It seems that some folks don’t know what to do on an escalator. This blog is dedicated to those people.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
It seems that supermarkets are overrun with people who don’t know how to act. Fair enough. Here’s the first tip
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Oh my gosh. It’s Friday already. Did you know there’s one every week? So, I shall once more be dispensing bad advice As usual, the advice will stupendously bad.
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JW asks: Should I really call my mom, or get her a gift or card, or visit her, or any of those other mother’s day things?
Dear JW: I think you should give the Mothers’ Day of Benedict Cummerbund. He’s handsome as anything, he’s rich, he has a career, what more could mother want? Ask Benadryl Cuminpatch if he’d like to spend the rest of his life with Mom. You’ll have to ask Benpicked Cucumber nicely as he is, as indeed all celebrities, used to people gushing up to him. If a lifetime commitment is too much, would he be willing to do whatever Mom wanted for one day. Should he complain of lost income from his movies, you’ll just have to rob banks until you’ve accumulated $100 million. Oh, and a grilled cheese sandwich. Make sure the cheese is gruyère. Celebrities have expenses tastes. This will be a Mothers’ Day Mom will never forget.
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SL Red, purple, or green?
Dear SL: The White House has been that uninspired white ever since its construction. I applaud your desire to spiff up the world’s most recognized building, to give it some character, to have some fun. Since, the color of the Republican party is often thought to be red, it would good to paint the White House red. I strongly suggest using spray paint for the job as the Secret Service is not going to give you much time to do a professional job with a roller and a paint brush. Indeed, they apt to be rather cross with you while hauling you away to ask such questions such as, “How did you get over the fence and so close to the White House without being spotted?” You’ll be able to answer with, “Why I went to the nearest circus and bought a cannon from the Human Cannonball. I then shot myself and my paint.” Maybe that will impress them. It’s worth a shot. (See what I did there?)
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JCA asks: Mayo, or Miracle Whip? Not for food, but for bedroom fun. (Asking for a friend).
Dear JCA: My natural inclination as a chef is to suggest mayonnaise as it is a purer food and less likely to be a chemical sh*tstorm. Indeed, try to get mayonnaise with all natural ingredients. Let’s keep our planet green. However in this case, spreadability and lubrication will be prized more than it would be in making a tuna sandwich, I suggest the scientific method. Have two bedroom romps with each volunter. Ask them if they preferred the mayonnaise experience or the one with Miracle WhipTM. You might need hundreds of volunteer partners before you become quite confident in your results. Should you have a spouse who balks at your scientific zeal, you might need to present your sweetheart with a nice box of chocolates and some lovely flowers when asking their permission. Oh, and make sure you always use fresh mayonnaise and Cool Whip. You don’t want to get false responses from your volunteers because you used something rancid. Check those expiration dates.
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KGV states: Thanks for the reminder. Being retired, I easily forget which day of the week we are celebrating.
Dear KGV: It is easy to forget the day of the week, isn’t it? Buy yourself a $600 cell phone, one that shows the day of the week. You don’t have to use the phone for anything. If opening the cell phone just to find the day of the week seems a bit weird, hire a butler. The butler will follow you around and will be pleased to tell what day it is no how many times you ask.
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LF asks: Why do ticks tick?
Dear LF: Not all ticks tick, only the explosive ones. Explosiveness was a defensive trait evolved by ticks during the Cretaceous period. Ticks of that time were forever getting trampled underfoot by tyrannosaurus rexes hot on the pursuit of a brontosaurus burger. A tick scout would raise the alarm whenever a T-rex approached. The explosive ticks would rush the killer dinosaur and explode themselves. The explosion would kill the tyrannosaurus, but the rest of the tick colony would be saved. Sure it would take a lot of ticks to fell a mighty Rex, but holy moly, there are a boatload of ticks. There’s a practical use to this as well. North Korea has not acting at all neighborly lately. To help the world, get on the plane to North Korea with a carry-on bag full of explosive ticks. Don’t worry about TSA, the ticks aren’t metallic and aren’t even on any list of prohibited items. The North Koreans, being a wary sort, might ask you what’s in your bag. They might even open your bag and ask, “What are those ticks doing?” You should say, “I don’t know. Do ticks talk?” (See what I did there?) Then head to the nearest military installation, the one where you can do the most damage. Tell the ticks that those North Korean missiles or fighter planes are T-Rexes. The ticks will blow up the entire installation or base. Oh I forgot, the North Korea security is a distrustful lot. Try to blend in as you make your way through the countryside.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Moldovan Entree
MINCED MEAT CROQUETTE
(Parjoale)
INGREDIENTS
3 slices white bread
3 tablespoons milk
1 small potato
1 large onion
2 tablespoons butter
½ pound ground beef
½ pound ground pork or veal
2 eggs
1 teaspoon dill
1 teaspoon parsley
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup bread crumbs
⅓ cup lard or vegetable oil
Makes 12 croquettes. Takes 1 hour 20 minutes.
