Proscuitto, pirate berry cereal, smoked white cheddar, and nyquil. What do you make?
people seem to all be responding to this post with the same train of thought: prosciutto and cheese sticks, fried in cereal breading, nyquil sauce on the side. but do you know what counts against you in chopped? lack of creativity. congratulations, every single one of you with the same hivemind answer just got voted out. not to mention the concept of a nyquil sauce on cheese sticks (smoked cheese especially) is fucking appalling. and if you can’t taste the nyquil, that’s also grounds to get voted out.
take it from a fucking crocker, there isn’t anything that can’t be made into a good meal. especially this? at it’s base, all of these are strong, hearty flavors. not necessarily ones i’d opt to pair and i try not to make a habit out of cooking with menthol, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be made to work.
i’m gonna hit this with a double feature, because i want this meal to happen. trying to force all possible basket ingredients into the smallest conceivable physical space, as is the case with the cheese stick ideal, may get the job done but like i said, it’s gonna taste like shit. breaking it into separate parts will cut you a little closer on time, but the dish itself will be better and your presentation will take a heavy bonus.
so here’s what you do.
take a two tablespoons of nyquil and put it in a small saucepan with two parts water to one part nyquil and pinch of salt. tiny, my man. a quarter teaspoon, maybe. let it steep over a low broil for 5 or so minutes* or until the water starts to take on a greenish tint. don’t stir it. separate the thicker part of the syrup from the ugly menthol-tinted water like you’d take out an egg white. dump the syrupy bit, but keep what is now a nyquil extract in the saucepan.
take that off the burner and let it cool to room temperature and put it into a small bowl; mix it in with a dash of real mint, three teaspoons of lemon juice, a tablespoon of white wine vinegar, two teaspoons of honey, another teaspoon of salt and a half cup of olive oil. this little vinaigrette will serve the purpose of a standard mint, save for that glaringly artificial taste that there’s no fucking way you’re going to be able to avoid cooking with nyquil anyways. it’s the difference between real oranges and orange gummies, but since the hors d’ouvre we’re making is primarily sweet anyways, it won’t hurt anyone to slide into the candy-like flavor realm.
*while your extract is steeping, make the most of your wait time and peel and cut a few slim wedges of ripe sweet melon. personally, i prefer charentais, but the best the chopped pantry will probably have is gonna be canteloupe. (honeydew works too, but it harshes the color scheme.) half your wedges once you get them out into a nice finger-food size. you should still have time to strip your prosciutto into inch/inch and a half wide strips, but if you don’t, you can take that on while the saucepan is cooling.
once your vinaigrette is done and mixed, toss your melon wedges in it until they’ve got a nice, sweet sheen over ‘em, and then wrap the seasoned wedges in the prosciutto. this is an italian classic, and it’s super easy. like i said before, the artificial taste of the nyquil will give this a slight twinge of tasting more like a snack, but overall, it’s still a great appetizer. if you do it right, this is high marks city.
“oh, fucker, but you didn’t even touch the berry cereal or the cheese!”
you are absolutely fucking right. because you know how bad it would’ve tasted if i did? i’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you don’t. so here’s the long-awaited fabled part two.
from the pantry, you’re gonna need some good apples. they don’t specify which wood the cheese was smoked with, but i’m going to assume it was hickory as that tends to be the favorite for cheddar flavors? so you can compliment the hickory smoke with a tart apple that’s got a sweetness to it – honeycrisp or braeburn are gonna be on the money.
put a whole apple (not peeled or cored, but make sure to take the stem off), a cup of apple cider vinegar, a cup of water, a cup of sugar, a tablespoon of salt, two teaspoons of cinnamon, and a tablespoon of lemon juice into the food processor and light that shit up. put your mushy applesauce-style mix into a large, wide pan into it until it caramelizes and evens out. it’s butter now.
now take two cups of berry cereal and take the actual berries out. with a mortar and pestle, grind up those weird yellow square bits into cereal dust. cut 6-8 slices from a thin loaf of french bread, brush the crusts in olive oil, and roll vertically in the cereal dust. once the outside of the bread has a second crust of cereal around the outside, arrange all of the pieces on a non-stick cooking pan. (you won’t use all of them in your plating, but it never hurts to have a little extra in case they burn on the edges or something gets fucky.)
take the apple butter you made and spread it thinly but evenly over the bread slices. cover them with a layer of folded prosciutto, a layer of thin apple slices, and a layer of sliced smoked cheese. bake for 15-20 minutes, or until the bread (and cereal) is golden brown.
plate on a flat square dish with one baked cheddar and apple butter tea sandwich fixed to one corner, your prosciutto-wrapped melon wedge in the opposite corner with the core-curve facing the center of the plate. accent the sandwich side with two apple slices forming an angle, and divide the plate with a colorful drizzle of the nyquil vinaigrette and a mint leaf.
last, but most certainly not least. while you’re on chopped, in that cute little cutscene after your plates have been served and you’re monologuing your final thoughts before the judges try your food,
look directly into the camera and invite tumblr user @tedallen to suck your dick.
