Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: the Home Town Buffet is never a valid option for dining out. My father, on the other hand, would have you believe otherwise. Apparently a beverage glass full of soft-serve ice cream is acceptable as both an appetizer AND a dessert. I guess it should come as no surprise, then, that most of my life, if not my essence, can be summed up in three little words: unhealthy eating habits. Unlike a lot of people, I don't blame my parents for my ending up a fatty, or genetics. I know my dad and my grandmother raised me the best they could. It’s not their fault that they gave me potato chips, I just blame my own goddamn lack of common sense when I was a kid for not knowing when to just stop, just STOP and back away from the treats, or to just go outside and play stickball or kick-the-can or whatever the fuck Jughead did to burn off the ninety burgers he just had at Pop Tate‘s. Odds are I’ll end up being one of those fifty-year-old guys eating a glazed donut while holding a handkerchief in my free hand to mop the sweat off of my face. But perhaps something positive can be gained from my childhood follies. Allow me to present to you tales of terrible habits that you should never allow your own children to get away with. I personally will feed my kids nothing but saltines and water. Which they will have to eat on the treadmill. Who told you that you could stop running? THIN PEOPLE DO NOT WALK
Granny Goose
I don't know if this is a California-exclusive thing or what, but when I was a kid we had these chips made by an Oakland-based company called Granny Goose. Shit, they could still make them for all I know. I've long stopped caring. But for years I was ALL ABOUT IT like I was Konnan cutting a promo. How much did I love these chips? So much so that I had a great-aunt, my grandmother's sister, Imogene, whom I would CALL "Granny Goose", because she slightly resembled the cartoon goose that adorned each package. I fashioned an identity for a human being after a bird who brought me greasy, salty potato crisps. To this day I have never once called her by her actual name, and several of our relations refer to her as Granny Goose.
And what of the chips themselves? They came in all the standard flavors, but my favorite was, of course, plain, because I was a "picky eater" as a kid and unadventurous in pretty much every way. Choosing the most flavorless staple foods as a child has earned me a reputation among my adult friends these days as enjoying "bland foods". Well excuse me, Javier, but just because I didn't spend my childhood licking chili powder off my palm doesn't mean I don't count.
The selling point of these chips was as follows: each green wax bag of chips actually contained two unmarked cellophane sacks of chips, each roughly the size of, say, a "medium" bag of Doritos. You know the size; bigger than the one at 7-11 where you're looking at it thinking you're WAY hungrier than that, smaller than the one at Target where you're trying to calculate what time of day your roommates will be out so they won't see you spending four hours eating the entire thing. Despite the fact that Granny Goose was a kind enough soul as to deliver unto me a double-helping of potato-y goodness, each double-pack cost the same or less than any other measly chip. Plus, they were RIDGED, the thing that Lay's was sorely lacking (this was in the terrible dark era before the advent of Wavy Lay's), and the thing that Ruffles had too many of. I'm talking about big fat thick ridges. Ridges that looked like The Littles had been riding dune buggies all over your chips, not the pathetic fine-toothed-comb Ruffles ridges.
Since there were the two bags in each package, we would generally pick up two packages during each visit to the grocery store, which basically meant I had to pick the one day of the week I wasn't going to have chips. You see, in those days (and thankfully much less often now), I didn't have what a lot of what the Parisians call "willpower". If there was a container or bag of something, I was going to eat that fucking thing. The concept of something like "eating until I was full" may as well have been like trying to explain Schrödinger's cat to a zygote. I would sit down and watch Trans Formers and eat an entire goddamn bag of chips, with one exception:
I refused to eat any burnt chips, or indeed any chips with brown spots. They just looked terrible to me, awful unwanted things that would be thrown back into the bag and eaten around. It wasn't until years later and the advent of quality control that I realized what a rare taste treat a burnt potato chip was. These days just about the only chip company where you can find a burnt chip is in Kettle Chips, because they're a company that knows what makes a delicious potato chip: big ol' fuckin' ridges.