PREPARATION
Add white bread and milk to small mixing bowl. Let sit for 20 minutes. Press gently on soaked bread. Pour out any milk. While bread soaks, grate or mince potato. Mince onion. Add onion and butter to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens.
Add all ingredients except bread crumbs and lard to large mixing bowl. Mix with hands until well blended. Shape meat/potato/onion mixture into croquettes 4″ long, 2″ wide, and 1″ thick. Add bread crumbs to plate. Dredge croquettes through bread crumbs until they are well coated on both sides.
Add lard to pan. Melt lard at medium heat. Reduce heat to low. Add croquettes to pan. Sauté at low heat for 10 minutes on each side or until croquettes are golden brown all over. You will most likely need to cook in batches.
TIDBITS
1) It’s easy to confuse croquet with croquette; they’re spelled nearly the same. Croquet is played with wooden mallets. Minced meat croquette is played with mallets made of minced meat.
2) Wooden mallets do not break when you use it to hit a wooden ball. The ball goes far. You need an entire lawn to play croquet, which is sometimes called lawn croquet. A mince-meat mallet will disintegrate if you use them to hit a wooden ball. Use a meatball instead. Still, a meatball hit by a mince-meat mallet will not go far. Mince-meat croquette is often played on a napkin. So remember.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Peruvian Appetizer
INGREDIENTS
1 cup quinoa
½ cucumber
¼ cup fresh cilantro
2 Roma tomatoes
1 red bell pepper
¼ pound queso fresco or feta cheese
1¼ teaspoons aji amarillo, aji panca, or chipotle powder
1½ tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 avocados
Serves 6. Takes 40 minutes.
PREPARATION
Cook quinoa according to instructions on package. Remove from heat and let cool. While quinoa cooks and cools, peel and dice cucumber. Dice cilantro, tomatoes, and red bell pepper. Dice queso fresco. Add quinoa, cucumber, tomato, red bell pepper, queso fresco, aji amarillo, lime juice, and olive oil to salad bowl. Toss salad with forks until well blended. Garnish with cilantro. Peel, pit, and cut each avocado into 6 slices. Garnish with avocado slices.
TIDBITS
1) Quinoa salad is an anagram for Quad Sinaloa. Sinaloa is a state in Mexico. It is all that remains of the once proud and vast Sinaloan Empire. The heyday of the Sinaloan Empire occurred over 4,000 years ago. It’s realm included North America, South America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. It’s technology while primitive by today’s standards was absolutely whizzo back then.
2) Way back then, Rubberto Sinaloa got drunk, cut open a rubber plant, and poured its sap into a boiling cauldron meant to cook fish. The heat turned the sap into rubber. He made rubber bands. Rubberto shot his rubber bands at his neighbor and took over his lands. He made the same land grab over and over again. Soon, he became emperor of Indonesia. We should all go on such drunken tears.
3) Anyway, Rubberto’s armada of rubber rafts crossed the mighty oceans. His marines and soldiers equipped with mighty rubber bands conquered pitiful natives armed only with stick and scary faces. Then Rubberto died, no doubt at the end of his life, leaving no heir. His four main generals quarreled and the Empire divided itself into the Quad Sinaloas of Viking Sinaloa, the Pharaoh’s Egypt, the Aztec Empire, and Poway, California. Sinaloa, Mexico is all that remains of the once feared empire. The prudent Mexican Federal government has banned Sinaloa’s inhabitants from possessing rubber bands, so things are kinda okay.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Oh my gosh. It’s Friday. So, I shall once more be dispensing bad advice As usual, the advice will stupendously bad. You know it will be so as I had overwritten the file with my previous answers and to re-answer. I mean how can you trust advice from a person who does that?
JBL asks: Will this be on the test?
