I am a Consumer Whore #3

I have developed a habit of taking ZonePerfect bars with me to work and occasionally snacking on them around the house. I'm not convinced that they really count as food, but they taste good enough to be eaten regularly, they have a long shelf life, and they don't make me feel as sick as vending machine candy. They're also probably a more nutritious snack than the salt & vinegar potato chips of which I just compulsively ate a handful while trying to finish this paragraph.

Around Christmas (note: I've been meaning to post this for about two and a half months now), I discovered that my latest box of substitute food contained a coupon for a dollar off "New" Cookie Dough ZonePerfect bars. I have long held the opinion that nutrition bars are always going to taste funny and that any attempt to change that will either fail or result in something that is no longer nutritious. Therefore, the idea of combining a nutrition bar with cookie dough seemed preposterous to me.

I am intrigued by the preposterous.

I am a Consumer Whore #2

Today was a big day for the Big Ten conference in football. It also turned out to be a terrible day, but I didn't know that when I woke up this morning. I only knew how great it would be if the conference won four games and proved that its teams deserved consideration among the country's frontrunners.

To get ready for the logjam of Big Ten games around noon, I wanted to do something that would show my unequivocal support for the conference, but I wasn't sure what I could do. For inspiration, I turned to my memory of the conference's own Big Ten Network and the way in which they covered games this season. It didn't take me long to realize that there was only one thing that I really could do, one thing that the Big Ten Network had endorsed above all else.

I made RO*TEL-and-Velveeta queso dip.

__sdfg's Chinese Feast

The thought that I'd be spending New Year's alone this year somehow reminded me of the scene in A Christmas Story where the family's planned Christmas dinner is ruined and they go to a Chinese restaurant. I therefore decided to pull some recipes from a Chinese cookbook and make something that would resemble a meal.

As you can tell from the above photo, I don't really know what I'm doing.

I considered applying the verde sauce to the rice, but elected not to.

I am a Consumer Whore

I went running this morning. I used a treadmill and I didn't last very long, due to being incredibly out of shape, but the run was still enough to leave my brain flooded with endorphins for a few hours in the morning and early afternoon. I also noticed that it was exceptionally warm out today, so I decided that I would go out and get lunch while wearing a T-shirt without a jacket. When you can go get lunch without a jacket on December 31st, you go get lunch without a jacket.

I've been watching a lot of Footba'al lately, so I've soaked up hours of good, wholesome, American advertising. With my runner's high in full effect and an empty stomach, I knew that I was in the ideal condition to do my American duty. I was going to stimulate the economy by doing what the commercials told me to do.

And so I bought a Taco Bell Touchdown $5 Buck Box.

In case it becomes significant later

I accidentally ate a small amount of raw shrimp paste today.

Everything that I have been able to look up after the fact suggests that this was a bad idea.

Exceeding expectations

About a week and a half ago, I decided it was time to really buckle down on school. Since I'm posting here, I obviously haven't done a great job of that, but one thing that stuck is that I haven't cooked anything in a while. Preparing edible food and cleaning up afterward requires at least an hour and a half, and once I start cooking something, I have no choice but to finish. If I get fast food or unfreeze something, I can eat and be done with it.

The problem with this has been that there aren't many convenient fast food places between my apartment and the Engineering Building. The best two are Subway and Woody's Oasis (a Lansing-area Mediterranean chain), and I've eaten enough of them to largely exhaust my taste. Yesterday night, after working on something at the EB until about 6:30 or so, I realized that I would need to grab something from the food court across the street. My options were Subway (overdone), Woody's (overdone), Villa Pizza (consistently awful), and Panda Express.

I hadn't eaten at Panda Express in a while. When I first started going to Michigan State, I didn't have much of a reference point on Chinese food. My parents usually ordered from one place that I never particularly liked, so during my first few years, Panda Express seemed like a convenient and acceptable option. After moving off-campus, though, I started going to better places that were outside walking distance (mostly Golden Wok). Lately, most of the Chinese food that I've have had has been stuff that I've attempted to cook at home. I don't think it's ever turned out particularly well, but it's been palatable at least, and it has the advantage of being cheap to make in quantities that would give me leftovers.

So, yesterday night, as I leaving the Engineering Building, I said to myself, "I'll have Panda Express. It can't be that bad."

Oh, yes, it can.

For the sake of posting...

After months of study, I have concluded that the only justifiable reason why Italian restaurants are able to charge as much as they do for chicken parmigiana is that after the meal, they do the dishes. I can't see what else would sustain demand at that price when it's so cheap to make it yourself.

Also, hooray for MSU finally showing some semblance of the form it was supposed to have this season.