Yeah, this is a rough one.
Remember the tragedy that was my first sweet potato “recipe”?
Well this is like if that first sweet potato got laid off from his cushy finance job and spent the next three months investing in whatever bottom-shelf whiskey was on sale that day and scratch-offs with odds low enough to subvert his claim for karmic restitution, until the drinking and constant denial of accountability tore his marriage and family apart.
That’s dramatic, but take another look at that picture and tell me that sweet potato hasn’t been through some shit. The sucker got tagged in on the last day of a grocery cycle, so while the result is an absolute travesty, I can honestly say it couldn’t have been any better. Unless, you know, I went to the store. But let’s not dwell on hypotheticals.
Let’s dwell on cheese. Cheese is tricky. My ability to stay thin is directly correlated to my ability to resist temptation for the thirty minutes every week I spend in a grocery store, which is something I mostly do well, but then also sometimes I do cheese. It’s not that cheese itself is bad, it’s that the way I consume cheese is bad. If I have it, it’s getting shoehorned into everything I make until I no longer have it, usually about 3 days, depending on the size of the block and if, heaven forbid, Safeway had any sort of 2 for 1 or 3 for 2 situation going on. Once it’s in the fridge I’m sprinkling some on my eggs every morning “because it’ll keep me full so I don’t have to eat lunch as early”, and it’s going in my rice/ground turkey abominations to make them less abominable, and it’s going into quesadillas after I’ve had four beers, and it might even just go straight into my mouth because why not. I rationalize it by telling myself that the whole thing is going to end up in my body at some point, so why not reach that point as quickly as possible and revert back to a cheeseless diet, giving my body more days of clean eating? Does that make sense? It shouldn’t because it leads to meals like the one pictured above, which I can confirm tastes exactly how it looks. Which we can all confirm is allcaps BAD.
It was almost so much worse, though. This blog experienced its first taste of adversity in the form of a missing Neighbor Steve; the sole provider of sriracha until I figure out how to stop forgetting to buy some. To be clear, Neighbor Steve isn’t milk-carton missing, he just wasn’t home when I knocked the first time. He also wasn’t home when I knocked the second time, about ten minutes later, in an act of desperation after bite number 3 of my monstrosity put up a bit too much of a fight. But, I discovered in an act of greater desperation, his door was unlocked. Which was interesting. Nothing quite makes you confront the nature of a relationship like having an unlocked door stand between you and a palatable dinner. Nothing also quite makes you exaggerate a friendship like it, either. It took all of twelve seconds for me to parse through our very limited shared history of neighborly hellos and the occasional split patio six pack to realize that, wait, Neighbor Steve and I are great friends. Maybe best friends. Maybe he’d even be offended if I didn’t help myself to his sriracha – my hesitation an indication of how little I appreciated our bestfriendship. So yeah I borrowed some sauce, not for me, but for him.
Anyway, sorry, I’ll try to keep this about the food.
Before you ask, the egg is overcooked and pointless and I’m not going to acknowledge it again.
The geography is inconsistent, but the cheese usually hits first, and cheese is good, so it starts off good. And flavor never really becomes a problem. It turns out you can load up pretty much anything with cheese and sriracha and worst case it just ends up tasting like cheese and sriracha, which could easily be mistaken for best case. What follows that initial pop of flavor, though, is a sudden understanding that half-melted cheese and overcooked sweet potato share an identical consistency. And while the chewy, almost gummy, texture of each bite is acceptable for half-melted cheese, it’s absolutely un-that for sweet potato. The homogeneity is disconcerting but not appetite killing, so the rest of the meal is spent attempting to chew in ignorance while your mouth sends signal after signal to your brain saying SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG. Luckily by now I’m very good at ignoring my body’s attempts to tell me something may not be edible. Luckily.
I chased the whole thing down with a few handfuls of spinach, so let’s go ahead and chalk this up as a well-rounded meal. Sorry mom.
Burned and Bland 