Jack in the Box

This is my new favorite fast food eat place, having eaten food here about 4 times so far. Part of it probably has to do with how I find the mascot hilarious:

He's kind of creepy like the Burger King king, but I think in a more non-threatening and funny way. They both just like to watch, but Jack is probably more business about it than the King is. The King, being carved out of a tree and then bronzed, has a wild obsession with watching. He can do nothing else. I tried to find him in Sterling, Colorado, the place of his creation, but he was not as easily found as the old woman in the visitor center told me he would be. The King was probably watching me the whole time.

Anyway, Jack in the Box, my New Favorite Fast Food Eat Place, has a bunch of good food choices. There are some rules about ordering food there though. Actually there aren't, but I just like to always order 2 tacos every time I'm there no matter what. There's something about how it's listed on the menu as "2 tacos" that cracks me up. Like you have to get two tacos at a time, and tacos only in even numbers. Can you buy just one taco? Probably you can order that, but you will still be charged for both tacos and right before the guy hands you your order, he takes one of the tacos out of the bag and drops it into the trash right in front of your face. This is the kind of place I would go to if ever I decided that tonight I will eat 100 tacos. (Update: people have apparently already done this and then filmed, with 200 tacos too. I guess I wasn't thinking big enough.) It's a good thing to add on top of an order though, since it's only a dollar for two tacos.

Besides the tacos though, I ate the steak melt sandwich there (thumbs up) and another sandwich I ordered blind. I didn't have my glasses with me and the menu was way in the back. I could tell that there were about a dozen numbered items to order from so I went with a number that had to be a valid choice -- sandwich item number 7. It turned out to be a chicken sandwich with bacon on it. Also good.

Jack in the Boxes are open 24 hours per day, so it makes them an important middle-of-the-night food option. I think they serve their breakfast menu all day too, but I have not tried it. They also claim to have desserts and egg rolls on their menu, but I'm suspicious about that. Everyone knows that the other menu options in restaurants are just to make the menu look bigger and more impressive. Nobody actually orders those things. If you did, you'd get one of those "alright wise guy, what are you trying to pull?" looks. Actually, once when I was at Burger King, I did order the pie slice, and the employee didn't say anything strange about it. I thought it was going to be like a game of chicken, to see if I would first try to retract my ridiculous order of nonexistent pie to save myself embarrassment, or if the employee would end up having to confess that there is not and has never been any pie at a Burger King. I was in disbelief when I actually saw that I got served a slice of pie.

I rate Jack in the Box 2 out of 2.

Candy Bars

I ate some candy bars recently. They're kind of similar. It's Three Musketeers, Milky Way, and Snickers. I used to think that Snickers was the best and Three Musketeers was the worst because of how much junk is put in each one, but now I feel the opposite way - mainly because of the nougat part of the candy.

Snickers - This has peanuts and caramel on top, but it has the lowest quality nougat inside. Also most of the space in the candy bar is wasted with the peanuts.

Milky Way - The nougat in here is better than in the snickers, but I feel like the caramel is a waste of space.

Three Musketeers - This thing is all nougat. I know what I'm getting and I like it. Also, I like the name better than the other two candy bars I talked about here.

If I had a choice between all three candy bars, I would pick Three Musketeers nearly all the time. The other times I would pick snickers and milky way to remind myself of why I like Three Musketeers more.


Update: It has come to my attention that the name of the candy bar is actually "3 Musketeers" and not "Three Musketeers". Maybe I was just excited to spell out the number.

Sardines with BONES

I had a good experience with those sardines in tomato sauce I ate before. I think some of it might have had to do with how it was King Oscar brand and that just seems real classy to me. So I got sardines again, but these ones are big and in soybean oil instead of tomato sauce.

I first thought something was wrong when I opened it up and it smelled awful. I didn't realize there were tons of bones in it until I started eating a bit and had a bunch of little crunchy things in my mouth. They're like tiny little rib bones all over the place and I was eating them.