Dear JBL: Yes, it will. Unfortunately, you don’t know what test. I strongly urge you to go to every school you can and take every test. If you don’t answer the question, you will get a zero for it. Indeed if you miss the test completely, you’ll fail the test and fail the course, and get kicked out of your university. And you paid a lot of money getting into that university. You won’t graduate. There will go your dream of becoming an astronaut and of being the first person on Mars. Oh, and here’s foolproof way of acing every test. Simply tattoo every fact and theorem you’ve run across onto your body. Now it’s quite possible, that the tattooed answer will be under your clothes. In this case, you’ll have to strip. If the teacher complains, say you’re allergic to clothes. If the answer is on your butt, ask the student behind you (See what I did there?) to read the answer. Ask nicely; manners are always in fashion.
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MA asks: Can yard bunnies do multiplication problems?
Dear MA: Oh yes. But they’re shy. They just don’t talk to anyone. You have to gain their trust. You have to get down to their level. This means crawling up to them and feeding them pellets. Rabbits are terrified if they talk to people as they fear by doing will stop the supply of pellets. So talk to them in a soothing voice. Tell them that you will provide gourmet pellets if they solve multiplication problems for you. This is known in economics as incentivizing the bunny.
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RAS asks: How do I teach my dog Trotsky to play chess?
Dear RAS: You must learn to speak dog. This is not as hard as it might seem given the smallness of the canine vocabulary when compared to English. Conjugating verbs verb in Dog is much easier than in Dog than in English and, my gosh, much easier than in French. To illustrate, for “Am Hungry.”
French:
J’ai faim.
Tu as faim.
Il a faim.
Nous avons faim.
Vous avez faim.
Ils ont faim.
English:
I am hungry.
You are hungry.
It is hungry.
We are hungry.
They are hungry.
Note there are six different conjugations in French: ai, as, a, avons, avez, and ont. English is easier with only three different conjugations: am, are, and is. However, Dog conjugation for “am hungry” has an elegant simplicity to it.
Dog:
Woof!
There are no cases for you (familiar or polite), for we, it, or they. That makes learning the dog vocabulary easy. Indeed the word, “woof,” is the words for literally dozens of nouns and verbs. Dog convey meaning by intoning their “woof” differently for each instance. You will need to practice your canine intonations and indeed, inflections as well. Get practicing.
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LF asks: Why can’t pigs fly?
Dear LF: They can! They can! You just need a big enough catapult. Try getting your catapult at CostcoTM; they carry everything. Get your catapult while you can. As of press time, there’s no government regulation about flinging pigs great distances in your neighborhood, but how long can that last given the government has seen fit to regulate commercial aviation.
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BRW asked: I point a red laser light at the neigbhor’s blinds when they are gone. The cats destroy the blinds chasing the red dot. Am I evil? (Taken from a meme.)
Dear BRW: Only if your neighbors are annoying. And if they’re annoying to you, they’re likely to be annoying to others on your street as well. In this case, wait until your irritating neighbors leave their house with lit candles. Point the laser beam at the candle. The cats will attack the red dot on the candle. The candle will fall to the ground. The rug will catch fire. The house will burn down. The neighbors will leave. (Gosh, neighbors is a hard word to spell. Another reason to see them go.) It’s much better to be proactive like this then to let your resentment against them fester into something serious. That benefits no one.
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LHH asks: Over the top, or under the weather: which is best for a Hump day? And are there differences by season?
Dear LHH: If you want to be over the top for weather, you need to go to the North Pole. But with global warming, you can’t guarantee solid ice for your lawn chair. On the other hand, you could be the first person to surf the pole. In contrast, you’ll under the weather at the South Pole. While the South is over a mile thick layer of ice, it is under the Earth. There is nothing underneath you. Nothing! You’ll fall. You see because of gravity, everything falls down. At the South Pole, there is no more down. The scientists at this pole meet this existential threat by constructing buildings. The ceilings on these upside down buildings prevent the people there from falling off the planet. The fear, however, persists as in this line from an angst-filled song, “Put our hands in the air like the ceiling can’t hold us.” Some polar scientists hew to a more devil-may care philosophy as evidenced by the line, “dancing on the ceiling.” If you must go outside when at the South Pole, you must, must wear boots with VelcroTM soles and stay on the Velcro paths. Otherwise, you fall off the Earth. This is true for Hump day, the other days of the week, and for the two seasons of day and night. The Laws of Physics never sleep.
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LF states: A question for Bad Advice Friday? I can’t think. (This is from memory. I overwrote the file where I answered this.)