My other main foray into disgusting chips-based eating as a kid was Cheetos Paws, which I would pop into my mouth and suck on until all the cheese was gone and all I was left with was a soggy clump that so resembled Styrofoam it would actually squeak as I chewed it up. Again, I never failed to eat the entire goddamn bag, usually buying them in Santa Nella and scarfing them from inside a sleeper cab in my dad's truck, more often than not reading an Archie digest as we drove through the horrid Central Valley of California on the way to Modesto to visit...you guessed it...Granny Goose.
Bologna
Possibly the longest-lasting staple of my unhealthy diet was Foster Farms chicken bologna. No idea why or when my dad and grandmother started feeding it to me, but I assume part of their rationale for doing so was based on the assumption that since it was made out of chicken, it would therefore be healthier for me than…whatever it is normal bologna is made out of. On the other hand, their slathering it in mayonnaise and putting it on white bread certainly rendered moot the benefits of whatever animal from which the meat was harvested. Shit could have been unicorn bologna, mayonnaise is a one-way ticket to husky jeans. To recap, the ingredients of the first meat sandwich I remember eating were as follows:
- Chicken bologna
- White bread
- An enormous dripping tablespoon of Best Foods mayonnaise
It appears when they brought out the Best Foods, they did INDEED bring out the best, because when I was in grade school it for some reason occurred to me that the mayonnaise was the tastiest part of the entire sordid affair, and I soon began requesting mayonnaise sandwiches.
I shit you not, I was eating white bread mayonnaise sandwiches with none of the trimmings and I was loving it. I paid no heed to the grimaces of my family members, I just wanted the mayo to keep on flowing. (That is also a popular sentence in first-person slashfic.) Thankfully for me, my guardians had sense enough to not pack mayonnaise sandwiches into my lunch, as warm mayo is nothing but trouble. For bag lunches, the go-to sandwich was grape jelly on white bread. I could not abide by peanut butter, apparently because there is some sort of nutritional value to it.
For whatever reason, I eventually tired of mayonnaise altogether, as I moved back to the bologna, this time unadorned by any petty accoutrements such as condiments or, you know, anything else. I began eating these sandwiches two at a time, sometimes two meals a day. It was pretty much what I ate from high school all the way up until a little while ago, although in about 2001 or so I cut back to one at a time. These sandwiches came to define me to my friends and family. “A ring of red and a loaf of bread,” as my grandmother would refer to them. If you twist that to somehow mean something dirty, fuck you, my grandmother was a saint. If you instead giggle at what a gross tubbo I was, carry on. For a time I would be embarrassed at wolfing these less-than-savory-looking sandwiches in front of new friends, and they may have poked fun at me once or twice, but eventually they just shrugged it off as one of my many quirks and we went back to playing WWF War Zone or whatever.
Keep in mind that I was double-fisting these processed-chicken horrors IN CONJUNCTION with the Granny Goose chips. Yep, two sandwiches and an entire bag of potato chips, that’s the lunch for me! HEY DO WE HAVE ANY MORE DING-DONGS I CAN STILL FEEL MY ARMS
Little Ceasars
When I was younger and all of my friends were eating from extravagant pizzerias, I was in my living room, hunched over a plate of Little Caesars Olde-Tymey Pizza-Style Confection (Prepared In the "I-talian" Fashion!) watching VHS tapes of "Dinosaurs" and reading a Bloom County book. My family was never one for the traditional, or "good-tasting" chains so popular with the kids back then and those with self-esteem nowadays. We weren't interested in what Pizza Hut had to offer (which was essentially cheese and pepperoni atop a giant flat doughnut). Round Table could get right the fuck out of here. And Mountain Mike's (the local high-end pizza chain) was only reserved for special occasions like after a Little League game or on a birthday; namely, when we weren't payin'. The rest of the time it was good ol' Pizza! Pizza!