Here's what was going through my head while I ate it:

"I'm going to do it. I'm going to eat those sardines. Ugh, this is so disgusting. It smells so bad. They're huge disgusting pieces of sardines. It makes me want to vomit, looking at it with the smell too. ...here I go. ... That was rough. I shuddered when I was eating it. Okay, time for a second bite. Maybe I liked them more last time because they were in tomato sauce - this time it's soybean oil. I don't know.. I don't know if I can do it - finish the can. ... ughhhhh, spine bones! It looks like a bunch of dead rotting fish. mannn.. ughh.. no, I can do it. I don't give up on food. ... mann, freaking bones. I hate bones in fish - they're small and everywhere sometimes. When you eat chicken, you know where the bones are gonna be and it's cool. Also you don't run into spine bones. I swear, I'm supposed to be looking at food, but all I'm seeing is the cover of Doom II Master Levels. ... man, ughh. little crunchy things I'm chewing on. ... man, freaking bones! I feel like I've been through this scenario before. And it's like, why the hell is this part all purple/dark red colored? Am I supposed to eat that?? I don't even know what to do. Man, these spines. And all those tiny little ribs. Okay, so I've eaten like two thirds of it so far. I can do it. ... man, okay. ... I ate all the meat. I did it. I'm not feeling so good. I need to rest or something."



There's a million little bones in this and they break off the spine so easily that it's impossible to remove them all. And after I was done, it looked like some kind of boneyard. It was disgusting, and I rate this food item zero of two.

Peanut Butter Sauce Pasta

I just got like three jars of peanut butter, so I'm all excited to eat a lot of peanut butter. I looked up online some recipe for a peanut butter sauce to use on pasta, but I didn't remember exactly what all the instructions were for it while I was in the kitchen. It probably doesn't matter because I wasn't about to start measuring things anyway.

Okay, so first, I cooked some pasta. It's wheels. I kept some of the boiling water in a glass cup so I could use it for my sauce.



Then for the sauce, I dumped in a bunch of chunky peanut butter because I thought it would be neat to have a bunch of little peanut pieces in the end. Then I poured in about the same amount of hot water as there was peanut butter. I was going to use some half and half next, but mine was chunky and smelled like old yogurt, so that's no good. Instead I used a glob of bacon grease from when I ate a ton of bacon. I remembered it said something about soy sauce and garlic cloves, so I poured in a bit of a pack of soy sauce and then some garlic herb powder I had. And also cock sauce.



So the sauce recipe is like this:
- chunky peanut butter
- hot water from the pasta
- bacon grease
- soy sauce
- garlic herb powder
- cock sauce

There are no amounts or measurements! You're supposed to eyeball it and taste it a ton as you do it!

I rate it two of two because I love peanut butter and I'm proud of myself for this after my last pasta disaster.

Bacon substitutes

I found myself craving a BLT, but I've never cooked bacon and I wasn't sure we had any. But I did find a can of bacon-flavored SPAM. The result was this:

I'm sure it would have tasted just as good with regular SPAM, but I wanted the vague bacon flavor to remind me of what I wasn't actually eating.

It's worth noting that the SPAM is much more consistent to lay on the bread, as actual bacon requires time-consuming, careful placement for a comfortable-to-wield sammich. And this was one comfortable-to-wield sammich.

"Lots of Good Stuff" Giant Shell Pasta

After finding out about giant pasta, I decided to build upon my previous nutella and pasta food experiment. This time, it's giant shells, and instead of just nutella, I filled some with peanut butter, and a few with marshmallow creme. Then I poured honey all over the top. If it looks like there's not all that much nutella in some of them, that's because it's a tip of the iceberg kind of deal.

Honestly I think this is kind of too intense, and I would not eat this for dinner every day of the week. Maybe only on special occasions or when I'm not thinking clearly.

I rate this food item one out of two.

Fluffy Tapioca Cream

As someone who's only ever made instant pudding, the idea of using a 20-year-old box of Tapioca mix that requires egg and sugar and vanilla extract to be mixed in should have seemed daunting. By the way, here's the box:

It looks older in-person, not quite as vibrant, and you can see the old-fashioned type as you turn it over.

Anyways, it should have seemed daunting. Everyone was saying I should just use the instant mix, and be done in 5 minutes. But no, I wanted this:

And it tastes like tapioca! I'm hoping that when it cools it's also fluffier. That nice bowl of it was made using just three tablespoons of tapioca mix... so next time I'll use double the ingredients and take pictures of the process. Something tells me I should use up that box.

Oh, and yes, I post here now. There can never be enough food-related internotes.

Nutella Spaghetti

I was about to pour alfredo sauce on some spaghetti when I realized the one thing that my pasta was missing: chocolate. So I put some nutella on top of it instead. It turned out just as awesome as I expected it to too.

Here's the recipe:

- cook some pasta
- when you're about to dump tomato sauce or pesto or something on it out of habit, STOP! instead dump nutella on it

I rate this food item two out of two.