Dear LF: Thinking is overrated. Millions of people in a few select professions never think, politicians and human billiard balls (A surprisingly popular sport) come to mind. But if you’re really having trouble thinking and would like to start again, I have two suggestions. First, join the French Foreign Legion. You’ll have plenty of undisturbed time to conjure up a thought as you’re marching under the hot Saharan Sun. However, as people join the Legion to forget, you’ll immediately forget what idea you created. But you will have started thinking again and that’s the main thing. Second, commit a crime, a crime so horrible that you will be spending years in solitary confinement. The serene, tranquil, undisturbed aura of your own is enormously conducive to thought. Try it and see!
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Bill O’Reilly, the hugely popular and controversial host for Fox, was recently fired by Fox TV. They need a new host. I need a new platform beyond this blog for my views. So, I humbly ask my readers request Fox TV to hire me to fill Bill’s time slot. Here’s why you should do so.
See? I am qualified. Please call Fox TV and put in a good word for me. Thank you very much.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Mexican Entree
INGREDIENTS – MARINADE
¼ cup fresh cilantro
3 garlic cloves
1½ pounds flank or skirt steak
½ teaspoon pepper
¼ cup lime juice
¼ cup olive oil (2 tablespoons more later)
INGREDIENTS – OTHER
1 medium onion
1 Roma tomato
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 bolillo, telera, or French rolls
grilling or cooking spray
½ cup refried beans
1 avocado
¼ cup crema Mexicana or mayonnaise
Makes 4 tortas. Takes 2 hours 40 minutes.
SPECIAL UTENSILS
mandoline (optional)
outdoor grill
PREPARATION – MARINADE
Dice cilantro. Mince garlic cloves. Add all marinade ingredients to mixing bowl. Mix by hand until steak is well coated. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours. Let excess marinade drip off steak. (If not, you will have some rather exciting flames coming from the outdoor grill.)
PREPARATION – OTHER
Preheat outdoor grill to high. Use mandoline or knife to cut onion and tomato into ¼” thick slices. Add onion and 2 tablespoons olive oil to pan. Sauté onion at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion softens. Add steak to grill. Grill steak on high heat for 5-to-10 minutes on each side, depending on your desired level of doneness. Remove steak. Spray the cut side of roll halves with grilling spray. Put roll halves spray side down on grill. Grill on high heat for 1 minute or until grilled side of roll halves turn golden brown. Watch carefully. Remove from heat. Cut steak against grain into 4 pieces.
Add refried beans to pan. Cook on medium-high heat until beans are warm. Remove from heat. Peel and cut avocado into 4 slices. Spread crema Mexicana on all roll halves. Add steak strips to bottom halves of rolls. Add onion, tomato, and avocado slices to bottom halves. Make an indentation in top halves of rolls. Place refried beans in indentations. Carefully turn over top halves with refried beans onto the bottom halves with the meat and veggies. Olé.
TIDBITS
1) The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 revolved around exceedingly complex issues such as: democracy versus oligarchy, large landed owners* versus impoverished peasantry, the authority of the Catholic church versus secular governments, and the ambitions of powerful generals and local strongmen.
2) * = This is not to imply the land owners were large, perhaps from the eating of too many too many burritos stuffed with shredded beef, lettuce, queso fresco, guacamole, and crema Mexicana. No, they had large estates, haciendas, that ran** for many miles in many directions.
3) ** = Land cannot run. A really big earthquake, 9.0 on the Richter Scale for example, can send shock waves through the ground that look like an ocean wave to any bystander***.
4) *** = Not that you’ll be able to stand up during a 9.0 earthquake. Most likely you’ll be toast.
5) I’ve used my daily allocation of asterisks – *. Life moves on.
6) Anyway, toast in Spanish is tostada. Tostadas are made mostly with beans and corn tortillas, which are cheap. This is revolutionary bands in Mexico ate quite a bit of tostadas.
7) The factions uniting, however briefly, behind successive central governments always had much more money than the rebelling peasants. The authorities could afford steak. Their armies ate well, often dining on carne asada tortas, the dish featured here.
8) The Mexican civil war was a lengthy, bloody affair. Armed bands and their leaders, jefes, shifted allegiances like the wind. Sometimes they fought for the rights of the peasants and sometimes they deserted to the government, the desire to devour a juicy, scrumptious carne asada torta proving too strong the resist.
9) Of course, the Mexican vegetarians stayed true to the cause of the bean tostada. Sometimes, even the most carnivorous soldiers in the Federal army felt the need to cleanse the palate with the delightfully simple bean tostada. When this happened, they deserted back the rebels.
10) And so it went. Battles went this way. Battles went that way. It all came down to which side would strike the decisive blow, to which side appeared the fiercest.
