Soy Sauce Packets & Epiphanies: the bk blunder...

i guess technically, it's a restaurant in the fact that it serves something resembling food. not necessarily nutricious, but "food" just the same. this lovely tidbit is more of a horror story than my usual food driven critique.
fast food joints are fast food joints. (with the obvious exception of white castle, which as far as i'm concerned, could be chopping up kittens and/or small children and serving it on those incredibly delicious steamed buns and i would still order a sack!) but you know the rest: the royal family of burgers, the irish mc-grease joints, etc, etc, etc. my local "royal" establishment is quite a gem. i very rarely go there, mostly because of all the shady people that work there. anyway, i go there the other day. my mom was at my house, and asked me to pick up some lunch on the way home. she of course, being my lovely difficult mom, can't just say "get me a #1 with a coke;" she says get me a double cheeseburger (which they don't have anymore) with no lettuce and extra pickles. well, we all now how easily an easy order gets screwed up at the drive-thru, so i knew this was going to be an issue and went inside. so i'm in. this royal establishment, by the way, is a throwback. they don't have the "high tech" computer screens hanging all over the place- they still have the microphone thing. so you order with the counterperson, they type it in their 1970's register and scream your order through the microphone to the apparently deaf and uber-stressed out burgermakers. i ordered. i payed. i waited. and waited. and watched...
i watched the dude making my whoppers with cheese barehand EVERYTHING he needed. no gloves. no tongues. barehand. bun? barehand. burger a.k.a. grease patty? barehand. lettuce? tomato? onion? pickles? BAREHANDED!!! and the worst part, is he saw me watching him. he had to know it was mine as there was no one else in the nastyass joint. he watched me watch him raw-doggin' my burgers and thought nothing of it. the counterguy throws them in a bag, hands them to me and says "have a nice day." i laughed and told him he could keep the manhandled burgers and the money. and to use the money to go buy burger boy some gloves.
now i know what you're thinking... that's not just in south jersey, that's everywhere. and i would say that you are right and wrong. you are right, all similar places do nasty shit like that once in a while. but... you are wrong because at least in north jersey they use some tact and do nasty shit in the walk-ins or in the privacy of the dishpit. not here my friends, not here...

TO RETURN:

the story behind ssp&e:

so i'm not sure if you're anything like me, but being the 'off the cuff cuisine' chef that i am, i try not to let anything go to waste. you know, when you bring home some bk or mickey d's, and after consuming your poor excuse for food, have ketchup packets or sauce shots left over that you throw in the door and forget about. same goes for chinese food, and you know they always give you enough sauce to put out a fire at the pentagon with your order. you throw them in your refrigerator door and forget about them. then one day you're trying to impress some last minute guests that have decided to stay at your place for dinner and all you have in your 'gourmet' kitchen are some ramen noodles, frozen veggies and some leftover grilled chicken from last weekend's cookout. the makings of a superb, on-the-fly stirfry. but wait, OH SHIT!, how are you going to make a sauce for your stirfry with no sauce? you look in the fridge and all you see is a bottle of ketchup, french's mustard (i use the term mustard loosely when describing french's), and a jar of pickle juice. oh no, what to do, what to do. then you bust open the butter holder, that invariably has never seen a stick of butter in it's life, and VOILA! soy sauce, duck sauce, hot mustard! packets, but instant chinkychow sauce nonetheless! each one of those packets, collected over time, came from a meal, inevitably eaten over conversation, an argument or during a lone lunch of self-reflection, came from a time and place in the past. as are our lessons learned. we learn through the years how to cope, how to inspire, how to teach, and how to live. we don't always remember those lessons, as we throw condiment packets in the fridge we throw life-lessons into the back of our heads, until one day we find ourself in a situation where it becomes relevant and we pull them from the back of our minds as to not waste the advice and lessons of the past. the moral of this story, and the linking of it to my blog- our life experiences are our 'soy sauce packets,' our hidden links to our experiences of our past...

e·piph·a·ny - noun - a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience. [www.dictionary.com]

the epiphanies that we experience in life, questions or situations that we find ourselves in, and don't know how to resolve, can most often be solved my raking our brains in search of a 'soy sauce packet.' an answer to a question. a solution to a problem. and so this, this blog, is simply an ever-expanding culmination of soy sauce packets in my butter box, and the epiphanies that have helped to make room for more butter in my fridge...

Soy Sauce Packets & Epiphanies

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the bk blunder...

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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