Men in the Kitchen (Part One)
Over the past four and a half decades, I’ve done my
fair share of eating.
Actually, if you take a peek at my girth, you could
argue that I’ve done significantly more than my fair share.
After years of painstaking (and weight gaining)
research, which included millions of consumed calories, hundreds of hours
pretending to be shopping, and two lifetime barrings from a couple of wholesale
warehouse stores, I have compiled a non-scientific, non-exhaustive and
completely frivolous list of “ do’s” and “don’ts” for you to consider when
visiting places that offer free samples.
Remember: Past successes do not indicate future
performance, especially with modern surveillance technology.
1) Change your appearance
frequently. This is especially easy to do if the store also has samples of
makeup. Special tip for males: save the “ extreme makeovers” for your
last run of the food samples.
2)
Don’t just stand in one place taking samples
from the same table. Move around for crying out loud.
3) Don’t say “Eww! Can’t you make
it without calamari?” Not all samples are meant for all people. On a positive
note, if you tend to like Calamari (and who doesn’t? Admiral Ackbar was
awesome!) and you hear someone saying “Eeewwww! Can’t you make it without
calamari?” Just think: More calamari for
me.
4) If you grab several samples ostensibly to take
them to your “wife/children/friend/great aunt Imogene from Oregon,” DO NOT
consume all of them in front of the sample demonstrator. (This might invalidate
your credibility.)
5) Don’t try to scare someone off
from taking the last sample ahead of you by saying “Dude, do you know how many
calories are in that?” You have to be more subtle: Say something like “Dude,
did you see the size of the fly that just flew out of that thing?”
6) If you disregard item number
five, and muscle a calorie-conscious “dude” out of the “last one;” also hang on to taste the first
of the next batch. You are helping the salesperson to “make sure the taste of
the product is consistently good whether it’s fresh or older.”
7) Carefully schedule your rounds
around shift changes, but avoid asking “When’s the other lady coming back?”
8) If you go back for
seconds/thirds/fourths, make sure there’s no residual evidence from your first
trips still on your lips or chin. (Special tip for males: Check your
beard too, really.)
9) Avoid making statements
like “Man, at Cost Club they give you
the whole thing.”
10) Don’t say “Just one more cup to
make sure the pretzel to M&MÔ balance is correct.” Well, at least don’t say it more than once.
Most of my eating hang-ups came from my father. Being
the son of a diabetic mom, my dad was always the food police in our household,
ostensibly to prevent me from also developing the dreaded disease.
Because of this, my father became pretty consistent in
hiding his candy. Unfortunately, he didn’t become consistently good at hiding his candy. This was
coupled with the fact that my mom was a frugal shopper. So when Heath™ Candy
Bars were on sale, she’d buy a couple hundred of them, storing them in the same
hiding place. This usually meant I could scrape a few dozen off the top before
Dad noticed any shrinkage in his supply.
Result: Type-2 diabetes.
Not really. I mean, I really did develop Type-2
diabetes, but it wasn’t because of what I ate. OK. Maybe a little, but it
mostly is genetic.
Dad hated letting food go to waste.
When I was a teenager, my mom was on one of her
frequent church “retreats.” I never quite understood what she was retreating
from, until I realized how poorly she got along with Dad. Anyway, my dad wanted
to feed me, apparently. (Probably my mom called him from Camp GimmeGodOverHubby
and reminded him that the children (the two strange people who occupied his
house while she was gone) would need sustenance.)
So, out of the blue, he comes to my room and asks, “Do
you want me to cook you a frozen pizza for dinner or something?”
This is an odd request. My mom lost her sight (a
side-effect of her diabetes) when I was twelve. I’d been preparing my own
bachelor dinners for years.
I knew how to cook a frozen pizza, but I was hard at
work accomplishing all the great things that make me who I am (a middle-aged
overweight nerd with a penchant for anything that is science fiction or
comic-book related.) I considered my options: If he makes me a pizza, it’ll give me fifteen minutes to do more comic
book reading. I could probably knock out Spider-Man #256 and the new issue of Alpha
Flight.
“Sure,” I replied.
Twenty-five minutes later, the smoke-detector went
off. I kicked myself for not following up on it. My sense of frozen pizza
timing was pretty solid. I should have known it once I got to Fantastic Four and Power Pack.
I repaired to the kitchen, where I discovered a thick
plume of blue-grey smoke pouring out of the oven. My dad was there with an oven
mitt, and a distinct odor of beer on his breath.
Dad was what you might call a problem drinker. The
problem was it didn’t take too much beer to turn him into something else. My
theory was that Dad’s mood was exacerbated by the drink. If he started drinking
in a good mood, (very seldom,) he was transformed into a very good mood. This usually meant breaking out old Kenny Rogers
and Roger Whitaker LPs. If he was in a foul mood, (more often) he wound up
being an angry drunk.
Needless to say, my mom’s absence and the presence of
alcohol make me very leery, but his mood so far was at worst neutral.
The strangest part about the smoke-filled kitchen was
the smell.
I’d burned my fair share of frozen pizzas over the
years of my pre-bachelorhood. If it wasn’t completely charred, I’d probably
still eat it.
Unfortunately, I had also melted my fair share of
plastic (usually experimentally) to see what could be done with melted plastic
(usually first-degree burns.)
The kitchen didn’t smell of burned pizza, it smelled
of melted plastic.
Dad pulled the pizza out of the oven. It was shiny.
“Did you remove the plastic before cooking the pizza?”
I asked.
“Geez, no” he hissed, looking red-faced and
embarrassed. “I thought you left it on and it just melted away.”
“No, you have to remove the plastic,” I said. My
pre-bachelorhood apparently had much better prepared me than my Dad’s
dependence on Mom’s cooking.
Ohh Geez, I thought. This has to get out of the house
before we all get high from the fumes.
“You can still eat that,” my Dad said. “You can peel
off the plastic and eat that.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m not eating food that’s been
covered in melted plastic.”
“You can still eat that,” he said.
“You can have it,” I told him. “I’m not hungry.”
Dad looked at the pizza, which more and more resembled
a small car tire.
“Nah,” he said. “I really don’t like pizza.”
He tossed the pizza into the garbage can, subsequently
melting the plastic garbage can liner.
And this was years before the advent of wholesale
warehouse stores that could sell us thousands more garbage bags.
…which leads us to…
11) If your
father is offering to cook you a frozen pizza, check after TWO comics.
12) No matter
how much your father is trying to help you, don’t eat food that has been cooked
in melted plastic.
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