If only the culinary experience I’m about to share with you was as good as this one was. If only.
There once was a sketch on Saturday Night Live where a guy had recently died, and got to talk to an angel about his life. “Ask me any question”, the angel said. “What’s the grossest thing I’ve ever eaten?”
“Ohhh, heh heh heh”, said the angel… “You don’t want to know that, believe me.”
“Okay, what’s the 671st grossest thing I’ve ever eaten?”, the man asked. The angel answered, and it was still disgusting.
Let’s just say that the story I am about to tell — I certainly hope there are not 670 grosser stories that I don’t even know about. In fact, this almost was one I didn’t know about either.
Carolyn’s family had served waffles or pancakes — I can’t remember which, so I’m going to go with pancakes for this story. But they were serving them out one person at a time, for some odd reason. Always being a hungry man, I opted to go first and eat my pancakes. BTW, I totally douse mine in syrup. And then I cut my pancakes up to expose more surface area and try to make sure syrup has completely saturated every cubic millimeter of my panckes, to 100% possible saturation levels. So the syrup is an important aspect to the story.
This is how I should have reacted:
“Wait a second. Something about these pancakes tastes funny…”
But that’s not how I reacted. Instead, I said, “Mmmmm”, and continued to merrily eat my pancake.
Next up was Carolyn’s brother Jay. He was quite happy to get pancakes too:
I want pancakes too! And bacon! GIMME!
But then Jay made a startling observation. “This syrup is full of ants!”
Praise “Bob”, this is NOT what I want to be eating. ANTS!
The ant to syrup ratio was a bit lower than this, but there was a whole bottle full of them. We’re talking 100s of ants. I probably ate at least 20 ants myself, unless perhaps they did not go through the syrup nozzle. In which case, I just got the sheddings, poop, skin, and decomposition of the ants that had previously died in the syrup. Not really much better…
“These boys get that syrup in ‘em, they get all antsy in their pantsy.”
Suffice to say, everybody else got to eat pancakes without ant-syrup in them….
“Yay my pancakes don’t have ants on them!” … “My fork doesn’t either!”
I kind of felt that better care could be taken to not serve a house guest ants, but hey, I guess I shouldn’t just trust that people’s food is edible when they give it to me. (Hey, the pancakes were good, and ants are nutritious. Just not what I would have chosen to eat.)
Little do they know that we’ve replaced their normal pancakes with Folgers pANTcakes — now with Flavor Ants(tm).
Nowadays, I inspect my food more carefully before eating it.
Especially if it comes from a Sawyer:
“Initiating ant scan.” ………. “Ant scan? I was not aware of that particular defense mechanism”