See, the deal with Little Caesars -- or "The Cease"-- is, you could either order an actual, delicious, filling cheesy delight from somewhere else, or, for the same price, you could have TWO large pizzas! And diarrhea at no extra charge! Well, seeing as how my family is the SOLE REASON that the Salinas Carl's Jr. started enforcing a "Limit 4 Per Customer" rule on 25-cent hamburger Sundays, the choice was clear. Remember the Granny Goose two-fer? This was that extravagance writ large. Or writ round at any rate. Back in the early days, the pizzas would come side-by-side in an enormous paper package that was stapled shut on one end. This was a company that knew it's target audience: men and women so desperate to eat two large pizzas that they had neither the time nor the inclination to navigate the murky waters of a cardboard pizza box or the organizational skills required to set two pizzas side-by-side on their own. JUST TEAR THE PAPER AND EAT IT YOU FAT SONS OF BITCHES. Pizza Hut later tried to ape Little Caesars by launching the BigFoot, but seeing as how Pizza Hut pizza was actually filling, it never really took off.
Now, let me preface all of this by saying that I actually greatly enjoy the taste of a Little Caesars pizza. I know a lot of this has to do with the fact that if you have consumed over seventy-five pounds of a particular food in your lifetime, you are completely fucked and doomed to enjoy it forever. Or maybe it's just that I enjoy any food that I have eaten so much of that I have vomited it up on more than one occasion. I'm looking at YOU, Keebler SoftBatch cookies.
Probably the most terrifying thing about their pizzas is the cheese. Normal pizzerias will make a melty delight where you go to pull a piece away and the dripping yellow plasma will force you to make that move where you try and pile the elongated threads of cheese onto your slice and end up looking like a total douchebag while you're standing there like a human taffy machine while other people are waiting I MEAN COME ON we don't have all day here, who the hell brings pizza to a picnic anyway. The aforementioned Mountain Mike's probably had the stretchiest, meltiest cheese of all. There was hardly an instance eating at their establishment (in between spending quarters by choosing M. Bison and pissing off my friends because I would just do that thing where I torpedo back and forth across the screen the entire time) where I didn't end up with a string of cheese down my throat on the way to my belly and the other end still attached to the slice. There is no sensation quite more terrifying to a fat kid than food that isn't finished still heading down. The Pizza! Pizza! supplied by the diminutive Roman emperor, on the other hand, was covered with a white substance that I suppose COULD have been cheese, but may have in fact been of the "string" variety. Each slice would pull away effortlessly, the cheese retaining its triangular shape at all costs. Apparently Little Caesars slices their pizzas with lightsabers. The official title of the gentleman or lady at the cutting board is "cheese cauterizer". The above promotional picture is a blatant lie. That cheese is actually rubber cement or something.
Another enigma of The Cease is that I don't believe their pizza has ever been piping hot. I'm almost positive that their ovens are specifically calibrated to cook all of the leprosy or whatever out of pizza (I am not sure how food works) and then instantly cool it to a tepid just-barely-hotter-than-the-inside-of-your-mouth. Just enough to assure you that heat was involved at some point somewhere in the process. There was never any danger of burning the roof of your mouth or anything, which I have learned through my travels is a defining characteristic of pizza.
From the lukewarm coagulated cheese to the business-card-thin pita bread which formed its base, everything about the pizza seemed designed to allow the unfortunate, elephantine consumer to keep on consuming until there was nothing left but a red-stained white undershirt and the tears of the day's promise left unfulfilled. But the pizza itself, shockingly, wasn't what was involved in my most shameful Little "C"s memory. It was the Crazy Bread.
Crazy Bread is the same dough used in the pizzas, except instead of putting entire slices of mozzarella on top, deep-frying some pepperoni, having a dog pant on it for fifteen seconds and calling it a day, the diabolical evil geniuses at Caesars Corporate have something far more sinister in mind. They begin by aging the dough in oak caskets full of 100% pure elk butter (none of that pussy margarine shit) for eight years, only removing it when it has become eight parts butter to every one part dough, or until the oak barrels become transparent. They then roll the ball of dough down a hill of garlic salt, where another team catches the ball and shoves it underneath a door which leads to the kitchen of a Little Caesars proper, where it is sliced, baked using the same stringent guidelines as their pizzas (using their patented TepidTech heating system), then sliced into strips and dunked into vats of movie popcorn butter and Guido-strength parmesan cheese. It is then placed in a foil-lined bag and placed under a heating lamp until the next customer could waddle in and pant heavily while gesturing frantically toward whichever item they desired. The piece de resistance was a small tub of marinara sauce (not included) in which to dunk the Crazy Bread. It was, inevitably, dubbed "Crazy Sauce".