Jesus christ, you win all of chopped. Are you happy? Are you happy the network canceled chopped because of you? Unbelievable. Well, take your pants off, let’s go.
Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.
and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.
well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?
I just want everyone to take a step back for a second and really think about how we’re using the most powerful knowledge tool in history to make jokes about a specific dude who lived almost 4000 years ago.
A communion wafer, according to the internet, is about .25g. Jesus was a healthy young man, who worked manual labor and walked everywhere. The average male in Biblical times was 5′1″ and about 110 pounds so call it 50kg or 50,000 grams. So 200,000 wafers to make up a whole Jesus. At one wafer a week that’s 3846 to eat a whole Jesus at weekly communion. If you went to Mass daily you could do it in under 550 years.
1000 communion wafers from Amazon costs $15, so acquiring a Jesus load would set you back about $3000
But that’s just the body. Jesus also bade his followers to drink his blood. How much of that Jesus communion wafer supply needs to be replaced with communion wine to account for his blood, and how much of that would need to be consumed to have drunk all his blood as well?
The human body contains roughly 5 liters of blood.
Communion wine costs about $66 for a case of 12 x 750 ml bottles (9000 ml).
So half a case is 4500 ml, or close enough if Jesus was on the small side which is reasonable given what we know of the times.
Thus, Jesus’ blood would be about 6 bottles of communion wine, costing $33.
How much of his weight was his blood, now? We can bring down the wafer count.
Osnap what an excellent question.
Water has a specific gravity of 1.0 and weighs 1kg/liter. Wine has a specific gravity if 1.5 thus weighs 1.5kg per liter.
4.5L of wine would weigh 6.75kg or about 15 pounds.
Reducing the wafer load by 6.75kg yields 43.25kg so call it 161,000 wafers or $2450 and change.
Plus the times we actually see him flirt come off more like he attended the Mr. Darcy Agorophobic Lobster School of Seduction, rather than being a stereotypical ladies man
Update: Legolas’ pupils are about 3.5 cm wide each. Now drawing kawaii Legolas on physics assignment.
And they told you science was no fun.
Science!
I’m going to do it. I’m going to hand it in.
Legolas’s pupil size isn’t the problem here, though. 5 leagues is 17.262 miles. The curvature of the Earth means that for a person of average height, the visual horizon is less than three miles away. Even if your vision is telescopic and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, you can’t see around the planet. If they were standing on a hill, it would have to be at LEAST 198 feet above sea level in order to see the horizon at 17.2 miles away, with nothing tall in between. Which, knowing Rohan, isn’t impossible.
But consider: Elven satellite eyeballs.
you mean like
@sidereanuncia it’s back, the post that I can only imagine haunts your nightmares
I shall never find peace.
Also, for what it’s worth, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the curvature of Middle Earth is the same as that of Earth.
There’s no evidence that Middle Earth curves.
Yeah there is. The Silmarillion states that the world was curved after the fall of Numenor (I believe), preventing access to Valinor. But Elves (among others) can travel the straight path across it.
So middle earth is round, but not for Elves because magic.
So wait, the reason he can see that far is because Elves just have the ability to ignore the curve of the earth? That’s awesome. It also means that no matter how good your optics got, you would always want elf eyes manning the spyglass because they can see arbitrarily far while everybody else is limited by this ‘horizon’ bullshit.
Oh thank God, my poor elf prince has seen too much in this post
Elves are flat-earthers
This post went from amusing to horrifying, to be brought back down to amusing, sprinkled in with some cannon explanation, and then you leave me here in fucking outrage
i like clues because they make sense, unlike people, who have legs that go on for days. how can a leg go on for days? i don’t know. help
i got the call late at night: “there’s been a murder on the orient express.” i knew i had to take the case immediately, because that is a TRAIN
i have been told i am “gritty” and “hardboiled”, maybe because i eat so many eggs and crunch the bits of shell between my teeth
“he’s the killer!” i said. “wait, no he’s not. wait, all these people look the same, which one is which again?”