Candy Blood

I got a chance to try this Halloween themed candy at some point. [sentences removed for adding nothing to the post] Anyway, it was taking forever to finish eating this thing - I had been going at it for a couple hours, and all the while, the candy blood was giving me this awful burning feeling in the back of my throat. It was also way too sweet. I ended up not eating all of it and having fun refilling and emptying the pouch with water at the sink. At some point later on, I found out that there was supposed to be like 50 servings of candy blood in it, so maybe that had something to do with it.

[Here is a better picture]

Since it's Halloween themed, I'm changing the post date to October. This may or may not be related to the fact that there was no internote in October.

Fried Eggiwegs

I had a bunch of eggs, and since the first thing that comes to mind is to smash them, I started frying eggs in a pan. I smash them open on a flat surface because that seems to work best for me. But since my stove is electric and I had never used one before in my life, I had some problems with frying them at first.



Electric stoves don't make any sense! It's all a flat surface and then it turns red in color on the one spot and gets super hot somehow. Except that you can have your pan sitting on there for like 5 whole minutes and it still won't have reached some sort of temperature equilibrium. I had the dial at number 6 at first, and it felt like it wasn't hot enough to cook anything, so I turned it up to the max, and things were cool for a bit, but then it was way too much! I would butter the pan and before even a second could pass, the butter burned up. I guess in the end, my strategy was to turn the dial to the max, and try to get all my cooking done in that moment of time while it's still getting hotter, but before it's crazy ridiculously hot.



This is what they looked like once I got better at cooking them. I cooked most of them easy over, and after I got the hang of it, I was able to go through a half dozen eggs without breaking any of the yolks. And before eating them, I poured on some barbecue sauce and cock sauce because those make it taste great.

Canned Sardines

I've never had the guts before to eat weird canned fish stuff, although I guess I do love to eat smoked oysters a lot, so I decided to eat canned sardines. King Oscar seems like a really classy guy, so he can't be wrong about flavor. I picked the sardines that were in tomato sauce instead of just oil or water or whatever the other ones were. It just felt like tomato was the only real choice for it.



They smelled really bad at first, but then when I started eating them, I couldn't get enough! From now on, I will associate the smell with excellent flavor.

Foods that are better not crispy

This is a list of foods that I prefer to be flaccid:

- pizza (sometimes)
- taffy
- beef jerky
- souffles
- lunch meats
- gelatin
- soft cheeses
- ramen (sometimes)
- cookies
- bananas
- pop tarts (no wait, I think I like these more crispy)
- bacon
- pears

Corned Beef Hash

I haven't updated in a while and if I don't update at least once per month, the boss is gonna really give it to me.

[Corned Beef Hash Photo 1]

[Corned Beef Hash Photo 2]

It tasted a lot better than I thought it would and I ate all of it. I accidentally broke my egg though. I think the beef got kind of crispy on the edges but I can't remember (I ate this like 5 years ago (a few months ago)).

I rate this food item 2 out of 2.

Chinese Food Pizza

I had a great idea for a new pizza, so I had to make it. This is like the last pizza, but instead I used fried wantons, fried rice, mongolian chicken, princess beef, and ho fun. I was thinking it might turn out to be a real mess, but it was really great, even if it was tough to eat the fried wantons on there.

[Pizza Picture 1]
[Pizza Picture 2]
[Pizza Picture 3]
[Pizza Picture 4]

Here is food description paragraph #2: I cook these pizzas for about 15 minutes because I have determined that to be the correct amount of time to cook a pizza. The cheese was melted perfectly, and it was super tasty. I was thinking about pouring cock sauce on it, but the princess beef was already spicy, so I figured that department was taken care of. Now that I look back though, I think it needed more cock sauce.

Hamburger Pizza

I heard on the internet of pizza with hamburgers on it, so I had to try it for myself. Other people might be suspicious that this kind of pizza is disgusting and gluttonous, but I had a feeling that it would taste great.

I got double cheeseburgers because I felt that the hamburgers were on the thin side anyway. I only used half of the burgers and fries I got on the actual pizza, the rest was eaten while it was baking.

[Pizza Ingredients]
[Pizza Construction]
[Pizza Unbaked]
[Pizza Baked]
[Pizza Sliced]

I think it turned out great - the fries ended up being like cheesy fries, which is awesome, and the hamburgers weren't as hard to eat as a pizza topping as I expected. The sauce was mushroom pasta sauce and at first felt like it would be a bit too runny on the pizza, but it turned out to not be a problem at all. One thing I might change when I try this again would be to remove the bottom of the hamburger, since it just ended up soaking up a bunch of sauce and getting mushy - not that I really minded anyway.