11) Both the Federales and the rebels used people. That was kind of a tie. The forces searched for something else. Then in an accident of fate, Pancho Villa and El Presidente Carranza both hit on the idea of using giant inflatable balloons made from MylarTM. Villa’s soldiers brought huge inflatable squirrels to the battlefield of Celaya. Carranza’s men, however, carried enormous inflatable snakes with them. Snakes are much fiercer than squirrels. Villa’s army broke and ran. The Mexican Revolution was effectively over. This is also why there’s a snake on the Mexican flag. There you go.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Cuban Entree
CUBAN HAMBURGER
(Frita Cubana)
INGREDIENTS
4 garlic cloves
1 onion
2 tablespoons olive oil
¾ teaspoon cumin
½ tablespoon Spanish paprika or paprika
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons ketchup
¼ chorizo (no casings)
1 pound ground beef
¾ pound ground pork
½ cup bread crumbs
2 tablespoons olive oil
1½ pounds shoestring potatoes (And cooking oil as well if deep frying or pan frying.)
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
12 hamburger rolls
Serves 8. Takes 50 minutes.
PREPARATION
Mince garlic cloves and onion. Add garlic, onion, and olive to pan. Sauté at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until onion and garlic soften. Add sautéed onions and garlic, cumin, paprika, pepper, salt, ketchup, chorizo, ground beef, ground pork, and bread crumbs. Mix with hands until well blend. Shape meat mix into 12 patties.
Cook shoestring potatoes according to directions on package. Add 2 tablespoons olive oil to pan and as many meat patties that will fit. Cover. Sauté meat patties at medium-high heat for 5 minutes on each side or until meat is cooked to your desired level of doneness. You might need to cook the patties in batches. Top patties with Worcestershire sauce. Warm or lightly toast buns. Add patties to bun bottoms. Top patties with shoestring potatoes. Place bun tops on shoestring potatoes.
TIDBITS
1) The most common geometric shapes drawn by the cavemen was the triangle. So, it’s no surprise cavemen engineers chiseled stone into triangular wheels. This shape proved to be quite useless for transportation. The PorscheTM line of high performance cars would have to wait. But then the Cubanhamburgerpithicus tribe invented the Cuban hamburger. Little prehistoric diners thrilled hunter-gatherers with this avant-garde culinary creation. Soon, an engineer, Ogg Edsel Yugo, had himself a Cuban hamburger. It was tasty. It was round. It inspired him to make a wheel, to make a car. Edsel Yugo’s car flopped. Humanity would wait several millennia for Porsches. Bummer.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Today is once more Bad-Advice Friday. I shall be dispensing bad advice to all comers. The advice will stupendously bad.
RP asks: Pop Tart wine pairings, please.
Dear RP: While many people and all wine connoisseurs and cannibals know that white wine goes with white food and red wine goes with red food, it’s amazing how few people are aware that blue wine pairs with blue food, as in blueberry Pop TartsTM, brown wine with brown food, such as root-beer Pop Tarts. If you are unsure of the color of the paste inside the Pop Tart, may I suggest adding sprinkles to a fine rose? Sprinkles in wine always pair well with sprinkled food.
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KM asks: Can you make ice cream from Coffeemate?
Dear KM: Yes, if you have a sufficiently powerful energy source. We in Southern California have a nuclear reactor in San Onofre doing absolutely nothing. Go inside the complex while the guards are celebrating. (Well of course, their partying. It’s my birthday.) Be sure to have all the necessary ingredients for brewing before you start. You’d feel awful if you fired up a hurriedly decommissioned nuclear reactor only to discover you forget the coffee filters.
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LHH asks: Cheese Whiz or organic palm oil for that get-away weekend?
Dear LHH: It all depends. If your sweetheart is the type who prefers Cheeze WhizTM or even VelveetaTM then by all means take the Cheez Whiz. There’s nothing so arousing as having your body scented like a good burger. Also, Lots of rain forests are being cut down to produce palm oil. This is a turn off to environmentally concerned lovers. However, guys whose dates cancel at the last moment should probably bring along palm oil
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SWW asks: I’m going to interact with others, this weekend. So which should I bring up–sex, politics, religion, or all of them? If it’s all, can you give me a sentence or two that combines them?