i’m a straight shooter who plays by my own rules, all 376 of them that I have in this annotated binder
i’m a lose cannon, in fact, i have been institutionalized for erratic behavior
my job as a detective is made harder by the fact that i am physically incapable of telling a lie or bluffing but made easier by the fact that i have no emotions about anything but trains. once a train was murdered, and i couldn’t stop crying
she had curves in all the right places. i like curves, because they make sense, unlike people
i like my liquor hard, and my social interactions harder
i’m the best detective around, but my fees are high, and i only take payment in trains
she had curves in all the right places. she was a graph i was making about trains. in the other room, my dad was crying because i wouldn’t make eye contact with him
“you will tell me what i want.” i said. “everyone tells me what i want. i’m tough as nails, and i’m not afraid to display aggressive behavior”
i got into this job because one time in fifth grade i asked my special teacher why people don’t like me, and she told me to be a detective and figure it out. i took that completely literally, and here we are today
maybe i should throw away all my detective memorabilia so that i can hug my dad for the first time
“i know you’re a detective,” my mom sniffled, “but sometimes i feel like the real detective, trying to figure out how to finally help you”
the only mystery i cannot solve is the mystery of why these nice ladies keep making me play with special blocks. i have literally no theories about why this is happening
“i didn’t solve the case, and i let a second train get murdered!” i cried. “i’m a bad detective!” “oh, honey, no,” my mom soothed, “you’re not a bad detective, you’re just special, and sometimes that means things are a little bit harder for you”
he handed me the pictures of the suspects. i crossed out their eyes so i could look at their faces.
i got the call late at night. “TEXT ME” i shouted into the phone
“there’s been a terrible murder.” “that makes 231,” i said, twirling my hair. i like numbers.
she had curves that went on for legs. i reminded myself to make eye contact, like my special teacher told me
“ain’t she a beauty?” i asked. my special teacher had been working with me on saying “isn’t.” “a genuine Horse .75. i got her 12 years and 37 days ago and she weighs exactly 14 ounces. i call her Melissa, after my special teacher. she’s almost as good as a train.”
i took out my bottle of whiskey, and started to read the label aloud
i’m a private eye. that means i think eyes should be private. why do people have to look at each other’s eyes all the time?
the ceiling fan moved slowly in my grimy office, slowly like someone about to give up on the world. i stared up, up, up at it, distracted from my obsessive cleaning. it had curves in all the right places
the whole world seemed black and white, like an old film, or my thinking
i took my gun out of the pocket of my trench coat, which i was wearing because of my sensory issues
with my gun smashed to pieces on the floor and the criminal’s gun pointed right at me, it seemed like just about the right time to elope
Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse is the same as Macbeth discourse.
Explain?
OK, so one of the big debates in Macbeth involves the scene in which Lady Macbeth talks Macbeth into killing King Duncan. People debate strenuously over whether it’s a scene of Lady M pressuring her reluctant husband into it, or whether it’s a scene of her sensing, due to their emotional intimacy, that this murder is something her husband secretly wants and has partially internally decided to do, and is arguing him into it in order to help him give himself permission to do it, in the same way that people see their loved ones wavering over the dessert menu and jump in with things like, “Go on, get the cheesecake, it’s your birthday!” Readers and scholars disagree strenuously about this – we even studied an incident in college in which two 18th century illustrators attended the same performance and happened to draw the scene the day after, producing two images that advanced opposite interpretations even though they’d seen the exact same actors do the exact same performance. It’s a big deal.
In the same way, the Baby, It’s Cold Outside discourse is about whether this is a song about sexual harassment, or whether it’s a woman singing about how she wishes she could spend the night with the guy she just had an excellent date with if only the neighbors wouldn’t talk, and him responding, “Stay, baby, it’s cold out! No one could expect you to go home in this!”
I really don’t know (baby stab his side) King Duncan’s a bro (baby cut through his hide)
I like him a lot (That decrepit old sot?) This plan ain’t so great (But what a king you’d make!)
The guards might worry (Darling, do it in a hurry!) His sons will rush the door (So knock them on the floor.)
I’m not such a knave (Bash his head with a stave) But I’d be a good king (Now you’re starting to think)
The dukes might all talk (But their chatter means naught) Say, love, what do you mean (You’d make such a king)
I simply must go (baby cut through his hide) There’s a war on you know (baby cut through his hide)
But what of his wife? (And what of his life?) It feels like bad luck (But that don’t mean much)
I’ve got a bad premonition (And I’ve got a mission) But that’s just superstition (My love, you’re a vision)
The witches said I’d rule (If they lied they were cruel) So baby let’s stab Stab his siiiiide!
Kimchi and Justice 