Tortilla with cheese, meat, or vegetables

So the myth theory says that every story is the same. It has the same components. It starts off with a hero and a dilemma. The hero sets off to solve the dilemma and eventually finds the solution while at the same time learning something about his or herself. There are little components like the 'call', an elixir, and the guides who move the hero along the way, that are stuck into the story at one point or another. But in the end every story is the same.

This is exactly like Mexican food. It's all the same. In the words of Jim Gaffigan, "it's a tortilla with cheese, meat, or vegetables." He's spot on. Sure, all the different dishes are prepared differently, but every dish is made of the same ingredients Think about it. There are burritos, tacos, rolled tacos, tostadas, nachos, enchiladas, chimichangas... Try and think of a meal that isn't a tortilla with cheese/meat/vegetables.

So, here is my explanation as to how the myth theory can be applied to cooking Mexican food. There's the guy making food, or the hero, who is faced with the dilemma of having to prepare a meal. The call - he is hungry. He set forth on his journey to the kitchen and is faced with the dilemma of choosing cheese, meat, or vegetables. His mother comes in and helps him make his food. He has to fight off his younger brother who comes in and tries to steal some of his food. These are the guides and the forces of evil that the hero meets along the way. Finally, he finishes cooking his meal and satisfies his hunger, solving the initial dilemma. In the end, the hero has learned how to cook, which helps him throughout his later life. He is then an inspiration to his younger brother to become an independent, meal-preparing hero.

This explanation proves that the myth theory is way too general; it can be applied to anything.

Lastly, there is no point in posting a recipe because if you actually read the post you would know that it's all some combination of cheese, meat, and vegetables held together by a tortilla. So go cook some combination of the listed ingredients. You can't go wrong. It will inevitably yield Mexican food.

Cake!

You show up at a birthday party and there's cake. There's always that awkward moment when you can't decide if you want any or not because you don't know what flavor it's going to be. It has the potential to be completely amazing and satisfy your taste buds, but then it also has the potential to be your least favorite flavor ever. I guess part of it comes with knowing who's birthday it is and what kind of cake he or she likes. Cake can be so mysterious; its insides covered up by a layer of frosting. It really could be anything - chocolate, vanilla, yellow. It could be ice cream cake, fruit cake, or that weird thing that's just a pie tin of whipped cream, which shouldn't exist outside the clown world of throwing them in other people's faces. They're just gross.

Anyway, like I was saying, it has the potential to be fantastic or nasty. Only time will tell. The deciding moment is after everyone has already sang happy birthday, while the birthday boy/girl awkwardly stares at the cake, waiting for his or her family and friends to stop singing to them. It's then that some one first cuts the cake, revealing the inside of the cake, no longer completely hidden by the frosting.

Cake is like the Internet. The Internet has the potential to be really good or really bad. According to some, the Internet is going to solve the worlds problems. It's a new "public sphere" for idea sharing and creative thought and discussions. Because it's accessible to people everywhere, it could potentially store all the world's information and solve illiteracy around the world. Then there are people like Mozorov, who don't see the Internet as such a good thing, especially when it has the potential to backfire and create more problems than it's worth. Receiving a piece of cake that you don't like definitely creates more problems than it's worth. You feel guilty for taking a piece and then not eating it, but you also don't want to pretend like you like it and eat the whole thing. Then you feel even more guilty throwing it away so you decide to just leave it on the table, acting like you forgot it there.

I will leave you with a cake recipe I randomly found and decided to make. I've made it a few times since. I think it's pretty tasty. (It's also better with a layer of crushed Oreo's in the middle.)

