M.C. RibEye – University of Minnesota student, Master of Soups and Stocks, lives in Minneapolis.
12 September 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Over 23 Hours of Epic Action!
“Have you ever had a tough time deciding what movie or TV show to watch on any given evening?” asked my cousin Eddie. “Let me premise this by saying that you know that you’re in for the night, and nothing sounds better than sitting back, feet up, popcorn bowl in hand, brain turned off and ready to be entertained…and yet nothing in your film library strikes you as either good or interesting, or the least bit intriguing in any way.”
“I hate that,” replied my brother, Killdozer.
I followed his sentiment by saying, “That happens all the time to us. I’m stuck at the DVD store with a few friends and no one can agree on what to watch, so we waste hours browsing… It’s maddening.”
My brother and I were out with our cousin, Edmund Callipeaux, for lunch at a University of Minnesota campus hamburger joint. Classes began this week, and as I am now a freshman attending the College of Liberal Arts, I have been invited to partake in a tradition that Eddie and my brother began 3 years ago when he started school here. A tradition that involves bi-monthly mid-afternoon lunches at Manning’s restaurant. (And they not only go to this same diner every 2 weeks, but they also order the same thing to eat every time.)
So, since this was the first week of classes, we were out to lunch with Eddie. However, to clarify the semantics of the phrase, Eddie claims that he is always a bit out to lunch, so whenever he is actually having lunch out (or away from his home) he says that it has the effect of a double negative in mathematics - - being out to lunch while out at lunch cancels out the confusion he normally experiences, and during these times Eddie can become quite lucid and clear-minded.
Hence, I will now recount to you the mainly accurate, yet slightly exaggerated story he told us while he experienced an elevation in his brain synapses brought on by our luncheon. The setting for my tale is the darkened interior of Manning’s bar and restaurant, a neighborhood joint that has occupied the corner of Como and 22nd in Southeast Minneapolis for years and years.
As we took our places on cushiony-backed bar stools at a high top table, my brother, Killdozer said, “The other day, I was in Target and I almost bought this Ancient Greek gods movie collection.”
“What was it? Did it have pirates?” asked Eddie.
“I don’t know. I think it was a bunch of movies about various mythological stories, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves…and stuff like that. I think that the movie, Hercules Against the Moon Men was in the collection. The box listed a bunch of titles; it looked cool,” continued Killdozer.
“You didn’t pick it up?” I replied.
“No,” Killdozer confirmed.
“Hmmm…. That sounds like it might have been a mistake,” said Eddie.
I then weighed in on the subject, “Maybe we should drive over to Target after lunch and see if we can still get a copy?”
“That’s a good idea. But unfortunately, I have to get home right after lunch. I’m going to need to take a nap, and then I have to start getting ready for dinner tonight,” said Eddie as he took a sip of ice water.
Killdozer asked, “What’s for supper tonight at the Callipeaux homestead?”
Eddie then said, “That’s the reason I was asking you guys about the whole movie phenomenon. I’m curious about it because that inability to make a decision not only happens to me with movies, but it happens to me on a regular basis when I walk into a grocery store!”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Just like with the movies, I look at all my food options and nothing hits me as viable. Heck, over the years, we’ve assembled a veritable video store-sized collection of movies at our house, and many times I’ll be standing there and nothing looks good. I’m not interested in this or that movie. Comedy, drama, romance, etc., etc…. Nothing looks good!” Edmund continued.
“Dramatic-romance-comedies?” chirped my brother.
“Is that a classification?” asked Eddie.
“It sounds like Clash of the Olympians might fit into that category,” I replied.
“Well anyway,” continued Eddie. “I often walk into the grocery store and I do the same thing. I try to gauge my mood so that I can land on a meal option. For instance, do I want action and adventure? Or maybe mystery? Or romance? Horror?”
