Perfect food
This blog seems to lay fallow quite a lot of the time at the moment. With a job that involves writing, a booze blog that I feel needs to be updated on occasion and my traditionally high levels of apathy, laziness and ooh look at the shiny thing over there!-ness I don’t often get round to spewing the random brain excrement that builds up in my beautiful head onto this rather cleanly designed (but also cluttered in a way that only I can see the organisation) page. But today I have broken that rule for two reasons.
- It’s NomNomNom time again, and I seem to be entering for a 3rd time. With a 3rd different partner. I am fickle
- Someone mentioned the act of deep frying on Twitter.
Deep frying is something that I have done precisely one (1) time. I made battered sausages (with a side order of cherry jam and frou-frou ponciness, as is often my wont), some homemade crisps (aka Blackened Potato slices) and then saved the oil in a bottle in my pantry (for I once had one of those) for a year before throwing it out when I moved house. It had black bits in. It wasn’t a bad thing to dispose of it. However, I posit a hypothesis - Deep frying makes any food stuff better. And now for some proofs.
Firstly, outrageously hypothetical (to make the following paragraphs seem sane in comparison): Poo. I have never had an urge to eat poo. I may utilise the phrase “I eat a lot of crap”, but that refers generally to the fetid outpourings of Messrs B King, R MacDonald and K Fried-Chicken (of the Indiana Fried Chickens [Harlan Sanders was born there, to save you the inevitable Wikipedia lookup. I read his autobiograpy - it took me months to find a copy and is awesome. It starts with the word 'Dadgummit' and gets better from there. "Life as I have known it has been finger lickin' good" RIP The 'Colonel']). However, while considering this while headbanging to the dulcid tones of the little people of the band SOiL in a lift this evening, I realised something. If I was going to have to eat a log of human excrement I’d rather it was battered and deep fried. There’s not a lot more I can add to that. On with the less crazy talk.
[Aside: I am currently smoking half of a large cigar that I just bisected. It's about 10 years old, 20cm long, and was given to me by a colleague when he left my old place of employment. He'd had it in his drawer for a while and gave it to me as he thought I might like the dried up husk more than he would. I've had it in a drawer since then and recently in my laughably named and incredibly dry humidor. The former colleague in question is a chap named Herbie Leonelli. He went from being a finance guy who feigned back problems to avoid scary Italian clients to being a pizza chef - you should all go and eat in his restaurant, Datte Foco. He's a dude. This cigar is very stale. Aside ends]
Anyway, taking the concept of battering making things better to the next level, I have discussed in great details with m’colleague Mr Morris (aka Dave aka My Landlord aka The Ideas Man who can’t be arsed to tell anyone his ideas) we chose a variety of battered foods which could be thought of the best ever. Starting with a simple concept, we decided to embellish until we could find an incredible foodstuff. First up - pizza. Pizza is pretty awesome, for a substance that is basically posh cheese on toast (joke stolen from the Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia, circa 1991) but the addition of a deep frying step at the end of its production will, based on the hypothesis above, make it better. We decided to add things to a theoretical pizza and after a number of days of debate ended up with this combination:
Folded
Doner kebab meat
Chilli Sauce
and
Roast Potato
Pizza
Deep Fried
The ultimate food stuff we originally thought. The addition of roast potatoes also makes all meals better, so why not a kebab meat pizza? However, we then decided to decompose this pinnacle of gastronomy - who needs the other items? Roast potatoes are almost the perfect foodstuff. If cooked in an animal fat they count as including meat and with a crunchy external counting and an internal nutritional paste of potato they are the ultimate food. So after further discussion we decided on the ultimate food:
Battered, deep-fried, roast potatoes
Just think about that for a bit. Have a private moment. What could be better, we posited? Then the mathematical side of our brains kicked in and we came up with an incredible plan: If battering and deep frying makes things better, how far could we take this?
Start with a void. An emptiness. A hard vacuum is Hard and we are lazy animals, so just take a blob of batter. On its own, fairly shit, but when deep fried it becomes a lot better. Take that blob of deep fried batter, batter it again and then deep fry it. This is now, by definition, a better food stuff. By the laws of mathematical induction we can then apply that process to a theoretical infinite series of battering and deep-fryings, which leads, after infinite time, to the ultimate food stuff.
So, according to maths(tm) air is the finest food stuff in the world, when prepared properly. This may remind me of the parable of the soup stone (stick a stone in a pot and you can make an excellent soup, as long as everyone else who’s eating it sticks in some tasty things) but as we all know that that maths is Law we can be safe in the knowledge that deep fried and battered air (to the power n, as n tends to infinity) is the end of the road when it comes to tastiness.
Apart from deep fried and battered Dr Pepper.
NomNomNom is in on July 12th and Dr Reeve and I will be The Booze Brothers for the day.