4 cups fresh strawberries 
1 - 14oz. can Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk (NOT evaporated) 
1/4 cup lemon juice 
1 - 8oz. Cool Whip (thawed) 
8 Oreo cookies 
1 TBSP butter (melted) 

Line a bread loaf pan with foil. In a large bowl mash 2 cups of the strawberries with a potato masher. Add the Eagle brand milk to the strawberries--stir. Add lemon juice--stir. Add 2 cups of the Cool Whip--stir. Pour the strawberry mixture into the foil lined bread loaf pan. Crush the Oreo cookies finely into a small bowl--add the melted butter--stir. Spread the cookie mixture evenly over the top of the strawberry mixture. Use the back of a spoon to lightly press the Oreo cookie mixture into the strawberry mixture. Cover the top of the loaf pan with foil. Freeze the entire thing overnight. The next day remove it from the freezer, remove the foil from the top, and invert it onto a plate--if any of the foil sticks to it, peel it off. Frost the loaf with the other 2 cups of Cool Whip. Slice the remaining 2 cups of strawberries and arrange them on top of the Cool Whip frosting. Slice like bread to serve.

I Can't Believe It's Not Intimacy

I remember the first time I ever saw a commercial for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. Some people were so excited about a lower calorie spread for their toast in the morning. My family never bought since we didn’t eat a whole lot of butter in the first place. I was at a friend’s house the first time I ever had I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and I remember thinking, “there is no part of me that would ever believe that this is butter.”

Today you can find several types of fake butter lining the shelves in the grocery store. Although it freaked my Dad out a little when it first came out, he has succumbed to the fake butter craze. His favorite brand is Benecol, which I guess has some other health advantage besides having half the calorie count. I will admit, the fake butter is all right if you sit down to eat your meal not expecting the “butter” on your bread to taste like butter... Some people have a strong preference.

The butter and the faux butter kind of remind me of Turkle’s idea of intimacy and faux intimacy. There are intimate relationships in person, which have more to do with others physically being there for you. Then there’s also virtual intimacy, which is still intimacy but in a different way. People can’t physically be there for you; however, they can still be there for emotional support.

Because butter isn’t really a snack, I don’t have a recipe for this post. My apologies.

Mmmm...Coffee Cake.

So you're driving down the main street and you're hungry. You don't really know the area, but you're looking for somewhere to get a coffee and a pastry. You spot some little coffee shop to your left but you think you see that familiar green Starbuck's sign down the street, so you keep driving. Eventually you're close enough to recognize that it is a Starbuck's and immediately park and go inside, completely forgetting about that little coffee shop a block behind you. You rattle off your usual drink order and look in the glass case in search of something to eat.
Now, I'll admit Starbuck's is pretty good, but one of the main reasons people always stop there is because they recognize its name. That poor little coffee shop you drove right passed could make the best coffee and treats in the world, but you wouldn't know it because you wanted the familiarity Starbuck's provides. There are plenty of little coffee shops by my house that make little treats and snacks that are so much better than the things Starbuck's leaves in their display case, but unfortunately all those little shops don't nearly as much business compared to Starbuck's because they aren't well known.
In class we talked about social capital and this idea was presented to us: lazy people who live in nice neighborhoods are more likely to get farther in life than motivated people who live in poor neighborhoods. Although I don't necessarily agree with this, it relates to the idea that Starbucks could sell some crappy type of coffee cake and more people would buy it than the most amazing coffee cake made at the coffee shop around the corner. Gelato Vero is one of the coffee shops I had in mind; they have some of the most amazing coffee cake ever :)

Roll-Ups

Have you ever had a friend concoct some really bizarre snack, said that it's really good and told you to try it. You wince, staring at the unappetizing food in front of you and in an attempt not to be rude, or a fit of hunger, decide to at least try a bite. Then your taste buds jump out of their seats, delighted with whatever the heck it is that you're eating. Then you eat the whole plate and feel slightly guilty for ever doubting your friend...yeah, so if that hasn't happened to you it has certainly happened to me.

One of my favorite weird snacks a friend showed me is a turkey cream cheese wrap, called the turkey cream cheese wrap, for lack of a more original name. You take a tortilla and spread cream cheese on it, about as thick as you would spread peanut butter on a PB&J sandwich. Then, you take a couple slices of deli turkey and lay them flat over the layer of cream cheese, making sure most of it is covered. Then you roll it up. I usually cut it into bite-size slices, which can sometimes be difficult because the cream cheese slides around and it unrolls a little if you haven't wrapped it up tight enough. But that's beside the point. I like this snack so much that I've started showing it to some of my other friends.

