My day was pretty good.  But chicken soup is always a good option.  It’s chicken, it’s soup—what else could you want?  I find, however, that I’m much more of a Campbell’s soup girl.  I love me some Chicken Noodle O’s.  I don’t like cooked celery that much, nor do I particularly like cooked carrots.  But this soup was actually alright.

The fruit salad thing was also kinda great.  If you had some vanilla cake, and plopped some of that into the middle of it, you’d have yourself a mighty tastey cake.  It had marshmallows and a couple of different kinds of fruit all mixed in together.

Spoony gets to represent this one, simply because the fruit salad was so delicious.

Enchirito, Mucho Burrito

Burritos are like getting presents.  Big wrapped presents of meats and veggies and other toppings.  Blue Coast, like I said, is near by.  Next to Garibaldis (for my out of state viewers, yes, that’s the place with the “cool pizza plates”).  I only have one complaint about the place itself.  It always smells like burnt grease, or smoking grease.  There was also a repair man in the parking lot that night who was taking up like 4 spaces.  And the lot was strangely packed.  The rice in this particular burrito was a little on the crunchy side.

“Taco Bell, Taco Bell, product placement Taco Bell!  Enchirito, mucho burrito!” – Kung Pow

Hamburger Help Me!

I love hamburgers, I love Mac N Cheese, and I love help. Get where I’m going with this? This was a big bowl of Hamburger Helper. Usually, we add more noodles, but we’d run out of the EasyMac macaroni that we use to thicken it up. I couldn’t actually take video of it, because my camera was running low on batteries. The light was even flickering. I think if I’d been able to take real video it would look a lot less like diarrhea.

Have you ever seen such Hi-Def Hamburger Helper?  I think not.

Scooby Dooby Ew

Have you ever seen anything more horrifying than this plate of food? I thought not. I can’t even come up with any gross link. It’s just terrifying. I even tried color correcting it on board the camera. Fat lot of good THAT did.

Like I say in the video this is some Bertolli pasta. For a packaged pasta product, it’s very good. And it over feeds 2 people. The sauce was just the obligatory Kroger Brand marinara. I usually like the jarred cream sauce. But we didn’t have it, and were too lazy to go get it. So. Red sauce it was. I put some Parmesan cheese on it, but that only increased it’s hideousness.

We also had some “Italian” spinach. The recipe called for Italian bread crumbs. However, we were short on ingredients. We ended up toasting bread and covering it in pizza seasoning. Creative, eh? When we crumbled it up, there was more seasoning on us than the bread. I’m not usually one for frozen spinach, but overall it was really rather palatable. But man, doesn’t that spinach look scary?  I recommend you watch this in HD to reduce the fear factor.

Bok Bok Chicken Sandwich

I’m usually a fan of “salad” type food.  Chicken salad, tuna salad, fruit salad, salad salad.  You know…salads.  Don’t get me wrong, there are salads that I don’t like.  For instance, the Subway seafood salad.  Imagine this fake crab and mayo all whirred up into a substance and sploppped into a huge vat.  I got conned into eating this one day by my brother who said…”Oh the salad tastes good.  Just get some toppings.”  And so I did.  He laughed as a grimaced my way through half of this accursed sandwich of gross.

However, I’m glad to announce that this chicken salad was in fact NOT accursed.  It was quite delicious, especially with the mustard and cheese.  The Cheetos were also very tasty.

Remember to watch my videos in HD!

PS.  Have you ever Google image’d Cheetos?  Yea.  Me neither.

French Bread Pizazz

It’s true. I am a poor college student.  And so when we get paid, it’s to the grocery store to pick out as many filthy delicious food-like products as possible.  These things are cheap and come two to the box.  Ah, the taste of college!  It’s right up there with that packeted alfredo that you just ad milk to…speaking of which…ahm..nevermind…

It really is good, though.  Despite being completely health-lacking.  We put the pizzas in the oven, so that they’re all crispy on the outside and soft in the middle.  Screw that microwave crap.  You might as well just dip it in water for a few hours.  You’d acheive the same effect.  Warm water.  Think about it.

I only noticed this after the fact, but those peppers look like giant, terrifying slugs. And they themselves weren’t too tasty. They were the generic Kroger brand. Meh. Pickled peppers.