“What would horror be as a meal?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know,” replied Eddie. “Let’s just say that I wasn’t allowed into the kitchen for a while after attempting a puree of various melted cheeses, cooked ground beef, and steamed vegetables. I blended them in a blender to what I thought would become gastronomic perfection, but instead, I ended up with something that matched the viscosity and texture of cake frosting.”
“Ouch,” I said as I perused the menu wondering what it would be like if restaurants had categories like Documentary, or Sci-Fi, or Thrillers!
The waitress came over to our table and Eddie and my brother both ordered the same boring, Classic bacon cheeseburgers with fried onions that they’ve been happily stuffing into their faces for the past 3 years, while I decided to go Independent and order a buffalo-chicken sandwich!
After the waitress left our table, Eddie returned to his grocery store story….
“So I walked into the grocery store by my house earlier today, and for the life of me, I could not decide what I wanted to cook for dinner tonight! It was very frustrating. First I thought pasta, then rice, then I started to wonder what sort of meat options I had, then I thought perhaps no meat would be the solution. I usually try to start with the basics and build up from there. What will the protein be? Chicken? Fish? Ham? (All three together? Mixed in a blender?) After that, what are the other components? Vegetables? If so, what kind? Onions? Carrots? Yams? Are they canned or fresh bought? The choices are endless, and madness lurks at the end of every isle and inside every cooler door, because everywhere you go in these grocery stores there’s just more and more stuff to choose from!”
“You’ve had quite a day so far, Eddie. Haven't you?” said my brother, Killdozer.
“It’s tough being me sometimes. There is a lot of stress and anxiety…. That’s why I’ve had to schedule a nap for later this afternoon!” replied Edmund while he took a sip from his glass of Coke-a-Cola.
“So what did you decide? What’s for dinner tonight, Eddie?” I asked as our various lunch orders were being placed on the table.
“Well, that’s the beauty of my story. It’s what I learned today…and it’s why I’m sharing this with you now…. I decided not to decide…. I decided to roll the dice!” said Eddie as he picked up the same bacon cheeseburger with fried onions that he’s been ordering for the past 3 years.
“You hit the frozen food isle for TV Dinners?” asked Killdozer.
“I’ll bet you did the old stand-by: frozen pizza. I hear frozen pizzas are in season this time of year,” I conjectured.
“Nope to both of you,” Eddie replied as he dipped his cheeseburger into a pool of catsup that occupied about a quarter of his plate.
As an aside: Can I ask you something? Are there 2 kinds of people… those who squirt the catsup on their burgers and those who dip? And what is this catsup or ketchup stuff anyway. They say that there are tomatoes in there, but deep down I know that I don’t want to know how it’s really made. It’s like the sausage of condiments…. I use the stuff but I don’t want to know where it’s been. How can it sit on this table at room temperature all day? How can it be safe to consume if everyone that sits here has handled it? Eddie has a brother-in-law who visited a ketchup factory in the mid-90s and hasn’t eaten the stuff since. That should mean something to me.
“Pass that thing over here,” asked my brother as he motioned toward the upside-down red squeeze bottle in my hand. “So what did you do, Eddie. As with all of your stories…I can hardly stand the suspense.”
“Well,” replied Eddie. “I was standing in the isle directly after the cheese counter, and I looked down to the end and I saw this elderly lady who looked all nice and grandmotherly-like. She stood by a shopping cart and her purse was resting in the cart where little kids usually sit. By the way, have you ever worried about those carts with the spot to sit a kid? I’m putting my food into a cart where a toddler (or 10,000 toddlers) has/have sat.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Don’t get off subject.”
“Right,” said Eddie as he motioned his hands just above the surface of the table like an umpire calling a runner safe at first base.
“Right. I’m looking at this lady and I’m thinking to myself, ‘She looks like she knows how to cook!’ I mean who knows, really? But I’m telling you, something inside me said, you can learn something from her.
“What do you mean?” I said while I started in on the second half of my adventurous buffalo chicken sandwich. (And it was tasty!)