Occasionally, they don't believe me when I say that it's really good so I'll tell them that another friend showed it to me. This way they know that I'm not that alone in liking it...it sometimes gets them to change their mind about trying it. However, the rare times that I don't have to resort to telling people that a friend showed me the recipe I sometimes feel like I'm plagiarizing. I know, it sounds silly, plagiarizing a snack, but, it's still the whole idea of taking someone else's idea and claiming it as your own, right? I know this situation is a little different because I can't get into legal trouble for telling other people to try cream cheese, turkey roll-ups, but I still sometimes feel like I'm taking credit for some one else's genius snack ideas...

Presentation is Key

When you're writing a letter to your best friend, to your boss, sending a text message to your cousin or writing a research paper, you use a different tone of voice in each one. Your science teacher would most likely not appreciate you using slang to talk about how osmosis occurs. Voice, tone, and the presentation of your thoughts completely change the feeling of your writing. Turning in a coffee ring covered, crumpled, hand written hard copy of a five page analytical paper using language you'd use to describe last night's party to your best friend is like going to a nice restaurant and receiving a plate of over cooked pasta with red sauce on a styrofoam plate.

Pasta can be served in so many different ways, some classy, others not so much. The way that it's presented changes the feel of the entree. It seems like when you eat out at a fancy restaurant and order pasta it's one of the most elegant meals you've ever eaten. Reading the name of the Italian dish to the waiter, the uniquely shaped, white, shiny plate and the freshly cracked pepper make eating pasta a whole new experience. When you make pasta at home it's not the same. You have to make sure the noodles are cooked correctly, that they don't annoyingly stick together, and the sauce is the right temperature. Your plates and utensils seem boring compared to the ornate one's from the restaurant, but in the end it is just pasta. Maybe they use a different brand or freshly made noodles with some random type of sauce or meat that you don't usually buy in the store. Despite these differences, pasta is pasta. In terms of writing, words are words; it's just a matter of which words are chosen and how they are strung together to represent your thoughts.

I have a sister who is vegetarian, so my family has started eating veggie products so that we don't have to make two different meals every time the family eats together. So, my Dad has taken to making an original, vegetarian pasta sauce. We mix together a jar of red sauce, a box of this 'meat' crumble that's made out of veggie product, and a packet of pre-made herbs and spices that's supposed to be made with taco meat. When the pasta's almost done, you heat up the sauce in a sauce pan and it tastes pretty good. I love the taco flavoring; although, I my San Diegan taste buds might be biased...

Life is Like A Box of Chocolates

Chocolate has been eaten all over the world for hundreds and hundreds of years. Cacao beans have been used in drinks, sacred rituals, and foods, and the cacao fruit is believed to have been fermented into some sort of alcohol beverage. People ate cacao products for medicinal, nutritional, and even aphrodisiacal purposes. Today, chocolate is everywhere; whether it's a Hershey's Kiss, a cup of hot chocolate, or chocolate covered strawberries, it's not hard to find. People try to justify eating chocolate with "oh, it lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, and it's high in antioxidants." My roommate just told me that chocolate releases endorphins, so I guess that's why chocolate does make you feel happier. And okay, so all of that may be true, but I still think society has gone a little overboard with the whole chocolate thing.

I walked into a candy store on the Fourth of July last summer with a few friends and we ended up having a somewhat lengthy conversation with the woman behind the counter. She ran the store and made all the chocolates herself. We saw chocolate covered strawberries, bananas, pretzels, cherries - all the normal stuff. Then we saw the chocolate covered bacon. Mind you, this was not the chocolate covered bacon at the fair where there's a chocolate bar with little, itty-bitty bacon bits in it. This was a giant piece of meaty bacon dipped in chocolate, as if chocolate or bacon didn't have enough sugar/fat on its own. Now, I get the whole contrasting sweet and salty idea, but chocolate covered bacon just doesn't sound appealing to me. If the chocolate bacon wasn't enough, the woman started telling us about a chocolate covered jalapeño pepper she makes; apparently, that was one of the top three most popular items in her store. (I don't understand. And, in case you were wondering, bacon flavored soda was the most popular item in this store. WTF.)  Other bizarre things I've heard of being dipped in chocolate: crickets, carrots, squid, potato chips, chick peas, the list goes on...

