Gremlin Grill

So, what all tasted like snot? Well, the cold kicked in on December 26th, when Sara Jane left for a few days in our nation’s capital. My bachelor plans were to clean out the freezer that week, something I was looking forward to. We have good food in the freezer. But had I followed that plan, it would have meant that vacuum-packed and frozen chicken & noodles would have tasted like snot. Creamy, rich, chickeny snot. So I didn’t eat it - I didn’t want waste good food.

There’s some chili in the freezer. That’d have been a spicy snot, slightly smoky from smoked Hungarian paprika, with a sweet finish from the ancho powder. But, rather than have those wonderful flavors washed out by salty throat oysters, I skipped it.

I also skipped the neat little half-pound or so of pulled pork I had packaged in the freezer specifically for the Mizzou bowl game. I was going to make a sandwich, put some on a pizza, then maybe sprinkle some on a bowl of Coco Puffs, but no. I'm not wasting pork if it’s going to taste like a smoked and sauced used Kleenex®.

So, besides cough drops, Nyquil®, and an assortment of mystery pills, my week of dining on excellent freezered cuisine was nixed by a constant drip snort honk drip snort cough drip snort gulp, and replaced with “Supreme� Pizza Rolls, a frozen pizza (yes, I cooked it), leftover Christmas ham (I froze most of the ham), and a lot of nothing. The New Year is off to a wonderful culinary start.

Anyway, last Friday, a Sonic® extra long chili-cheese dog and an extra large order of chili-cheese tots confirmed the demise of my cold, and that the damage it did to my palate was temporary. Because damned if that wasn’t some good chili-cheese crap. So now I can taste, and now I can start thinking about barbecue again.

You read it, you can’t unread it.