My brother thanked our waitress and confirmed that everything at our table was fine as Edmund said, “You guys are going to love this! It’s the perfect crime - - of plagiarism! Meal Plagiarism. Is that a crime? I don’t know…. What I’m telling you is that I decided not to decide what I was going to cook for dinner, and instead, I followed this nice lady around the whole grocery store and bought one of everything she bought! By the end, we had the exact same things in our carts! Dinner is on and I didn’t have to make any tough decisions!”
Killdozer and I looked at each other for a bit (a second or two) and then my brother asked, “What?”
“What did you, or, I mean she get…or rather, what did the two of you buy?” I asked as I thought to myself, ‘This is going to be an interesting 4 years at the University of Minnesota if these lunches proceed as scheduled.’
“Well…. I didn’t know at first how things were going to work out. She was over by all these cans of things and I pretended to look at some olives or something, and before she meandered away, she had placed a small yellow can and a lager blue can into her cart. After that, I casually strolled over to the place where she had stood and grabbed the next cans off the shelf. One was a can of black beans, and the other was filled with chopped green chilies. In my wildest dreams, I had no idea where this was going to lead. Black beans and green chilies…. What do you do with those?”
“Intriguing,” replied my brother. “Didn’t she notice that you were following her?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I tried to be cool and act like I was just wandering from place to place. But let me ask you this, have you ever inadvertently followed a person through a whole grocery store? You notice them here at this spot, and then again over there, and then again at the cheese counter…. You’re both going through the store at the same pace and following a similar path. It’s a coincidence. But it makes sense, the stores are laid out to take you from one end to the other and finally out through the check out area.
“I remember this one time a while back when some guy and myself were going in opposite directions through the isles of a grocery store in Rochester, Minnesota. We passed each other in the middle of the first isle (him going east and me going west). And then we meet again going the opposite directions at the center of the canned food isle next door. It was like we were making figure eights as we moved from one end of the shop to the other. (Or maybe it was more like we were making a double-helix shape?) After 7 or 8 isles, as we passed each other for the last time midway down the soda pop isle at the far end of the store, and the guy says to me, ‘We must be after the same stuff.’ To which I replied, ‘Yeah, I guess so. But you went the wrong way and I went the right way.’
“I don’t think that the nice lady noticed that I was following her all. She probably thought it was a coincidence or something. Who knows? She may have just thought that some kind young man was also looking for the same buy one, get one free packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Which by the way, was awesome. That’s when I knew that I was definitely onto something…. Not only did I not have to decide what to buy, but I was also saving MONEY! Who doesn’t love that?”
I then said, “Kind young man…? Dude, didn’t you just turn 40 last year? Peace and love and everything, but I think that we need to dispense with the quote/unquote young moniker.”
“Robust. How about using that as your new descriptive adjective? It’s a relatively vague and yet, complimentary-sounding term,” my brother said this while patting Eddie assuredly on the back.
“I could live with robust, or fresh. Do kids still say fresh these days?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
“I ask about the word fresh,” Eddie continued to say, “Because the shopping lady picked out some of the nicest tomatoes and avocadoes that you could imagine. Definitely a good time of the year for those things here in Minnesota. And a nice onion too. And as I proceeded to do the same, I was really scratching my head and getting pretty confused. What does all this stuff add up to? Chicken, beans, chilies, onions, tomatoes, avocadoes?”
“Maybe she was fixing to grill up some kebabs?” proffered my brother.
“You guys are going to love this…. We rolled our carts into the cooler area with all the cheese and milk and stuff like that. After browsing a bit, she reaches out and picks up a block of cheddar cheese....
"This worried me because I was getting so confused that I was starting to wonder if my little experiment had backfired on me. Then she picks out a jar of spicy salsa and that’s when I almost turned around to go back to the front of the store and start completely over.
Salsa?
