Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Cook: The Mac Shroom

Lady Gaga once compared jet lag to a bad batch of shrooms. To that I laugh and say “Gee, it must be nice to suffer from jet lag.” I mean some of us here in the middle class can’t afford to fly our wives, dogs, skis, guns, golf clubs and luggage north for the holidays. So we make a sixteen-hour drive instead. Give me jet lag any day over that.

Our latest version of the trip was especially harrowing because I drove for 13 hours straight, losing my MP3 player halfway thru, and I only had a five song EP (Frightened Rabbit’s State Hospital) to listen to. No matter how good a five-song album is (and I do enjoy FR’s) you can’t take six hours of it. I know, I tried. Yes Lady Gaga, that is the stuff ‘shroom nightmares are made of.

We stumbled in the door sometime around 9 o’clock at night. The spiders on the ceilings and floating baby dinosaurs forced me to sit for a few moments and rest my eyes. When the bad trip seemed to be over I headed to my stash of holiday gifts and pulled out one of my new cookbooks Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day. I didn’t know what I was looking for, possibly a good case of the
‘shrooms to wipe away the bad or maybe just something to share with the baby dinosaurs. What immediately jumped out at me was the Mac-Shroom. This wiley creature consisted of homemade barbeque sauce, Mac and Cheeze and portobello all layered on a burger bun. I made some slight alterations as I couldn’t fathom eating another piece of bread (I basically lived off that stuff in Pennsylvania) and my energy had long since disappeared so homemade barbeque sauce was not going to be on the menu. Instead of bread, I laid down a grilled portobello, topped it with a tomato and a pile of Mac and Cheeze and then finished it with some store bought barbeque sauce.

It wasn’t as fabulous as I hoped (the tomato should’ve been cut up and placed in the Mac and Cheese instead of isolated below it and I’m sure the homemade barbeque sauce makes a world of difference) but it still pleased both the dinosaurs and myself. The spiders refused to come down and try any. I will definitely be giving this another go, with no body modifications. I can’t wait to try out some of the other recipes as well (the Jimwich and Chow Mein sandwich are both calling my name).

Hear this sandwich in song form.

No comments:

Post a Comment