Huge Big-Sandwich Internote

I was looking through the offerings of Fat Sandwich Company when I came across a single item that cost 25 bucks. It was called the Big Fat Ugly, and the ingredient list had a huge description of a bunch of meats, so I naturally assumed this had to be some kind of sandwich sampler option, where I get to taste a variety of sandwiches from the place. I had to order this, and when it was delivered a short time later, I was somewhat shocked to realize that it wasn't a sampler, but everything just tossed into one sandwich and wrapped in foil.

[Big Sandwich - detail]

I knew this was too much for me to eat alone, so I cut it in half and shared.

[Big Sandwich - bisection]

It's really difficult to eat this like a normal sandwich. I tried one bite that way, but then changed my strategy to eating my way from the top to the bottom using a fork, going through layers of meat, fries, onion rings, and jalapeno poppers. Most of it was pretty good. I liked the bunch of fries even though it seems like filler and was a bit soggy from ketchup and mayonnaise. All of the meat was great, except for the hamburgers. I felt those were really plain-tasting, but I supposed that was my fault for not biting into it along with a bunch of other random things at the same time. Identifying what I was eating at the moment was a bit of a challenge. I should have kept a checklist, because some of the foods said to be in the sandwich I think went unaccounted for in my eating of it.

I took my time working my way through it, and I finished (half of it) in about an hour. I hear they have a challenge where if you eat one in 15 minutes, you get it for free, but I'm not going to be trying for that - I'm not a glutton.

Subway Sandwich Experience

I was told that I should be ashamed of myself for having the quality of liking to eat food and not ever having eaten a Subway sandwich shop sandwich, so because of this, I visited a Subway sandwich shop I saw in front of me.

When I first walked in, I felt it was a foreign environment - I didn't know what to do to make my purchase. I was somewhat familiar with how the store works: I'm supposed to yell at the workers until they put together ingredients that correspond to the words coming out of my mouth. I was kind of nervous about this, so I stood back for a while and hoped I would see someone else make an order first as a demonstration. A person was at the cash register at the moment, but I wasn't sure if that was because I was supposed to go there first, or they were at the end of their food transaction. While I was waiting, I looked up at the back wall, hoping to see some sort of menu with prices, but I wasn't able to really identify one, and at that moment, one of the workers asked if I could be helped. I decided I would be real cool about it and act like I knew what I wanted already, so I said I'd like a meatball sub. I know exactly what I want. I'm in charge. I've had meatball subs at other places and I didn't think there was a lot of room for messing up ordering this one. I forgot to mention what type of bread I wanted, like I always do, so I quickly replied back "wheat". But they were out of wheat! I was caught off gaurd. The worker went through a list of three different breads that were available. Some of them sounded like they were cheeses and not breads, and although I love cheese and think it's really great, I went with white. At this point, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to just start firing off commands of what should be done to it, so I stayed quiet and just started eyeballing some of the ingredients. The next question was what kind of cheese I wanted on it. I wondered for a split second what would happen if I said I didn't want cheese, but I just said provolone since it's a good cheese all around. After that, I was asked if it should be toasted. Toasted..? I bet that would take like half an hour to do! I didn't have that kind of time to be standing here (actually I did), so I said "no".

The worker put the sandwich down at this point and left it there, I guess so it could wait for the next worker to take care of it, like a production line. I few seconds passed and I didn't know what I should be doing, so I looked to my side and saw another person was starting to make an order and I watched that for a bit. I started wondering if maybe the sandwich could have been toasted in this amount of time it was waiting there. But then my attention was called back to the sandwich making process by the next sandwich shop worker. What did I want to be done to the sandwich now? I didn't know what to say! Isn't the meatball sub already done? There are meatballs on it, sauce, and some cheese. I don't know what else goes on a sandwich. I had to think back to that other meatball sub I had for ideas. I remembered (or fabricated a memory, I'm not sure) that there were onions it, so I looked around for onions in the ingredient trays. I couldn't find any. I didn't want to ask for something I didn't think they had, and I didn't want to look like I didn't know what I was doing, so I named one of the ingredients I saw which I knew I was familiar with: green peppers. Those probably go well on a meatball sub, and they might even have actually been on the last one I ate. I was doing well, but I needed to have at least one more ingredient to appear to be a sandwich ordering master. I saw some jalapeno pepper slices nearby, but I wasn't confident enough to call them that, so I just pointed to them and said real cool-like, "yeah, and some of those hot peppers. That'll be all."

