4 Recipes That Came From The Mind Of A Child (Taste Tested)
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When my friends and I hit peak boredom on stormy summer days in our youth, we would head to the kitchen and pour random items into a bowl. Pickle juice, milk, cumin, hot sauce, apple juice, tomato sauce, black pepper -- it all went in. We would take turns taking sips of it, fully knowing it was going to be a liquid nightmare.
The point of it wasn't to make something disgusting. It was to stumble upon something delicious. That never panned out. The idea of piling a ton of foods on top of each other and hoping for the best stuck with me. I continued to dream of big, stupid, and, no doubt, horrifying food monsters that -- fingers crossed -- might be incredible in spite of their grotesqueness. But, for whatever reason (probably sanity), I never made them.
Until today.
Let's make Little Kid Luis the happiest boy in the world by bringing some of his horrible food freaks to life ...
Fruit-Chew Burrito, Aka "Syrup Tube"
The idea of the Fruit-Chew Burrito popped into people's heads all around the world at about the same time. No one can take credit for coming up with the idea of wrapping Fruit Gushers in a sugary tortilla of Fruit Roll-Ups and Fruit By The Foot, just as no one person can take credit for dipping Wendy's french fries into a Frosty, even though I'm pretty sure I invented it in August of 2002. When one person thinks of it, the idea automatically unlocks in every other human's brain. Now, it's just a matter of making it real.
AssemblyGeneral Mills sells a variety pack of Gushers, Fruit By The Foot, and Fruit Roll-Ups because they've long known of my mission and have been preparing for this moment for decades. It was foretold.
To begin, I slightly overlapped two Fruit Roll-Up sheets to allow room for two packs of Gushers. I found that only one Gushers pack created a thin, more taquito-like roll, and I wanted something thick that I could sink my teeth into. I wanted to feel like I was gnawing on a semi-melted candle. So, two sheets it was.
After that, the Gushers. Gushers are great. They're the candy for people who always wondered what bath beads tasted like. After a quick roll, I had ...
A psychedelic dog turd. Don't worry. Fruit By The Foot to save the day:
Now, it's a Crayola turd wrapped in human muscle tissue.
I imagine that if you were to perform an autopsy on the caterpillar from Alice In Wonderland, his insides would look a lot like the inside of a Fruit-Chew Burrito.
Trippy nuggets and technicolor goop bursting out of a thin wisp of trippy, mangled flesh. That's what it tasted like, too: bright and neon -- like a black-light poster shoved its hand in my mouth.
Every bite pops with the flavor of its corresponding color. But, all of that fades away by the second bite. What normally happens with fruity, chewy snacks is, as they mingle with saliva, they turn into syrup in your mouth. Now, stack a bunch of those things on top of each other and then add in the Gusher juice. If there were any old-timey, bacteria-sized oil prospectors living in my mouth, they danced a jig because they struck it rich.
Double Stuf Oreo Stack, Aka "The Oreo Tower Of Babel"
In 1974, Oreo introduced the Double Stuf. With twice the normal allotment of cream between the cookies, Nabisco had created a new standard for insanity. Years later, I would remove the creams from a few Double Stufs and combine them into one large Oreo. But, I always dreamed big. I wanted to create a Tower Of Babel -- an Oreo structure so magnificent gods would punish all of humanity for my arrogance.
So, I built it. Sorry, humanity.
To begin, I became enraged at the modern packaging of Oreos. The plastic tear-away strip works well for exposing the center row of cookies for easy access, but it makes grabbing the cookies on the side rows a futile clawing that inevitably shatters the cookie.
Luckily, I only needed two cookies left intact for my Oreo Tower Of Babel. I didn't throw away the rest once I got them. You'll see them again later.
Next was the boring process of gingerly separating the Oreo cream from its cookie so that the cream remained solid. I piled them and piled them. This is the beast I had cursed with the breath of life:
I ate two cookies during the process because I'm not trying to achieve scientific accuracy as much as I am just trying to do stupid things, so what you're seeing there is 28 creams instead of 30. Each is a Double Stuf, which technically makes this a 56-Stuf Oreo.
It's around here that I realized I had no idea how to eat this thing. Do I smash it together and eat an angry wad of mush? Do I take a bite from the center and let the ends dangle and collapse like Powder's flaccid penis? I wasn't sure, so I did this...
Deep-throating was the only way to go. I employed the "cup the balls" hand grip to keep it all structurally sound and then I rammed this thing into my head.