And I fucking loved it.
To me, the pizza was great. I adored it, and every time it was ordered I awaited the inevitable stomachache as I hoovered down piece after piece while watching Tim "The Toolman" Taylor make a rocking chair with tank treads or some bullshit. But the highlight of the night was the Crazy Bread mit Sauce. I would eat the Crazy Bread first as though it were an appetizer and not a horrible meal in its own right. I would uncap the sauce (often the hottest component in the entire Caesars oeuvre) and dunk the bread right in. But instead of eating it -- and thus reducing my chances of having a heart attack like five seconds from now -- I chose to SUCK THE SAUCE OFF AND DIP AGAIN. I would do this up to three or four times before taking each bite, as my poor gluttonous mind was certain THIS was the reason that there was so much more sauce than bread, and that everyone else was doing it WRONG. I have never told anyone else this terrible secret outside of my family, and I ask you not to judge me, but instead join my class-action suit against the evil Pizza Corporations and the Marinara Consortium of the Americas for making a product too delicious to resist and/or failing to provide directions with Crazy Bread and Crazy Sauce.
I was recently back in my hometown on an errand, and I was suddenly overcome with hunger and pressed for time. For those of you who don't know (and my God, how lucky are you?), in the past couple of years Little Caesars has enacted a new promotion, the "Hot-N-Ready". Surprisingly, this is not a new Shannon Tweed movie, rather a five dollar pizza. Basically, what they do is they continuously make large cheese and pepperoni pizzas throughout the day, nonstop, and anyone who wants to can just walk in off the street, plunk down a five-spot and instantly receive something guaranteed to kill them faster. America! What a country!
Anyway, since I was pressed for time and the place was RIGHT THERE, I decided to bite the bullet and have my first Little Caesars pizza in several years. I had five bucks on me and was in the middle of a shame spiral, so who cares? Insert Cathy strip or Elaine Boosler joke here about fat thighs or something. I walked in and shockingly there was a line, and appeared to be no pizzas waiting in under the heat lamps. (Which were helpfully labeled "Pepperoni 1" though "Pepperoni 12". Guess they don't get a lot of vegetarians in there or something.) As I stood there I looked to my left and saw a large mural advertising the Pizza! Pizza! deal of days gone by, touting the two large pizzas for the price of one. I turned back to the menu board and had no idea what the fuck they were talking about, because I only saw four items listed: Large Hot-N-Ready Pizza, Deep Dish Hot-N-Ready Pizza, Caesars Wings (what), and Crazy Bread/Crazy Sauce.
As the man in front of me ordered, I overheard that it would be a ten- to fifteen-minute wait for pizzas. On the other hand, I saw a massive pile of Crazy Bread under the heat lamps, and a small pyramid of tubs of the blood-red sauce. I glanced back up at the board:
CRAZY BREAD - $1.00
CRAZY SAUCE - $0.89
A dollar. A DOLLAR for Crazy Bread? You have to be kidding me. I stepped forward and ordered a Crazy Bread and Crazy Sauce, plunked my two dollars down, and headed back to my car. As I pulled out of the parking lot I realized I was about to attempt to eat one of the greasiest, messiest foods known to man while driving on the freeway. Thinking quickly, I snugged the tub of sauce into one of my cupholders and felt a deep twinge of shame. Fighting through that, I opened up the bag of Crazy Bread with my free hand and noticed something for the first time:
Crazy Bread is an entire pizza's worth of dough.
It only costs a dollar.
Seriously, what the fuck is going on? I can buy a five pound sack of butter bread for a dollar but I have to pay four bucks for a gallon of gas? As I started on the Crazy Bread all I could think about was how buttery, how greasy, how garlicky it was. How full the bottom of the bag was with its leavings. How I used to sit and eat a whole bag of this stuff like Fun Dip BEFORE I would eat an entire large pizza, and what a treat it was. How excited I would be whenever we got Little Caesars. And now I can buy a large pizza for five bucks or a rolled-up pizza cut into strips for a dollar. All I could think about was how disgusting this stuff was that I was putting into my body.
It was delicious.