Top Five Food and Drink Combos

1. 

   Karl G Siewert on December 1, 2017 9:43 am

   I am not aware of any past episodes in which vomit anecdotes appeared, but my records do indicate that Fruity Pebbles were mentioned as an “Also-ran” during Episode 124 – Top Five Cereals (http://majorspoilers.com/2015/12/31/top-five-cereals/). It’s very likely that Stephen told the story at that time. Also, there is not currently an episode entitled Top Five Gastrointestinal Incidents, but there certainly could be!

   My personal top five food/drink combos:
   5) Cheeseburger and beer – This is my no-brainer. I like a beer with pizza, but to me, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a nice sit-down restaurant cheeseburger, juicy so it drips down your arm if you’re not careful, chased bite by bite with beer. A lot of people (like Stephen) prefer a crisp beer like an IPA or weiss, but I will always go for a stout if they have one. That extra creaminess and complexity marries perfectly with the greasy meat and cheese, the bun, and good fresh veggie toppings. Excuse me. I need to go find the nearest Red Robin.

   4) Almond cookies and jasmine tea – I am a dunker. I will try pretty much any bread or pastry-type substance dunked in a beverage, and chances are I will like it. I was going to go with a donut and coffee, but that seemed a bit prosaic, and also I’m not really a donut fan. A few years ago, though, I noticed that nearly every random Chinese buffet restaurant serves the same things on its dessert side, and one of those is a dry, crumbly cookie with a slice of almond pressed into the center. The cookies are good by themselves, but if you dunk one in your cup of hot jasmine tea, it becomes 100% better. It has to be a quick dunk, though. If you leave it in for even half a second, the cookie disintegrates into the tea, which is not necessarily horrible, but it’s not what I’m going for.

   3) Tex-Mex and root beer – There is something about the flavor of root beer that works perfectly with cheap fast-food tacos and the like. It’s my go-to beverage at a Bell or a Bueno, but there’s a very specific memory associated with this combo for me, so let me get into the spirit of the episode with a digression/tangent:

   My high school had what was called “open lunch”, meaning that students could leave campus at lunchtime as long as they made it back in time for the next class. My parents gave me lunch money each week that would pay the $1.25 per day for school lunches, but they wouldn’t give me extra to go out. However, I soon realized that if I packed my lunch four days a week, I could use the $5 to go out once, so that’s what I did.

   There were several restaurants within walking distance of the school, but the one that quickly became my standard hangout was a local joint called (depending on which sign you were reading) either Taco Villa or Taco Via. Everything on the menu was pretty standard ground beef based Tex-Mex, but I heard from other students that they had a secret menu! There were items you could order only if you were in the know, and one of these was simply called The Thing.

   The Thing was basically a bare-bones tostada. It was a flat hard corn tortilla topped with meat, cheese, and what I’m pretty sure is a drizzle of hot lard. In retrospect, it’s a pretty disgusting-sounding food, but to high school Karl, it was absolute perfection. So every Wednesday of my high school career (at least until I got a car and a job), I would walk to Taco Villa and order a Thing, a Sancho (burrito with lettuce and tomato), a big cookie (baked in-house) and a medium root beer.

   To this day, if I spend more than two or three days in Topeka, I will always try to get over there and have this traditional meal of my callow youth, and it still tastes exactly the same. The only disappointment is that now they have The Thing actually printed on the menu board, so just any random yobbo can order it without being part of the sooper sekrit club.

   2) Hot pizza and cherry Coke – I’m not a big cola fan, generally speaking. I find them too harsh. I was interested to hear Matthew describe Coke as “cinnamon-y”, because that seems right to me. It has a bite that I prefer to avoid. Stephen’s hypothesis that it’s better over ice because the carbonation is mitigated also rings true for me. Truly, this episode has been a cola revelation for me. One of the few times I will choose to drink Coke is with pizza. They seem to pair really well. But even then, I will choose a cherry Coke over the bog-standard, because that cherry flavoring seems to take the edge off.

   1) Cold pizza and orange juice – This was going to be my controversial option, because people usually recoil when I talk about it, so I was gratified to hear that Matthew has a similar choice in his list. As many folks will attest (including Matthew in Episode 30 – Favorite Breakfast Foods – http://majorspoilers.com/2012/10/09/top-five-030-favorite-breakfast-foods/) cold pizza is particularly good in the morning. When I’m eating hot pizza, I like to be adventurous, but my favorite for cold breakfast eating is plain old pepperoni, and I like to pair it with a tall cold glass of O.J.

   A lot of people are still on board at this point, but then I cross a line. Did I mention I’m a dunker? That’s right. I will eat my way down to just the crusts, and then I dunk them in the orange juice to soften them up. Yum!

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