What on Earth was she buying all this stuff for? But then she picked up a package of 8 large flour tortillas, and after a few minutes, I totally figured it out.
“Looking down into my cart at all the items, I told myself that it was just like playing the game Scrabble. Each food item is like a little wooden letter from the alphabet, and I just needed to rearrange them on the game board to spell out the perfect word,” Eddie said this as he looked cautiously around the restaurant to make sure no one was eavesdropping.
He then proceeded to describe how he used his artistic and creative brain, “to imagine all the ingredients in every possible combination, and when I eventually used my mind’s eye to see all the vegetables as well as the chicken inside the large flour tortilla, I knew that the Triple-Word-Score was BURRITOS - - 100 points at least and an extra 50 for using all my letters!"
“Dude. Burritos. They are awesome! Some of my favorite foods are packed in burrito-form. You’re a lucky man, Eddie Callipeaux,” my brother replied.
Edmund continued, “I was so excited; I had no idea how the mystery would be solved! And the tension was really starting to rack my nerves. Talk about an explosive ending to an action-packed rollercoaster ride through the grocery store! Unbelievable; it was the burritos all the while! Hitchcock himself could not have delivered a more suspenseful and thrilling ending!”
“No cilantro or garlic?” asked my brother.
“And no lettuce?” I added.
“She must have had those at home, or maybe she forgot them along the way,” replied Eddie.
“Maybe she didn’t have a C, a G, or an L tile on her Scrabble board?” I jokingly said.
“I guess I’ll be having my burritos without cilantro, garlic, or lettuce (which is too bad) however it’s worth it too have been given this meal for free,” Eddie said.
“You didn’t have to pay?” I asked thinking that somehow Eddie had convinced the mystery lady to pay for his grocery cart too.
“No…. I mean, yes,” Eddie confirmed. “I did have to pay. Actually we got into line at roughly same time - - next to each other, at neighboring checkout counters. While milling through the various magazines, we both advanced through our short queues at a similar pace. And while my items were being beeped across that laser thing, I heard the same beep beep beep behind me, and when my teller said 29 – 74, I heard the same monetary request repeated behind me, almost as an echo in stereo sound. It was uncanny. If the store manager is paying close attention to the numbers tonight while he or she balances the books, they’ll probably catch the next flight to Vegas after considering the odds of 2 people having the same bill in their store, at precisely the same time!”
Our waitress brought over our bill and as Eddie pulled out his wallet, he said, “If you didn’t know what had really happened, it might really freak you out.”
"No doubt about that," I confirmed.
“Well, as usual, this lunch was great. You’ll have to let us know how dinner turns out tonight,” Killdozer replied as he pushed back his chair from the table.
While the three of us walked away from the table, and Eddie was waving good-bye to our waitress, I started to wonder about the odds of Eddie making something good out his burrito ingredients. Approaching the door to the outside world, I said, “You know, Eddie, that nice lady in the grocery store has done all the heavy mental work for you up until now. Your menu is set because of her. And as I think about it, you ordered the same bacon cheeseburger with fried onions that you’ve eaten here twice a month for the past 3 years, thereby sidestepping once again any actual decision-making on your part. But after your nap this afternoon, you’ll be on your own in that kitchen….”
Eddie then replied, “…. I know what you’re saying, you can only lead a horse to water. I have all the ingredients, but do I have the wherewithal to pull it all together and make something fantastic? Do I possess the culinary skills to tantalize the taste buds of Zeus, as well as all your other Olympians, and beckon them down from their immortal coil to feast BURRITO-Style?
“I do not know the answer to that question right now, but I will have a response for you later tonight! That much I can promise!” exclaimed Edmund.
“Aim for a Zeus from one of those cheesy, low-budget adventure movies and I think you’ll do just fine,” I said as we crossed the threshold of the dimly lit restaurant and walked out into the blinding sunlight of the south-facing parking lot. – MCR