It's gotten to the point where certain foods combined with chocolate are unnecessary and gross. People use chocolate both appropriately and inappropriately, just like commas. I'm not saying that I know how to use commas in the correct manner, and I'm also not one to judge whether some one else is using chocolate in an acceptable fashion. However, I will say that chocolate and squid are like two independent clauses that should never be combined with a comma, or in this case chocolate. Some people use commas excessively, some use them inappropriately, and others just don't know when to use them. If you're dipping squid in chocolate you are obviously an excessive and unnecessary comma user, metaphorically speaking.

If you haven't completely lost your appetite, here's a chocolatey snack.

Milk Chocolate S'mores Popcorn
Popcorn dipped in milk chocolate
Popcorn dipped in caramel
Graham Cracker (small) pieces
Mini Marshmallows
Peanuts (optional)
(Slightly altered recipe from Harry & David's Milk Chocolate S'mores Moose Munch)

Enjoy :)

Caramel Apples

A few people on my floor and I went apple picking this weekend. It was pretty fun, despite the fact that it was cold and rainy the whole time. With a bushel of apples, we returned to the farm stand and bought hot apple cider and fresh donuts (delicious!) and listened to a small band playing Irish folk music. With so many apples, we have to think of creative ways to eat them so that we don't get tired of just eating plain old apples. The first thing we decided to try was caramel apples.

I'm not talking about the professional looking caramel apples on a stick you might find at the fair. We are far too lazy for that. Instead, we heated up a cup of caramel in the microwave, sliced up some apples, and dipped them in the caramel. (We had peanut butter too.) It was fantastic. While I sat there eating my apple, I was trying to think of ways that I could relate this to the public sphere or Barlow or something like that, but nothing came to me. I just kept getting side tracked. I started thinking about who people are on the Internet versus who they are in person. And then (don't judge me) I thought of this scene in Shrek.

This got me thinking about layers. I thought of how a majority of people represent themselves fairly accurately on the Internet but then there's always that moment when you see something on your friend's profile that's a complete misrepresentation of who they are. Although their core personality is portrayed by their profile, they've also got that extra 'layer' where they (intentionally or unintentionally) act or talk like someone they're not. Well, then I thought, that's kind of like a caramel apple. There's that outside layer of caramel that kind of masks and enhances the apple, the core of the snack. In this instance, the apple is someone's personality and adding the caramel is like padding a resume or slightly altering one's profile on the Internet. I admit, this is a questionable comparison, but it's all I got...besides this picture of us waiting for our cider to cool down.

Breakfast

Everyone’s heard the phrase breakfast is the most important meal of the day and my theory is: if it’s the most important meal of the day, why not eat it twice? One of my all time favorite things to eat for dinner is breakfast. Typically I’ll make one of the following, depending on how many people I’m cooking for.

Breakfast Burrito

Freshly Cooked Tortilla

Scrambled Cheesy Eggs

Bacon (extra crispy)

Potato (in any form, preferably hash browns)

Avocado

Hot Sauce (some people like it...me, not so much)

Pancakes (or Waffles)

Any Pancake Batter

Sliced Strawberries

Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips

Butter or Syrup on top

French Toast

Bread of your Choice, dipped and cooked in a mixture of egg, milk, cinnamon, and

vanilla

Maple Syrup (warm is ten times better than cold)

Powdered Sugar

Sliced Strawberries

I’m also a huge fruit person; I have yet to find a fruit I don’t like, besides coconut, which I don’t think is even a fruit. For the sake of my argument, I’m calling it a nut.