Dear SWW: Any topic is okay as long as your suitably armed. There is nothing so frustrating as to listen to some ignorant clod go on and on incorrectly on some topic and having no way to stop the rant. Many people carry an assault rifle for this very reason. However, if you’re anti-gun, that’s okay, too. In this case, I suggest carrying a kitchen mallet. It’s dual purpose. It tenderizes meat as well as dispatching people. If however, your heart is set on offending people with the minimum of words, may I suggest the following sentence? “God demands you have frequent sex with Democrats.” (Be careful though to substitute in the word “Republicans” if talking to a Democrat. There’s nothing worse than an avoidable faux pas.)
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KD asks: What should I do if I come in contact with a one-eyed, two-toed flying purple people eater (not to be confused with a trump supporter).
Dear KD: It was never clear to me if the song referred to a purple monster that ate all people or merely a monster that ate purple people. If the later interpretation is true, than I am safe as I am note purple. However, I never ever take blueberry baths. I don’t want to look purple in case I run into a purple-people eating monster. However, things get existential if the monster devours everyone. You have two options. One, spout theoretical econometrics at the flying monster. You will rapidly put the critter into a coma. Don’t know theoretical econometrics? Surprisingly few people do. Two, smear yourself all over with lutefisk. That is the nastiest smelling stuff on God’s green Earth. The monster will stay far away from you as will all other nasally equipped beings.
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JAS asks: Is there life on Mars?
Dear JAS: There’s only one way to know for sure. Go to Mars yourself. Of course, once you arrive, there will be life on Mars as you will be there. Oh, I suppose you could look for pre-your-trip-to-Mars life. Honestly. Okay, you’ll need a powerful rocket to get there. NASA has powerful rockets. If, as I suspect, their rockets as scheduled already for future missions, you’ll have to create your method of space travel. Your space capsule should be a Smart CarTM. They’re small and have a radio and a CD player. Attach thousands upon thousands of bottle rockets underneath and along the sides of your car. Light the bottle rockets and quickly, oh my gosh quickly, get in your car and close the door. Put on your seat belt. Safety is important. And away you go.
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MH asks: Donut holes? What gives? Why should I pay more just for a bag of holes separately?
Dear MH: This is a contentious issue. Deep, secret societies are at work. President Bush wouldn’t touch this issue. Neither would Obama. His health care plan was a just an excuse to avoid tackling the doughnut-hole issue. President Trump plays golf every time some brings this up. Clearly, you’re going to have become president if you hope to find out. And be brave, be very brave.
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OM asks: Are we there yet?
Dear OM: No, we are not there yet. We want to visit the Sun. This will not happen as long as the Earth continues to orbit it. Honestly, it really seems as if we are really just going round and round. The only way to get to the Sun is to shove our planet out of orbit. To do this, we simply need to get about two billion people to jump sixty feet to the ground at the same time. Clearly, we need the cooperation of the Chinese and Indians. Travel to those countries, flash your winning smile and persuade those nations’ leader to cooperate. Should their rulers balk for some unforseen reason, they’re foreigners after all, threaten them with nuclear weapons. Don’t have nuclear weapons? Tsk, tsk, it always pays to be prepared. In that case, break into the White House and steal the attache case that launches everything. If security stops you say, “Oops, forgot this. I’d forget my head if it weren’t attacked.” Make your getaway while they laugh at your joke,
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KE asks: Is the moon really made of cream cheese?
Dear KE: Only the Cream Cheese Association (CCA) knows and they won’t tell without a million dollars in unmarked bills. If you have that much money fine, ask them. Otherwise, you’ll have to save up through hard work, rob a bank, or make counterfeit bills. Do a good job though, the Treasury Department takes a lot of interest in high quality counterfeit $100s. And gosh darn it, you should be taking pride in your work for its own sake.
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KM asks: Will masturbation really make you go blind?
(long pause)
Dear KM: No. See? I’m typing this. Ok, with touch typing I don’t need to see, but no.
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LHH asks: What happens when you smoke the filters?
Dear LHH: You see God. Do this only if your conscience is clear as you will get judged right there and then.
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NB asks: When a stranger asks me – what do I do? – how should I answer. (I think you know what I do.)
Dear NB: Oh my gosh, don’t tell them the truth. Their eyes will glaze over. Their life force will escape shrieking from their nose. Tell them you taste test artichokes. That’s what I say. Unless, of course, you can’t abide the questioner. Then by all means, tell the truth. Honesty is the best policy.
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WK asks: Where was the clock that Bill Haley rocked around?
Dear WK: No one knows for sure. It was once spotted at a flea market in Stockton, California back in 1989. Time to follow up this lead. There can’t be more than 10,000 flea markets in America. Right?
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– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Paul De Lancey's Blog 