If you're looking for a description of the flavor profiles, the mouth feel, and the flavor notes for the Oreo Tower Of Babel please refer to the following series of sequential pictures taken as I chewed the Oreo Tower Of Babel:
Super Swiss Roll Cake, AKA "The Swiss Roll Fortress"
The Swiss roll cake (or Ho Hos, or Yodels, depending on which snack cake brand you prefer) is a perfect dessert. Chocolate cake swirled into a spiral, accompanied by an airy vanilla cream, all encased within a soft, welcoming shell of chocolate icing -- just sweet enough to ensure that the two rolls per pack fully satisfy your sweet tooth. So, of course, as a kid, I wanted to turn three boxes worth of Swiss roll cakes into a multilayered cake that looks like a supervillain's secret fortress.
AssemblyIn high school, I made the same clay model of The Alamo two years in a row, receiving moderate to terrible grades on them. I applied the residual muscle memory from those Alamos to The Swiss Roll Fortress. Stacking layers of rolls on top of each other felt fluid, like I had done it before. Only now, I didn't have the stress of trying to achieve a passing grade. Only the panic of having a 2 trillion-calorie dessert sitting in my home for weeks.
The layers were separated by cake frosting:
White vanilla on the bottom layer, chocolate between the second and third layers, and more white vanilla all along the exterior. Remember the Oreo cookies from earlier? I put them in a food processor and created Oreo cookie powder:
The Oreo fairy dust was sprinkled on as a finishing touch.
The TasteI ended up making a giant Swiss roll cake.
You would imagine that's what would happen when you try to cram 24 of them into the clown car that is your mouth. But, the flavor is more than that. With chocolate and vanilla frosting oozing out of every bite, I had created a Super Swiss Roll Cake, an uber-Ho Ho. The taste wasn't just the culmination of a shit ton of rolls; it was the beginning.
This is the first and last of the Swiss roll cakes. The flavor was so intense that, after two bites, I was convinced that I, in 2015, had created the very first Super Swiss Roll Cake, which would soon travel back in time to become Swiss Roll Prime, the mysterious, time-traveling Super Swiss Roll Cake that would inspire the mass production of billions of Super Swiss Roll Cakes around the world, eventually leading to the creation of itself, The Swiss Roll Fortress, so that its moment of creation could be documented for posterity, by me.
So, yeah. It tasted alright.
The Ultimate Fast Food Meal, Aka "The Hell Baby"
We have come to this. This was the original food monster I dreamed of as a kid. Fast food, all of it, crammed into one sandwich. Would I be igniting a street fight in my mouth for flavor supremacy? Or would I stumble upon a flavor utopia wherein all fast foods live in harmony?
It'll probably be whichever one makes me diarrhea the most.
AssemblyI had to get a Double Decker Taco from Taco Bell, a plain cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's, an order of six-piece chicken nuggets from Wendy's, and the thigh and leg meat (with skin) of a two-piece combo meal from KFC, into one shape that would let me get a bit of everything in every bite.
This was the trickiest assembly of them all. It was a shitty vacation where each individual insists we all do the thing he or she wants to do. I figured, since the Double Decker is already two things at once (a hard-shell taco wrapped in a soft tortilla), I would shove everything up the Double Decker's ass and hope for the best.
I peeled the soft tortilla away from both sides of the hard shell. I lined one side with nuggets, and the other with the burger, which had been cut in half.
The chicken was torn and sprinkled on top, along with the fries.
Seeing it all assembled, I wondered why I ever wanted this. This is what food looks like when it's enchanted and hunting you. I expected this thing to say, between labored breaths, "Kill ... me ..." If I dropped this off in a tiny 1800s eastern European village at 3 p.m., a pious angry mob would burn it at the stake by 3:07.
From the pictures, it's hard to tell where one item ends and one begins, what's folded into what and where, and, for the love of God, why. That's kind of how it tasted. It ended up being the street fight I was hoping it wouldn't be. Everything was battling for supremacy, trying to be the dominant flavor. For the first few chews, all I tasted was violence. Malice. Hate. War.
From the ashes of war arose a victor: the Double Decker. The distinct taste of Taco Bell is a 2 ton stampeding behemoth that wrecks every flavor in its path with no mercy. If you're twitching on the ground in pain, reaching out for help, Taco Bell's taste will stomp you into goo. It cares not for your sad attempts at being yummy. It will be the only flavor; the final flavor, roaming the wastelands until time immemorial, searching for other flavors that it may crush beneath its foot. Taco Bell's taste doesn't give a fuck.
So, a word of warning to you all: If you happen to encounter Taco Bell's taste in a dark alley, don't run. Don't fight. Shhh. Quiet, child. You're safe now. Say a prayer, and wave goodbye to your mortal coils, for Taco Bell's taste is about to shuffle you straight off them fuckers.
Luis is defying his own advice by trying to outrun Taco Bell's taste. Not today, Taco Bell's taste. Not today. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.
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