If it were up to me, I would probably eat breakfast for every meal of the day, with the exception of a sandwich every once in a while. I’ve always wondered why the time of the day determines which foods are acceptable to eat? It’s not like people are incapable of eating pasta for break fast or making an egg, sunny side up, with a piece of toast for dinner. The time of day has given society expectations as to what is “normal” to eat at the different hours of the day. People should break free and eat lunch for breakfast, breakfast for dessert, dinner for lunch, and dessert for dinner; if you think about it, you’re still eating the same foods throughout the course of the day. Just don’t eat food right before you go to bed because I’ve heard that’s bad for you...or your digestive system, or whatever.

Time is like the media. According to Habermas, the media has taken over the public sphere and has provided society with a constant stream of topics that have grown to be expected topics of daily discussion. We have become so dependent upon events publicized by the media as conversation topics that phrases like “how ‘bout them Chargers/Red Sox/Pats...” have been used to fill the awkward silences when people can’t think up something of their own to discuss. Events displayed by the media have not only infiltrated our conversations, but have also been used as a default “panic phrase” to avoid sitting in silence; time, in a way, has provided society with types of food that are customarily eaten for specific meals of the day and people rarely go out of that realm of accepted foods and eat pancakes for dinner. When people brainstorm what they might want to eat for dinner, it’s usually just a list of the average dinner foods, or they panic and by default choose one of their three favorite fast food places to order in from. Barlow thinks that blogs are taking back the public sphere, in the sense that the media no longer defines all that we talk about. If it were up to me, society would no longer feel obligated to make certain meals based solely upon what society expects us to eat at that time of day. If you are one of those people who often skip breakfast due to lack of hunger or over sleeping, eat if for dinner. Why would you miss out on the most important meal of the day?

Peanut Butter

Peanut Butter. It’s wonderful thing, unless you’re allergic. Then don’t test out the following snack ideas. Peanut butter is so great that you can just eat it off a spoon. In fact, I frequently do so. However, I’m going to write about all the snacks you can add peanut butter to, to make it even tastier. First off, everyone knows you put peanut butter on apples and celery, but that’s boring; we’ve been doing that since kindergarten, but after thinking about it and talking to a few people, I have created a new and improved list of foods that go well with peanut butter.

Peanut Butter Breakfasts

Spread some peanut butter on your toast. Add thin slices of banana for extra flavor that also combats the stickiness, or sprinkle some Cheerios on top to give it some more crunch. English muffins are also good with peanut butter; you can add jelly too!

Peanut Butter Snacks

There are a few items on this list that I have yet to try, so I can’t defend all of them, but here it goes: Cheez’It’s, Oreo’s, Carrots, Ritz Crackers, Graham Crackers, Pretzels

Surprise Item

So there is a diner in my hometown called Corvette Diner. There is one item on their menu, the Rory, where you can get your money back if you’re not satisfied with your meal. It’s a hamburger with peanut butter, bacon, lettuce, and mayo. I never had the balls to order it, but I had promised myself that before I left home for school I would try this burger. Finally, my friend decided to order it so that my friends and I could all try it and turned out it was one of the most wonderful hamburgers I’ve ever had in my entire life. I know you’re probably doubting me right now, but trust me, try it.

Peanut butter reinvents the boring snacks, the healthy snacks, the snacks our parents used to feed us that lack pizzazz, just like blogs bring people together to discuss topics of interest in a whole new light. With so many progressive thinkers in the world, opinions change and new thoughts and ideas are constantly flowing. These ideas are frequently brought to life through the blogging world. Blogs have allowed people to talk about different topics in an innovative way; on the internet, people have the courage to speak their minds, with less fear of being judged. They can express themselves freely and talk about anything that interests them. Everyone has different opinions and brings something new to the table, altering discussions and making them unique. Peanut butter does the same; it slightly changes the flavor, the texture, or the feel of a food, causing you to see snacks in a whole new light.

If you like peanut butter as much as I do, it’s definitely worth trying all these snacks (even the hamburger) and I am sincerely sorry if you are allergic to nuts.