I managed to avoid appearing like I didn't know what kinds of things go on a sandwich, but I saw now that my sandwich was going to be wrapped and placed in that little newspaper size sandwich bag all by itself. I couldn't have that! I needed something else to go in it too, or else all my hard work of ordering the sandwich would have been for nothing and I'd fail to impress the sandwich shop worker with my skill. I remembered back to when I was in high school and my friend bought a ton of Subway cookies, so I requested that I have a double chocolate chip cookie to go along with it. I'm not some shmuck who orders just a sandwich! I was feeling pretty good of myself, and was about to leave when I heard the person behind me in line order some sort of combo deal. A combo deal?! Why didn't I know to order that? At this point I started thinking that the sandwich shop workers knew all along that I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't fooling anybody. It was okay though, because I had a sandwich.

I don't know if the sandwich tasted like the greatest thing in the world, but I was pretty hungry so I liked eating it a lot. I wasn't really in the mood though for the hot peppers, though. I shouldn't have ordered those, but it had to be done. In the future, I think I would much rather just be able to be at a sandwich shop and simply say "meatball sub" and be done with it.

Souper Meal Review

This is the Nissin Souper Meal. Here are my thoughts on it in bullet point form in attempt to minimize risk of conveyance of my thoughts being influenced by language use and to prevent any humor as a result of a clever language use, because I feel writing an analysis in paragraph form distracts a reader from the actual information and ideas present and restricts everything to rules held by language and expectations about how language should be written. I have no intention of misleading a reader through use of a flowing writing style.

- The cup is shaped so that it is larger at the top and smaller at the bottom. Clearly, this is because of how when people eat food, they tend to be hungry for about 90% of what they see in front of them. While eating this, the person will then initially be deceived into thinking there is slightly more food than there actually is and therefore be hungry for the amount of food that the cup actually contains.

- The name of the product, "Souper Meal" at first appears to be misspelled, but the reason for it being written this way is actually the word "Souper" is a french word, meaning "to have supper", so by reading the title of the product, you are being commanded by its designer to eat this meal for supper.

- By putting "Meal" as the latter word, the designer is trying to make a point about man's need and desire for food as an end.

- The picture of the cup of instant noodles on the front of the label shows it in a way that I am not used to seeing it - ready to eat and with large floating words on top.

- The general layout of the design elements shows an artistic liveliness and conveys a message about food that no other food item package design to date has yet done.

- The Souper Meal tastes all right.

Chili Ramen

Eating ramen instant noodle packets is a pretty cool thing to do. It became even cooler when I figured out that you're supposed to add hot water so the noodles become soft like real noodles. Recently, I tried replacing the water and flavor packet with a can of chili. This is pretty good, since it makes me feel okay about eating a can of chili, but I need to still add a bit of water to get the noodles hydrated fully. Oh, and an important ramen rule: always use two packets of noodles. One packet isn't enough, since food is good and you should want to eat a lot of it. Also, the can of chili wasn't very spicy, so I had to dump in a lot of cock sauce. In the end, I found this to be an interesting way to eat ramen noodles. I rate it 2 out of 2.

A Hungry Man is an Angry Man

Microwave dinners usually have crazy instructions on them for me; that I should cut slits, remove the plastic, stir some of the contents, replace the plastic, let it sit for a minute, then microwave it again. It's really ridiculous, so usually I just take a fork or knife and poke a few holes over the foods it mentions then microwave it once and that's it. The Hungry-Man dinner I just ate had a bunch of crazy instructions like this (remove the brownie..? how is that even possible without smashing it up into bits?), but that was just the beginning.

I was able to successfully do a lazy job of heating it up, though the potatoes were still frozen at the middle, but I ate it just the same. This dinner was fried chicken flavor, but even though I knew chicken has bones in it, I still was able to convince myself that a microwave dinner is a lazy food and I could just pick up the chicken and bite into it without worry. Now, I think bones are funny, but inside food I'm eating is one of the places they shouldn't be, especially for a microwave dinner. After I had stuffed the whole piece of chicken in my mouth, I had to remove a dozen small bone pieces. It was unpleasant! I don't even feel full after eating this. Hungry-Man dinners are supposed to be the last word when it comes to getting two thousand calories in one meal and being done with food for a while, but I know I could eat about four more of these right now at least! I used to think that when a frozen meal says "Hungry-Man" on it, that meant something.

All I'm left with now is a pile of bones.